a big guy in a big city

The Tian Tan Buddha… probably

Posted by Bone at February 28th, 2008

I don’t know how blogging this holiday got two days behind, but it has, probably because I’m shooting all the pictures in RAW format and formatting them is taking quite a long time, it does yield good results though so I’m sticking with it, even if I had used up more than 5GB of HD space this week.

On… Tuesday, I went to Ngong Ping to see the world’s largest outdoor sitting buddha statue, but as you can tell from the above picture, visibility was not good. Terrible, really. I got a feeling things might not work out well as soon as I got off the MTR at Tung Chung and looked towards the cable car station, and could barely see it even though it was only a couple of hundred metres away. The cable car is a 5.7km ride that provides stunning views across over the islands and South China Sea, but unfortunately in my car (after about an hour queuing) we could barely see the other cars passing us, let alone the sea, mountains or even the ground for most of the journey. And it seemed to only get worse the closer we got to the tourist village of Ngong Ping (purely built for tourism, which was kind of sad, but I did buy a pack of postcards that I haven’t got around to posting yet). I held out hope that the cloud would magically lift when I climbed the few hundred steps to the top of the hill where the buddha was, but it didn’t. It was a big disappointment since all the guidebooks mention the Tian Tan statue, and all I could see of it was a darkened outline. The monastery at the bottom of the hill was quite cool, although there are a lot better ones around the area (which was yesterdays trip, pics coming soonish). One funny thing was that when people walked up the stairs they were all laughing and smiling about how they’d come all this way (the journey from HK city centre to the statue was about 2 hours) and couldn’t see a thing.

After I got back from that area I had a wander around the mid-levels area and went on the worlds-longest outdoor escalator, which snakes its way up the hillside from down near the Central area. I didn’t go all the way up since you have to walk down and my ankles are not in a good way at the moment, but it was fun watching the streets roll past from a higher vantage point. I also found lots of cool restaurants and bars, so I might swing that way for dinner sometime. Then back to the room for a little rest. Then I went out to Kowloon Bay to watch Transformers on an IMAX screen at the MegaBox mall. I couldn’t find my way to the mall so I asked two random people, and they were going that way so they walked me to the shuttle bus (free shuttle bus to a shopping centre, brilliant!) then when we got there (after having a nice chat) they took me to the correct set of elevators and checked which floor I should be on, how astoundingly nice is that! I was the only person in the entire IMAX for about 15 minutes after the show started, which was amazing, then 3 other people turned up, but still, it was like having a private screening. I had to skip out a couple of minutes before the end since I was worried about missing trains back, and I was on the other side of the bay so it wouldn’t have been a case of getting a cheap taxi back.

I did make it back (probably with loads of time to spare, but the last train times are different depending of the train line and day, so there was no point risking it), but was hungry and fairly resigned to probably eating McDonalds as they were the only place I could think of that were open 24 hours (except for the tiny restaurants that scare me with their lack of an English menu). On the walk to McDs, of which there are two within 2 minutes walk of my hotel (and 4 7-Eleven convenience stores, they’re everywhere!) I noticed a restaurant was not only open, but actually looked quite inviting. I they had an English menu outside but not inside, so I ordered takeaway on the street (sweet and sour spare ribs with special fired rice HK$64) and ate it back in my room.