Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Big Buddha Obsession

I also walked around Kowloon Park in Hong Kong. I think it’s the city’s largest park, but if it isn’t, it’s up there. There was a nice-sized pond and a lot of area to walk or even jog if you’d prefer. I didn’t see anybody there jogging, though. What I did see was a lot of older people practicing Tai Chi. The low-impact stretching exercises were going on individually and in groups. It was a little disconcerting because there were dozens of people doing this and I felt a little out of place. No problem, though. I suppose I was destined to feel out of place from time-to-time while I was in China.

In my final afternoon, I decided that I needed to see the Big Buddha. Even though I had never heard of the Big Buddha 24-hours prior, I had heard people talking about it all morning and I decided that I needed to see it too.

Since I’m tired of sending you to Wikipedia every time I write about something of which I’m ignorant, I decided to actually do some homework this time. Hong Kong’s Big Buddha is the Tian Tan Buddha. It is the world’s largest outdoor bronze Buddha, or at least it was until 2007. This ancient structure (he said sarcastically – it was completed in 1993) sits atop a hill on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. It would sort of be reminiscent of Cristo Redemptor in Rio de Janiero except it doesn’t actually overlook the city.

Seeing the Buddha on top of the mountain truly is amazing. What I found just as amazing, however, was the trip to the mountain. After travelling on the subway for about 45 minutes, I reached the Tung Chung station. From there, it was a short walk over to buy a ticket for the Ngong Ping 360. The highlight of the Ngong Ping 360 is the gondola lift from the Tung Chung station to an area close to the Big Buddha. The trip allows you to cross the Tung Chung Bay and then mountain hops on Lantau Island until you reach the Ngong Ping plateau. The trip takes about 25-minutes, and since I was alone in my car, I had nothing to do but take in the scenery and it was pretty thrilling.

There was a problem, however. I got to the Big Buddha late and I didn’t have time to climb up to the monument. I had a meeting at 6:30, so I had to settle for only going to the steps that rise to the Big Buddha. I had another problem, as well. The weather was crappy and the sun was behind the Tian Tan Buddha, so all of my pictures were much darker than I’d like. Anyway, I was able to get Big Buddha out of my system.

After our meeting, we went out to dinner. It was a Chinese restaurant, but the food seemed kind of western to me and I ended up just eating chicken fried rice because it was the best I could come up with in the ordering process. That was fine, though, because I was getting ready to embark on 27 hours of travel to Kunming beginning early the next morning, so I really didn’t want to play too many experiments with my tummy.

That pretty much ended the trip to Hong Kong. We went on to Kunming (where I am at the moment) and I will pick it up from there in another post.

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