HK day 2 - Lantau Island, Big Buddha, Tai O Fishing Village, Times Square, Modern Toilet

I woke up around 7:30am without the help of my alarm clock.  I had to check out of my current "double" room and check into a single room so I packed my stuff back up and gave it to the caretaker to hold on to.  She said she would check it into the new room for me.

My hostel :)

view from the stairwell of the hostel (Chungking Mansion)

I quickly studied the MTR map and planned my route to Lantau Island.  It's a fairly straight forward series of transfers and within 30 minutes I was at Tung Chung station on the island of Lantau!

views from the MTR

Lantau island appears to be mainly forest, and only a small percentage of the island has buildings on it.  Probably one of the most famous tourist attractions in HK is on Lantau Island: The Big Buddha.  One of the largest outdoor bronze sculptures in the world.  And this is the reason why I was there :)

They have the Ngong Ping 360 gondola that takes passengers up and over the mountain to the city of Ngong Ping which is where the Buddha and a Monastery are located.  I made my way to the gondola but unfortunately saw a notice that it was closed for regularily scheduled maintenance!  crap.  Oh well, they had a bus that also takes you up to Ngong Peng so I boarded that instead.  The upside is that the bus was way cheaper (around $1) versus the tram which I think is like $12, and also it gives me something to go back and see when I go back to HK in the future.

apartment towers outside the MTR station in Tung Chung

The bus ride rode up through the mountains affording beautiful views of the jungle covered valleys and empty sandy beaches with clear blue green water.  Unfortunately I think I sat on the wrong side of the bus (the right side of the bus has better views) but I made sure to sit on the correct side on the way back so it worked out :)  After a 30 minute ride we arrived at Ngong Peng!

Within 30 seconds of disembarking the bus there it was!  The Big Buddha!  It was peeking over the tree tops on a hill north east from the bus stop.  I made my way underneath a large Chinese gate and down a path lined with different sculptures of Chinese stone guardians and stone lanterns.  It was hot and humid, but the clouds were low and moved quite fast through the mountains giving the place a magical feel.

A hundred meters or so later I found myself at the center of the piazza looking up the 184 or so stairs to the base of the Buddha.  After some quick photos I made my way up the stairs.  The pictures made the stairs look much longer and I was at the top in less than 5 minutes.

The statue doesn't look that tall from far away, but as perspective goes to show, when you are standing underneath the statue it's huge!  The Buddha is sitting on a large circular pedestal with several smaller statues who appear to be looking to the big Buddha and worshiping it or giving thanks.  There is plenty of room to walk all around the statue so I made my way around to the backside of the Buddha and snapped some pictures of the beautiful lush jungle island scenery.  The clouds were starting to lift and the blue green water looked beautiful down below in the distance.

Inside the big buddha is a little museum and I wasn't going to go in at first, but I found out it was only $2.60 and included ice cream and a water so I went in.  I happened to be entering just as a tour group was going in so I followed them around and listened to the tour guide speaking about the various things inside.  Most notably was some form of religious doctrin that they had managed to write on an insanely small piece of paper.  You need to read it with a magnifying glass.  The tour guide said there's over 400 characters on the little paper and it was all drawn by hand and needle.  Ridiculous!

that whole scroll fits onto that little thing in the bottom right

Once I left the museum and picked up my ice cream I headed back down the stairs to a close by monastery.  Not really anything particularly crazy but there were many incense spots and the temples and buildings were nestled into the jungle really nicely and I'm sure it would be a peaceful place without all the tourists bustling about :)  Lucky for me I arrived in Ngong Ping relatively early in the morning so there still weren't many people around (though as I left I noticed an influx of more people).

tree fur

fur closeup

Next on my list of places to see on Lantau Island is the small historic fishing village of Tai O.  It's about 10km away from Ngong Ping.  I was going to walk but the sun started to come out and I figured I might as well take the bus and save my feet for walking around the village.  I walked to the bus stop and the bus only came every hour.  I had about 30 min to burn so I went to a small noodle place for dumplings.  As I left I realized it was a Taiwanese restaurant.  lol.  I left Taiwan to go to HK and have taiwanese food... regardless, the soup was tasty.

After a 15 min ride on the bus we were in Tai O!  It's a really small town, and as you get off the bus, you are in a small harbour with old boats and small buildings on wooden stilts.  I didn't have any plan on where to go so I just started wandering around where I thought it looked interesting.

After snapping some pics of the harbour I found walking through a dehydrated fish/seafood market.  Every store had hundreds of dried fishy things hanging from strings and layed out in bamboo baskets and mats.  The smell of dried fish was quite strong and I was imagining it'd be close to unbearable if it was inside some hot and humid building.  As I walked past the different stalls I wondered how each store could compete with eachother.  They all looked to be selling the same thing, and there was SO much of the same thing and it didn't look like a lot of people were buying it.  Though this village has been around for a long time so I'm sure they have it figured out.  I'm the clueless one here :)

Wandering through the village felt a bit like I was transported back to an older time.  All of the small tin buildings were sitting on old wooden stilts plunged deep into the mud.  Each shack must have only been a few hundred square feet at most.  And many of the doors and roofs were less than 6 feet tall so it would have been difficult for a tall person to live there.

HK has fairly good signage for tourists and you'll continually come to a post that has arrows on it indicating which way will take you where.  I took a back street to the edge of town where a little temple was located.  I've seen so many temples now that it wasn't really anything new, but the landscape around the edge of town was beautiful.  The tide was out and the river running through the town to the ocean was mostly dried up.  

There were white cranes walking along the waters edge looking for their next meal of crab.  As I stepped down off the path onto the sandy/rocky beach the whole ground suddenly started moving.  Hundreds of little crabs and crustaceans scuttled to the safety of near by rocks.  I snapped some pictures but there was no shade on the beach so I went back to the path and headed back towards the bus stop.

On the way back I picked up a postcard to send out to liza and the store who I bought the postcard from had a cafe in the back overlooking the small river through the town so I sat down and relaxed for a bit before venturing back into the sun towards the Tai O post office I had seen earlier.  To send a postcard to canada from Tai only costed about 30cents.  Strange how it costs most to send a letter from Burnaby to Surrey than it does to send a postcard from Hong Kong to Surrey.

I got to the bus stop just as the next bus arrived so it was straight into the AC'd bus for my trip back to Tung Chung.  Lil and I had arranged to meet in Times Square at Causeway Bay so after making a quick stop at my hostel to change rooms I made my way to Times Square.

Times Square is nothing like the NY equivalent as it's more of a Mall/Shopping area in HK.  It's still quite large and the mall attached to it is huge though.  I looked around for 30 min while waiting for lil to get off work and picked up some gifts for Ali and Niki.

Lil took me to a nice book store with plenty of design books and we browsed around for a while there.  I wished we had more resources like this when we were in university!  There was even a book full of "No Dogs Allowed" signs which was quite funny.

We continued to wander around the area and decided to go to the Modern Toilet for diner!  Lil had asked me if I'd been before and I said no, but I'd seen one of the restaurant chains in Taiwan near the Shilin Night Market.

When we arrived we were invited to sit on toilets for chairs, and the table was a glass sheet on top of a bathroom sink.  haha.  We ordered our meals of Japanese milky hotpot and tonkatsu which came with unlimited salad, unlimited cake, plus a cheap drink and soup.

I ordered the fresh Kiwi Juice and lil ordered Rose Vinegar.  The drinks came in urinals with straws which probably some of you saw pics of on my fb.  The kiwi was nice and the rose vinegar... well tastes like rose flavoured vinegar. haha.  It wasn't bad though :)

Our food came shortly after and was served in mini toilet bowls!  Lol.  As i was eating I was just imagining what a strange and bizzare concept.  The food wasn't bad but definitely the props were the most memorable :)  Thanks for taking me lil!  It was definitely an experience!

It was already pretty late so we decided to post-pone going up to the peak, and we just took the city tram through the streets.  It's one of the older/slowest ways to get around town and the line runs all the way from the west to east side of the island making frequent stops.  A tram comes every minute or so and only costs about 25 cents.  Great way to tour the city on a budget!  As we rode in the tram lil would point out different things and give me little tidbits of info on what we were seeing or answering questions I had.  I had a great time and once it got late we made our way to the MTR to get some sleep with plans to head up to the peak and check out her work at the Hong Kong University.  It was a long day but filled with great memories!