Day 73 – March 29 -Hong Kong, China

Fred wanted to do something different this time in Hong Kong and he wanted to include a ferry ride.  After talking with the tourism representative on board the ship and the staff at the Tourist Information Center, we decided to go to Lantau Island where there is a Big Buddha, monastery and tourist village.

We first took the Star Ferry from the Kowloon side over to the Hong Kong side.  Then we took the MRT (train/subway) from there to Tung Chung on Lantau Island.  The train went under the water rather than over the ridge.  Lantau Island is where the new international airport and Disneyland are located.  There were lots of families on the train!

As we exited the train station, we could see the Cable Car that would take us up to the Ngong Ping village where the Big Buddha and Po Lin Monastery is located.  After standing in line about 30 minutes, we were loaded into a cable car that seated 10 people; we only had six so there was plenty of room.  The cable car is about a 30 minute ridge up the mountains.  It makes two sharp turns where the cable cars are detached from the cable and then reattached after the turn is made inside a cable station.   There were two kinds of cable cars, the regular one and the Crystal Car with a glass floor.  With Fred’s issues with heights, we got the standard car.

It was hazy so the view was a bit restricted.  The first part of the ride we got a great view of the International Airport including watching planes take off when we were higher than the run ways.  It is a huge airport and they are continuing to enlarge it.

We first walked through the Ngong Ping Village, a tourist village built to take advantage of the statue and monastery.  There were quite a few restaurants, including Subway and Starbucks, two theatres with presentations, souvenir shops, etc.  We walked as far as the foot of the stairs (way too many for us!), then looked around the entrance to the monastery.  Fred’s feet were beginning to tell him that we needed to find a place to sit down.

Most of the tourists were Chinese as this is a favorite tourist area when visiting Hong Kong.   After resting our feet for a few minutes of people watching, we walked back to the restaurant area and chose one with Chinese food.  You could have Chinese, Italian, Taiwanese, kebabs, noodles, pizza or a European bistro.  The food was good but not particularly different from what we would have eaten in Denver.  We had a soup, which we thought was a beef broth, bbq pork, chicken with chilies and other stir fried vegetables, rice and tea.

After lunch we checked out the bus terminal to see if we could get a bus from the top to the ferry dock on the other side of the island.  We didn’t find one, so we rode the cable car back down to Tung Chung where we found a bus to Mui Wo where we could get a ferry back to Hong Kong.  The ride across the island was interesting as we saw a bit more of the islands real villages and people.  It appears that there were quite a few Caucasians living there as one school was letting out as we drove by and there were quite a few western-looking children in the group.

When we arrived at the ferry terminal, we discovered we had two choices, i.e. the regular (slow) ferry or the fast ferry.  We had 30 minutes to wait on the regular ferry which would take one hour or we had 60 minutes to wait for the fast ferry which takes 30 minutes.  Since the elapsed time was the same, we boarded the regular ferry and arrived back in Hong Kong to catch the Star Ferry back to Kowloon and the ship.