Hong Kong: Lantau

One day when I was in Hong Kong, I went to the Outlying Island of Lantau, which is a very interesting place. On it they have Hong Kong Disneyland, the airport, and a shopping village with a monastery and a giant Buddha. You can take a cable car up to the village, and walk around, visit the monastery, and climb up to the Buddha.

This is a "tea tasting" I went to where I tried traditional chinese tea...it was cool flower tea where it "bloomed" under the hot water

This is the view of the Buddha from the cable car

I took the cable car to the village, walked around the small town and did some souvenir shopping. Then I went to the hill with the Tin Tan Buddha and climbed the 300 and something stairs to it. This was huge! And it was a beautiful statue, along with all of the other statues around it. Inside the base, you could walk around and see revelations and writings of the Buddha (this was all in Chinese so I am not really sure what I saw but that was the general feel I was getting). There were also these incredible tapestries that had illustrations of the Buddha’s story.

All of the stairs up to the Buddha. There are more then 300 stairs to climb!

I made it to the top!

While walking around the Buddha, I was lucky enough to see a religious ceremony take place. The priests who were walking around were very friendly, and stopped to say hi to all the foreigners and to ask where we came from. After climbing down from the Buddha I went and had dinner at the monastery. It was a really nice simple vegetarian meal and was delicious. It was a really fun day, and nice to get out of the city itself, go somewhere more rural, and see something truly spectacular like this Buddha.

The religious ceremony at the Buddha