Lantau Island

Tuesday 5th June

The morning was taken up with still more shopping and other secret women's business. I spent an hour wandering around backstreets near Bonham Strand: it was bustling but not crowded, and no one was rushing anywhere.

Lantau island giant buddha

We just missed the ferry to Lantau Island, so we caught the MTR to Tung Chung instead. Here, on the north side of the island, near the airport, high-rise apartment blocks form an enclave that seems like a commuter suburb largely separate from the rest of the island.

When we got there, the skyway wasn't running, so instead we bought a bus daypass, waited 10 minutes for a bus, and then had a hot 45 minute trip to Ngong Ping and the Big Buddha, doing three-and-a-half sides of a rough square instead of the direct 6km on the skyway. The narrow winding road climbed around steep hillsides; roadwork to widen it was slowing traffic down.

Six days after we were there, one of the cars fell off the Ngong Ping skyway, so we may have missed out on a more exciting experience than we imagined! The Ngong Ping skyway was closed for a long time, but has been reopened.

It apparently takes a few hours to walk to the top, which would be a great hike in cooler weather.

Lantau Peak

a sleepy bus

mid-harbour container transshipment

At Po Lin we paid the HK$100 for access to the exhibition inside the Buddha and a "deluxe meal" in the monastery afterwards. The Buddha itself is impressive, but it's the dramatic landscapes surrounding it that really make it spectacular, with cloud swirling around the mountain tops.

The vegetarian meal in the monastery was ok — "deluxe" got us better air-conditioning — and afterwards we looked around the Po Lin monastery.

I would have liked to have explored the complex more, and climbed Lantau peak, or done other walks, but we were tired and had a dinner appointment that evening. So we also gave up our plan to visit Tai O fishing village, and just got the bus to Mui Wo — which was a hot and sleepy ride.

From Mui Wo we caught the ferry back to Hong Kong, ending up in the "ordinary" section rather than the air-conditioned "deluxe" so we could open the windows and enjoy the harbour views properly. Hong Kong is a busy port!

There was plenty to see on Lantau Island that we didn't have time for. We didn't visit Tai O, or look around Mui Wo at all, or explore Po Lin/Ngong Ping properly: that would make for a very long day, starting early, or one could spend a couple of days on the island. When it isn't so hot, there's the 70km Lantau Trail, which does a loop around the island. (There's also a Disneyland, but that's not really part of the island, just an excrescence on its north-east tip.)

For inspiration, look at this photo essay on Lantau Island.

Camilla and Amy went straight back to the hotel, but I took the chance to visit the zoo and the botanical gardens. There's nothing that exciting here, but they offered a bit of an escape from the heat. From there I caught a bus back to the hotel.

We had yet another amazing dinner with a different group of relatives, this time in the Hong Kong Golf Club. So we got to see some of the scenery as we drove over the mountains to the south.

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