Trains, Boats, Buses, Cable Cars, and One Big Buddha

Last Sunday I went to the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island where the "Big Buddha" is. I went with Brian and a couple other of his friends from the States. There is a train stop at the base of the mountain that has a cable car that goes strait to the monastery. We, however, decided to take the long route which turn out to be a mistake. We first took the train from CUHK to the tip of Kowloon to find the ferry to Lantau. We discovered that the only place to get a ferry to Lantau was at the Central Piers on Hong Kong Island. So we took a ferry across to Central and then figured out which boat we needed. We waited 30 minutes until the ferry we wanted arrived. The boat ride was then about an hour long. Once we got to Lantau we had to take a bus to get to the monastery. This was another hour long ride. The reason the bus took so long is that Lantau is very mountainous. Even though the length of the bus ride was a little annoying, it was neat to go through the mountains and forests on Lantau. That day was very very cloudy and the mountains were so high we drove up into the clouds. We were pretty happy once we got to the monastery since it had taken us about four hours to get there. Unfortunately, since it was so cloudy we could not see much. There were stairs that you had to walk up to get to the Buddha, but you couldn't see the top of the stair case. Once we got to the top, we could only see the outline of Buddha, but that in its self was neat. Inside the Big Buddha was a museum. It had all kinds of neat artwork but everything was explained in Chinese, so I have no idea what it actually was. We then walked back down to the monastery to get lunch. It was all vegetarian but very good. We explored the temple nearby for a little bit before deciding to head back down. We did not want to spend forever getting back to CUHK so we took the cable car. The cable car ride was actually a lot longer then I had expected, about 45 minutes. By that time it had gotten so cloudy that if another car was coming the other direction you could only see it for a couple of seconds, not to mention for the most part you couldn't see the ground. Near the end we descended enough to be outside of the clouds. We got a very high birds eye view of the Hong Kong Airport which was neat. Once we got back on the ground we took the train back to CUHK.

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