After the recent controversy surrounding the fake Asiana pilot names, I think we all need to be a little more culturally sensitive.
For that reason, I will not be making any jokes about the King Fook Jewellery Group, the Hung Fat Pawn Shop, or Wing Kee Fruit.
From Central I took the MTR to Lantau Island, where I was immediately bombarded with advertising for Ngong Ping 360 and all the wonders they make available. Sky-Land-Sea Adventure! Guided tours! Culture and heritage! Local delicacy!
I opted for a round-trip cable car ride across the mountains to the Buddha statue. I spent an extra US$11 for the Crystal Cabin, which has a glass floor. The ratio of standard cabins to crystal is 2-1, but the line for the standard looked about ten times as long. Plus you get to look down. Well worth it.
Some of the other cars looked a little spartan.
The ride is about 3.5 miles and takes 25 minutes.
Eventually you see Mr. Buddha off in the distance.
The cable car deposits you at Ngong Ping 360’s photo center, where you have the opportunity to buy the photo they took of you when you departed. Then you exit through the gift shop into the Ngong Ping Village, which is a long avenue of shops and restaurants that leads to the temple. It’s basically a shopping center that’s made to look like a village. Kind of like Disneyland’s Main Street USA, but with a Chinese flavor. And Starbucks. With Christmas decorations. And numerous displays that feature a cartoon Koala who is somehow associated with the Korean company Lotte. There was also a display of cable car cabins from around the world.
It was at this point that my camera battery died.
I skipped the temple and walked up the loooong (and really crowded) stairway to the statue. The statue itself is the largest outdoor seated bronze Buddha statue in the world (presumably he would be taller if he stood up), and was made by China Aerospace Science and Technology, although I don’t know what prompted them to do so. The statue has three levels, but you have to pay to go to the top one, which I didn’t. I was allowed to visit the gift shop, though.
The view from the top is nice, and worth the climb, but there isn’t much of a reason for a non-Buddhist with a dead camera battery to stick around, so I went back down to the village and got a mediocre donar kebob at Ebenezer’s Kebabs and Pizzeria. Then I took the cable car back and missed another opprtunity to buy a photo of myself.
Once through the gift shop, the Ngong Ping people are done with you, and you go down an escalator to the street below, where you have to negotiate your way through through traffic to get back to the train station.
When I got back to the room, I fell asleep until nearly 4:00. No time to go up on Victoria Peak, so I took a harbor cruise. It was relaxing and the engines worked the whole time.
I went out at 6:00 AM, forgetting that it was Sunday. There’s not a lot open at 6:00 AM on Sunday, even in Hong Kong. But on the plus side, the streets aren’t crowded.
I took the ferry to Central and wandered around for a while until Starbucks opened, after which I went looking for the bus to the Victoria Peak tram. While doing that, I saw the stairs to the escalators to the Mid-Levels, and decided to do that first. Of course, it was still Sunday, and things were still closed, but I did go in the Man Mo temple.
Man is the god of literature and Mo is the god of war, so when you put them together you get…what? Hitting people with books? I’m not really clear on the specifics, but in practice, it seems to involve large amounts of sandalwood incense, hanging from the ceiling in coils.
Or stuck in bowls, alongside flaming candles.
Parts of the shrine had colored lights and looked suspiciously like Christmas trees.
I like sandalwood, but after a while it got hard to breathe, so I went back down the escalators toward the bus terminal.
Along the way I passed some people sitting on the sidewalk on pieces of cardboard. As I walked, I saw more and more of them.
At first I thought they were street people, but there were too many of them, and they weren’t asking for handouts. Then I noticed that they were all women, and they were apparently planning to camp out for a while, because some of them were constructing more elaborate housing.
All of this was happening outside of a mall called World-Wide Plaza, so I went inside.
There were pscrillions of people.
The vendors were selling everything from phone service to day-old donuts, and it was all marketed toward Filipinos. Wikipedia says:
The kiosks or shop units are typically from around 10 square metres, and are rented out to small traders, who sell telecommunications and banking services, to food, and magazines. The arcade is popular with the large Filipino population, particularly on Sundays, as many of the shops are run by their compatriots. The wide assortment of typically small shops caters to their needs, selling merchandise from their homeland.
Which doesn’t explain why they’re all women, or why Sundays, or why the cardboard. My guess is that they’re all domestic servants, that Sunday is their only day off, and that the place is so crowded that they have to wait hours to get in.
But where do they get all the cardboard?
This was all adjacent to the central bus terminal, where I learned that the bus to the Victoria Peak tram does not leave from the bus terminal, a small but crucial detail that my guide book neglected to mention. Instead, it leaves from the ferry terminal, where I had been a few hours earlier.
By now it was 10:00, though, so I decided to go see the giant Buddha on Lantau Island and save Victoria Peak for later.
It is crowded.
The train started running at 6:00 AM, so I left the airport and went to the Kowloon waterfront, where I took the Star Ferry across to Hong Kong Central. (Hong Kong refers to both Hong Kong island and the Special Administrative Zone that includes it. I think the name of the city itself is still Victoria, although no one seems to call it that.)
I couldn’t check in until afternoon, so I had to carry all my stuff with me. It’s only about 20 pounds, because I’ve slowly been learning how important it is to travel light. Still, I didn’t want to spend the morning hiking, especially since I only got about two hours sleep last night, so I caught one of the double-decker trams, went upstairs, and rode around for an hour or so. The fare is HK$2.30 (about 30 cents).
(Note the bamboo scaffolding in the background. Most of Hong Kong’s gleaming modern skyscrapers are built using bamboo scaffolding.)
After all that it was still only 9:00 AM, so I walked down some side streets that had rows of small markets.
The food seemed very fresh.
But I stopped in a bakery instead and got a pastry, then sat in Starbucks for a while. Eventually I meandered back to Kowloon and checked in right at noon.
And now I’m going to take a nap.
Hong Kong Airport is not exactly jumping on a Saturday night. Or a Friday night. Whatever night this is. I think it’s a few minutes into the 28th. That’s Saturday, right? Whatever.
Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do for the rest of the night. I can’t check in until afternoon. I have my Octopus Card, though, so I can go pretty much anywhere. The sky’s my oyster!
UPDATE: The trains do not, in fact, run all night, as I was for some reason thinking. So unless I want to pay extra for a taxi to go somewhere else and hang around in the middle of the night, it looks like I’m here for a few more hours, drinking flat whites, charging my iPad, and reading the Economist’s World in 2014.
The SeaTac Airport Central Terminal was renovated and expanded in 2005. It has numerous shops and restaurants, a floor-to-ceiling window with a view of the runway and the Olympic Mountains*, and plenty of space to sit or walk around.
But I’m not in the Central Terminal. I’m in the South Satellite Terminal. The Runway Grill looks like it might be my best lunch option.
* Not that you can see them most of the time.