Big Buddha

One great thing about October in Hong Kong is that it is liberally peppered with public holidays. Our instinct on weekends and public holidays is to get out. October 1st was National Day and not entirely sure how to celebrate it, we decided to do the tourist thing and to head for the Big Buddha. Guides to Hong Kong will tell you the Big Buddha is the largest bronze outdoor seated Buddha in the world and as such it sounded rather impressive.

Big Buddha is reached via cable car known as Ngong Ping 360 which takes its visitors 3 and a half miles up a mountain from its terminus on Lantau to Ngong Ping Village. This part of Hong Kong is known to experience the worst air-pollution readings and visibility is often negligible. Local wits deem the cable car name appropriate in as much as 360 metres is about as far as you can see on the average smoggy day.

Having queued for well over an hour round a bus station, up an escalator, over a bridge and back again, we eschewed the “Walking with Buddha Tour of Enlightenment” and bought basic return tickets for the cable car. Then queuing began in earnest. We snaked back and forth 24 times before reaching the cable car. The boys grew bored. Predictably. They began to fight. A Chinese family with two impeccably behaved children watched in amazement as we snaked past them 24 times, the antics of our boys growing ever more turbulent with each turn.

Finally inside, the cable car whisked us up over Chek Lap Kok airport – a vast modern structure which occupies an island of its very own, land which was entirely reclaimed for the purpose of building Hong Kong’s new airport. Due to the limited visibility we couldn’t see much of it. Below us were fisherman standing chest deep in the murky waters of the Pearl River Delta with polystyrene boxes floating beside them to hold their catch. From the sandy turmoil left in their wake they appeared to be raking through the estuary mud with nets for shrimps or shellfish, we couldn’t be sure. From our vantage point however, we could also see what else was floating in the river and it did not make us more inclined to try the local shellfish.

Up and up we climbed; the steep wooded hillsides of Lantau looking curiously reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands through the mist. “What’s that?” yelled the children in unison as the pinnacles of a fairy tale castle came into view. “Is it Disneyland?” they wanted to know. In fact it was the entrance to Lin Po Monastery. And yet that initial impression that the place bore a remarkable similarity to Disneyland wouldn’t quite go away. As we reached our destination a monkey took our picture for posterity.

The cable car spat us out directly into the first of many souvenir shops. This now familiar Chinese marketing tactic never fails to irritate me as it means we start each trip by disappointing the children with our repetitive and forceful NOs! in response to the vast array of tat we are channelled through.

Ngong Ping is a one street tourist town. As such it bears an uncanny resemblance to the film set of a spaghetti western where the wooden houses are little more than a façade. I snuck behind to make sure the shop fronts did in fact have backs to them. Instead of the Nevada Desert I found an enormous coach park belying the wished for impression that the tiny Chinese shops, ornate little bridges and curlicue roofs had grown up as part of an ancient Chinese village.

We giggled at the shop names; the Wing Wah Ngong Ping Tea House (Starbucks is next door), Chopstick Gallery, Hoi Tin Tong and Wo Kee Loong Gifts Shop. “Where is old China?” pondered my husband. “Has it all been bulldozed?”

Could anybody really be fooled by this, I wondered. And yet it seems so for the tourists were there in their thousands, paying homage to the Buddha, visiting the temple and then, presumably depositing their disposable income in the pockets of the tat vendors.

We wandered on up the main and only street towards Big Buddha. My husband had to make a call. Our youngest needed a pee. We couldn’t find the facilities and rather than leave the other three I decided the coach park was as good a place as any. She was lucky to escape being photographed on the job as mainland Chinese will waste no opportunity to snap blonde children of which, it appears, they have seen remarkably few.

The Buddha towers over the village and the monastery as one might expect. He benevolently lifts his hand in blessing and the tourists swarm on up the steps to see him at close range. We had the buggy with us and excused ourselves. But we did enter the monastery through the fairy tale castle.

Here incense sticks of all shapes and sizes were for sale in the forecourt and huge golden effigies frowned down on us in the ante hall. The religious were busy bowing in prayer in the garden; huge bunches of glowing incense sticks held aloft. Signs warned of the hot incense pots where the incense sticks end up in a bonfire once prayers have been said.

In the inner courtyard steps lead up to the temple where three huge golden Buddhas looked down from their vantage point above the altar. The courtyard itself appeared to be given over to a huge open-air vegetarian canteen.

It is tempting to believe that Big Buddha has been around for centuries and that we, as modern day tourists, are following in the footsteps of our forefathers who came to admire this astonishing Hong Kong sight generations before. In truth Big Buddha has only been there for a rather surprising 15 years. The monastery is slightly older, having been founded in the 1920’s but we are not talking ancient dynasties here and one can’t help leaving with the distinctly Disney flavoured impression, which came first, the tourist town or the Buddha?