These past two days have really redeemed hong kong for me. My original impression was big city, good shopping, multicultural, nice waterfront, good transportation. Sound like Vancouver much? But we've seen so much natural beauty just minutes out of the big city. If I were to return to hong kong, I'd base myself on one of the islands instead. Warm, semi tropical, green, and beautiful, yet still close enough to the big city to make a short hop over.
Not that great of a sleep last night, even in our nice room, after I discovered all the tea I drank with dinner happened to be caffeinated. Hey, it was just sitting in the pot, how was I supposed to know? But we got up in the morning, packed our stuff one last time, and our B&B host made us breakfast. The bus came in about an hour, so we walked through tai o some more, as the tide was now in and we could see the fishermen setting out for the day. Then hopped on the bus up to ngong ping for the morning.
Ngong ping is a very Chinese attraction. It is a little shopping/restaurant village, built around a buddha and a monastery. It's connected to tung chung, near the airport, by a giant cable car line. Unfortunately the cable car is closed for two months for maintenance, hence the bus.
We started by climbing up a couple hundred steps to big Buddha. Ngong ping itself is at a very elevated point of the island, but big buddha is on one of the peaks. The views from up there were great, and the Buddha is huge. And I mean massive. It looked like a lot of Chinese had made the climb for religious purposes, and we saw many of them lighting incense and praying at the monastery when we visited it afterwards. We then walked through the shops in the village, not really intending on buying much as we were rationing our HKD for bus fare. After walking around and sitting a bit in the sun, we caught the bus back to tai o.
We still had a few hours before we had to leave, so we decided to take a dolphin boat out for 20 minutes. It was pretty cheap, and they loaded about 10 people onto a small, brightly colored speed boat and we set out. I was surprised; we actually saw a dolphin. It was white, characteristic to the dolphins in this area, and it jumped around a bit. Then we boated back to tai o to go around the stilt houses a little. The driver cut the tour a bit short and a couple on the boat were really unimpressed, but we just had to shrug. This is a Chinese-descended village. And that is just so like china.
We walked around a little more and sat and read in the sun by the ocean for our last couple of hours. I really liked tai o. It's such a calming and charming place to be.
Reluctantly we went back to the B&B and grabbed our luggage, then went to the bus terminal and took the bus to tung chung. The driver drove fast. Like really really fast. In a massive bus driving up and down mountains and navigating sudden turns. It was a bit of a disaster: luggage and limbs everywhere. In tung chung (I think the guy beside me was happy to see me go) we transferred to the airport bus. We made it to the airport, all in all, in just over an hour. We're waiting at our gate now; our flight leaves at 7:50pm for the lovely 12 hour overnight flight, 4:50am your time. I really don't want to get on this airplane, I'm sorry. I miss everyone more then I thought, and would be down for a nice visit, but I wish I could just hop on another plane once I'm all caught up. But that's just not the way it goes, and I got to go to school tomorrow. Bio first thing. 15 hour jet leg. Sick life. Signing off!