It is still a Chinese holiday today and we decided to visit the Big Buddha and Po Lin monastery. We took the metro after a leisurely breakfast and arrived at the 4.5 mile cable car to the top of the mountain. The place was swarming with Chinese plus a few westerners. We decided to join the queue despite the 105 minute queue sign. The line snaked around eventually terminating at an escalator. We got to this point after 2 hours, only to find this was the start of the next stage. After 3 hours we got to buy our tickets and 3.5 hours we got on the cable car! This is the longest ride we have ever been on with a huge 1 mile long ride over a bay before climbing up the hill. It was a beautiful day and we wandered around the Buddha and monastery. The queue to go down was a mere 45 minutes and the descent started, half way the car stopped and we spent 10 minutes swinging and not moving before going backwards up the hill. We stopped again and started to have thoughts about how long we would be stuck, how would they get us down?
Thankfully, just as we were deep into planning, the car started going back down again.

The lesson is that we could have shortened the queue by not going on a holiday and by booking online which would have saved us many hours of queuing. The locals, particularly the children were very well behaved in such a long queue.