The number one thing Caellum wanted to see in Hong Kong was the Big Buddha located on Lantau Island. He’s very religion curious, which is a good thing which will undoubtedly help him become a tolerant adult.

To get to the Big Buddha and the Po Lin Monastery, we took the Ngong Ping 360 glass bottom cable car. It was about a 20 minute ride up into the mountain village surrounding Tian Tan Buddha. You get a good view of the airport on the way up, which is an engineering marvel on its own.

Once the ride was over, we headed up the 200 or so steps to the majestic monument of Buddha Shakyamuni. There was a nice juxtaposition of devout Buddhists visiting the site and tourists. The religious visitors brought a level of authenticity to the site as they bowed and paid respects on their way up the stairs. Caellum thought the practice was quite interesting and had a lot of questions I couldn’t answer. We’ll answer them with Google tonight. 🙂

Once at the top, we wandered around the site and took in the views of the Po Lin Monastery and the beautiful landscape around us. The weather wasn’t the best, so we didn’t get to see the area in great light.

We then went to the Monastery and mostly people watched as many lit incense and went through some kind of smoke waving ritual.

Caellum may have met his soulmate, at least that’s what a pretty young lady that we shared our cable car with on the way up and the way down called him. With the number of people around, being in the same car twice was a longshot. She asked him to look her up when he was about 20.

We have figured out that doing things in the AM in Hong Kong is your best bet. After our return trip via the cable car, we noticed the line to get the ride to the site was at least 10 times longer and would have probably taken more than an hour to get through. We noticed the same at Disneyland, once noon hit, the place was packed. We’re going to test the theory tomorrow morning at The Peak, our last visit was a no go.

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