Our last absolutely full day in Hong Kong. There were two places we had to visit.
The first was the Big Buddha on Lantau Island to our west. It’s a very popular tourist attraction and despite it feeling a bit cheesy we thought we should go. We took the train out to the town where cable cars take visitors up the mountain. Unfortunately, it turned out they were having their annual maintenance that day so they weren’t running. We could still get to the Buddha by bus which took us up the steep mountain road, down again and back up to the Buddha.
The good news was that just about everybody else knew about the maintenance so the place was relatively quiet compared to what we’ve heard from others.
The Big Buddha itself was pretty impressive. We had a bit of a climb to reach it but it was worth the effort. After that we visited the nearby monastery which was a smaller version of the nunnery we saw on our first day. Nestled in it was a food joint selling vegetarian food. We ate here but it was a bit yucky.
The whole area, unfortunately, was overlaid with tourist tack. This was trebly so in the “Village” which was all shops and very Disney like. We’d have had to walk through the “Village” from the cable car had it been running. Would have been awful. The only saving grace was how few people there were there.
The bus ride back was much quicker as there were two descents and only one ascent.
We headed back to the hotel for some rest and then went out for our second must do – the Happy Valley races which are held every Wednesday evening. We’d timed our visit to Hong Kong to ensure we’d catch this and are now so glad we did.
We arrived early around twilight, paid to go into the members enclosure (US$12 each) and paid for seats overlooking the winning post. We read our form guides for the eight races and picked our winners. Splashing out about US$20 each for all the races we were set for a fine evening, particularly with Helen’s horse picking form (she picked the winner for the Melbourne Cup).
As night settled the races ran. The atmosphere was great. Our horses not so. Despite each race being very close that was about as far as our picks ever got. Still, we had a great time and learned next time to pick horses with four legs. Best leave it to the pics to give a real sense of the evening.
Incidentally, yesterdays pics didn’t all upload at once so avid readers may wish to go back and check them out again.
Leave a Reply