Tian Tan Buddha

Another day trip today, this time to Lantau Island, another peninsula of Hong Kong.
We started on the Star Ferry, then on to the superfast and sparkly clean MTR to Lantau, then onto a rickety old bus with seats too narrow for my Scottish sized bottom!
We had a very slow and noisy journey across Lantau Island to Po Lin Monastery.
This is where the worlds' second tallest seated bronze buddha can be found (someone built one 2 metres taller this year!)

The Tian Tan buddha is very odd, it seems old, but has in fact only been there since 1993
It's massive (34 metres high and 250 tons in weight) and there's a climb of 268 steps up to the platform, where 8 sculptured beautiful immortals sit guarding the huge figure
It includes a museum and has 3 floors inside. It's very impressive.

After our descent, we visited the Po Lin Monastery itself, which consists of two temples, beautifully ornate, but with the terrifying addition of many massive burning coils of incense overhead, which drop ash at regular intervals!
The smell is amazing though and the temples are very atmospheric and decorative.
Time for lunch, we used our meal tickets to have a special vegetarian lunch cooked for us by the monks.
This was a bad idea.
Both of us still being scunnered with all things slimy after a dim sum overdose on Wednesday, we were faced with a soup that tasted like wet tea, but had hairy gourds in it. This was then followed by an assortment of slimy tofu based dishes, all beautifully cooked, but, after the tea soup concoction we had quite a struggle to get them down. We managed to eat enough to be polite, but left a shameful amount behind and scuttled off for a drink of juice to take away the taste!

Next stop was Ngong Ping village, an utterly surreal place 5 minutes from the monastery. Here you can find a Starbucks, a Seven 11, many gift shops and cafes along with a themed 'experience' called Walking With Buddha, which we had to investigate.
It consisted of bright lights, lasers and smoke & mirrors added to by a Disney type cartoon, which showed Buddha's rise to eternal enlightenment. It was interesting, but tacky, not least when, at the end we had to post a wish into a slot in the side of a huge clear plastic buddha which lit up with fibreoptics as the wish made it to Buddha's thoughts!

Finally to top off the experience, we were tipped out in a gift shop. Somehow it wasn't quite the serene experience we'd expected, but it was funny!