Bob and Jamie's Adventures in Hong Kong, Day 4

We tried to get back to Golden Bauhinia Square in time to see the daily flag raising ceremony, but when we got there the Hong Kong and People's Republic of China flags were already at the tops of their flagpoles. So, we looked at the flags and the statue in the daylight and went inside the Convention Centre to see the lobby and escalators featured in New Police Story.

Then we went to Délifrance for breakfast and had "Cheese Omelette & Ham Steak, served with Baguette", which also happened to come with a sliced tomato. While we were having that and a cappuccino, they were playing random French music, and at one point they played Charles Trenet's La Mer (featured in Mr. Bean's Holiday). After we finished eating, we came back to the hotel to get ready for the day.

Our first stop of the day was to the auction place for Bob to pick up his painting (which, after all, was the impetus for this whole trip). We took a taxi back to the hotel to drop it off, and the taxi driver seemed to have trouble finding it because we went in circles for a while (I guess the roads here are even confusing for the professional drivers).

Then we went to Tung Chung to visit the big Buddha statue on Lantau Island at Ngong Ping. Before heading out to the statue, we had lunch at the Citygate Outlets mall at a food court called Food Republic, which had counters serving food of lots of different Asian styles: Shanghainese, Szechuan, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indian, and more. We had curry chicken from the Indian place.

After lunch we took the Ngong Ping 360 cable car over to see the statue. When we got there, we discovered that there was going to be a kung fu demonstration by Shaolin monks in the little fake touristy village at that end of the cable car line. It was a disappointingly short demonstration (no actual sparring), but still neat to see. Then we went over to see the Big Buddha.

As promised, it was really big. And there were lots of stairs to climb to get to it. Lots of stairs. It probably seemed like even more due to all the pollution in the air. Through the trees we saw a steeple or turret or something; when I asked Bob what it was (since he'd been there before), he said it was (and I quote) "some kind of Buddhist thing". He later clarified that it was the roof of a stupa.

The we walked the Wisdom Path, and saw the Heart Sutra carved in logs mounted vertically (I suppose as a way of taunting them into recalling their previous existence as actual trees). We started hiking a trail which would've eventually taken us to the Shek Pik Reservoir, but we had to turn around to get back to the cable car before it stopped running.

Back in Tung Chung, we walked along the waterfront and back to the mall. Being an outlet mall, it had a lot of discount clothing stores but no record store, so we didn't buy anything. At dinner time we walked across the plaza to Pizza Hut, where we ordered a pitcher of Pepsi. It was so nice not to have to so carefully ration my consumption of my beverage. In fact, it was almost a struggle to drink it all.

Then we went back to the mall for a little bit before riding the MTR back to our hotel. We were both exhausted from all the hiking around the mountains of Lantau, and slept on the subway; fortunately we had to ride that line from one end to the other, so there wasn't a danger of missing our stop.