On our second to last day in Hong Kong we decided to go and see one of the other islands upon which there is a giant bronze statue of Buddha, which you can reach via a 25 minute cable car journey. The cable car has a glass bottom and you pass over the sea, mountains and woodlands. Its a nice trip and the glass floor was pretty fun. Sharing our cable car were an american family, you may be familiar with them from the National Lampoons Vacation series of movies. I kid you not, we were stuck in the cabin with National Lampoons Hong Kong Vacation, I kept looking for hidden cameras and wouldn't be suprised if you see us coming to a screen near you soon. Comedy at its best, at least for Nikala and I at any rate.

The Giant sitting Buddha was impressive, though I should point out that this was built in the 1990's and isn't a historic site. To tell the truth I felt a little disappointed with everything else that surrounded it; it was all just so new and so, well, touristy.

A long way from home:

After exploring the area we discovered a little walk down a small trail, sign posted as "Wisdom Path". This led to a replication of Confucius' hill climb with his prayers carved onto the wooden posts alongside. Again it was a bit contrived, given that it was all only less than 10 years old, but the countryside was beautiful and we were away from the thronging crowd. After a while it seemed as though we had strayed off the path and when we looked up, we found ourselves face to face with the Children of the Corn (for those of you that haven't seen the movie, adults get killed in unpleasant ways by creepy children and scarecrow-like demons and other such nasties!)

One of the things that this trip through China has taught us is that when you go travelling you can expect there to be ups and downs, surprises and dissapointments, and you just never know what will happen next and what will be good or bad. When we made it to the other side of the creepy rundown village we discovered another footpath, and beyond that a mountain. Lantau Peak is 934 metres high and the top dissapeared into the low clouds. The path and steps were made from rough stone, there wasn't any concrete in sight or for that matter any people. This was what we had hoped to find in Huangshan, and it was beautiful. As we climbed the steps, we had to push aside the foliage and as we went lizards, beetles, crickets, butterflys and all manner of creatures scattered before us as we ascended. It was pretty tough going and towards to the top, the steps became steeper and steeper, some of them were each over a foot high and all were uneven. Once again the views were breathtaking, though once we passed the cloud line we could barely see each other, let alone anything beyond a few feet in front of us. The climb took us about 1.5 hours up, and a pretty pacey 30 minutes down and by the time we reached the big Buddha again, we were drenched in sweat and our hearts were hammering in our chests. But we were ecstatic, we had finally found the mountain we wanted to climb, though it was in a completely different location than expected.

Just before we entered the cloud layer:

We looked back and could just about make out the Buddha, where we had started our walk:

After a spot of lunch we headed back to Hong Kong island where we had decided to spend the afternoon looking around the botanical gardens and maybe visit the zoological park to meet the giant tortoises. After that we had already decided on the restaurant we would have our farewell to Hong Kong dinner in and had begun planning what we would do the following day before going to the airport. It was about 4:25pm and at that point Nikala asked what time our flight was on the 31st July. It's at 12:35 I replied. There was a silence between us and then we must have come to the same conclusion at the same time. 12:35 or 0:35? I scrambled for our itinerary information, Nikala scrambled for our cable car tickets, we compared the dates. Crap. We were flying tonight! With all the travelling, all the airports and flights and everything else over the last three weeks, we had totally lost track of what the date was and we were obviously enjoying Hong Kong too much. Subconsciously we didn't want to leave and now we had a mad dash back to the hotel, where we were fully expecting to either be charged another nights stay at god knows what rate, or to find that our bags had been left out on the street for all and sundry, or perhaps even both. Until now we have both been pretty impressed with how we have been on top of everything despite all the travel problems we have encountered, but now at the last, we have given ourselves all this drama. Ah well it can never be said we ever do anything the easy way.