As my 3 week stay in Hong Kong slowly draws to a close (3 more days!) I’ve scurried around trying to make the most out of my last days. I’ve explored and siteseed to the max. On a recent adventure, I visited the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. The Buddha was built in 1981 (through 1993) and is connected to a monastery. I think the vision that will forever remain in my mind is the one of the Buddha (a silhouette) appearing in the distance as we rose higher and higher up into the mountains of Lantau Island where it is located. It felt odd to travel so far– but it did feel like a pilgrimage of sorts.
Of course while we spent 20 minutes riding around in the sky, our group took pictures to commemorate the moment.
Once we reached the top, we had to walk through a small village of souvenir shops and restaurants to get to the Monastery and the Buddha. One of my favorite aspects? The area allows dogs, cats, and cows to run free so we did have a few meetings. As we slowly made our way towards the Buddha (our first stop), it was cool to see differently angles.
As we finally got to the bottom I noticed the stairs. Now let me tell you. No one prepared me for 268 steps. Luckily I survived. I might totally be bitter that I made the decision to wear sneaker heels on this adventure because the amount of walking may have killed me! While I might not remember the steps with fondness, I will say that it was SO WORTH IT to make the hike up. I don’t exactly have words to explain how awestruck I was.
What I hadn’t noticed before was that on the top of the mountain there was more than one Buddha. The set up was: a huge Buddha in the middle and smaller ones around him. I was a little disappointed that while at the top I couldn’t get better photos. The sheer amount of people made it hard to get people & the Buddha all in one pic. But at least we documented the moment.
Afterwards, our next stop was to the monastery to look around and have lunch at their famous Vegetarian restaurant. Unfortunately, a majority of this area was not allowed to be photographed, so I snapped a few of things I was allowed to photograph.
The lunch at the Monastery was good yet humble. I’ve had so much meat here while in Asia that it was nice to take a step back and just have veggies. I ended the day feeling tired but like a stuffed little green pepper (hehe).
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