Day 28 - The Ngong Ping Express

Caroline was Not Well. Some kind of fluey thing that had started in New Zealand was beginning to take hold. With the prospect of making our way through the efficient chaos that is Hong Kong and the unfamiliar underground, it didn't seem a good omen.

The subway system, aka MTR is superb. Completely spotless and very simple to navigate, an all day unlimited ticket for all lines was $50, or just over three quid. The MTR is the very model of how to build a city transit system, with wide, brightly lit atriums and platforms. The interchanges between lines are generally on the same level meaning that the flow of people is easily managed.

Anyway, enough train talk - the plan for the day was to make it out to the Po Lin Monastery and Big Buddha on Lantau Island. We popped onto the MTR and headed for Tung Chung, out near the airport. There are two ways to get to Po Lin, either the hour long bus or the Ngong Ping 360 cable car.

The cable car ride takes about 25 minutes and costs about £6 for a return journey. The ride is 3.5 miles long and is absolutely spectacular if not a little bit tense for someone like myself. I'm not scared of heights but I do have a fear of falling and at a number of points, the car is a good couple of hundred feet above the ground. Most cable car rides have a good number of towers, yet there are a couple of stretches which must be at least 3/4 mile without any support whatsoever.

At the end of the ride, you make it to the Ngong Ping village. This is a bit of a themed shopping place, really. The object of the visit is the Tian Tan Buddha, which is an astonishing 34m high.

It looks absolutely spectacular from just about every angle except right next to it where the sheer size of it overwhelms. You have to climb 268 steps to get to the Buddha, no matter Caroline being too ill, even I struggled to make that climb in the near 30 degree heat.

You can walk around the base and inside the bottom level of the Buddha. To go higher, you must purchase a meal ticket (vegetarian of course, this is a Buddha after all) which also gets you up a couple of levels.

It is very odd wandering around a statue and pausing while people are praying to that very same icon. I'd liken it to being in a cemetary and next to you are a couple of burials taking place. You don't know whether you are intruding or not.

Back at the bottom, I had a look at the Po Lin monastery itself. You walk down a tree-lined avenue, past pots of burning incense until you reach a small temple known as the Welto Temple. Inside are four large statues (about 10 feet each) and a smiling Buddha. From there, you walk into the courtyard and then see the Hall of the Great Hero itself.

It was the same peaceful air as the Byodi-in Temple in Hawaii, yet the grandeur had been turned up to 11. Flowers, fruit, carvings, paintings, statues. Still serene despite the large numbers of people entering the hall. Caroline was really struggling and I had gone myself, but I went back and convinced her it was worth the effort to see.

The trip out from Victoria Harbour is so, so worth it. Po Lin is a small ocean of peace in the hubbub of Hong Kong.

I nursed Caroline back to the cable car and then onto the MTR and our hotel. Any plans we had for the evening went out of the window as she virtually collapsed into bed and fell asleep almost instantly.