Back To The Monastery*

26 March 2010

In the afternoon we took a longer trip on the MTR all the way out to Lantau Island – more than half of which is designated country parkland – where we caught the Ngong Ping Skyrail (these are beginning to become something of a feature on this part of the trip). The Skyrail runs for nearly 6km over the Tung Chung Bay (we could see eagles below us) and over the top of the 934m high Nei Lak Shan peak to the Ngong Ping plateau. Once there we went straight to the Po Lin Buddhist monastery where we had the HK$100 ‘De Luxe’ vegetarian lunch – the main reason for our visit but there was one other but you will have to wait while we tell you about the food. Unlike last night’s dinner there was no imitation meat instead it was just excellent vegetarian food; lunch was made up of mixed mushroom soup with glass noodles; deep fried spring rolls; bean curd sheets with lemon sauce; fresh lily bulbs with asparagus and other vegetables; black mushrooms with bok choi and steamed rice as well as copious amounts of green tea. This was followed by puddings of chrysanthemum cake, red bean paste dumpling and lotus bean cakes. Yes it was a lot of food, yes we did eat it all, yes we did use chopsticks (as we have for every meal) and no, the YMCA does not have bathroom scales. The reason we needed all that food, we kidded ourselves, was to climb the 400 steps up to the Tian Tan Buddha statue.

At 23metres it is the world’s largest outdoor free-standing statue and it’s pretty impressive and yet quite serene. We also made a brief visit to the monastery where the monks were chanting in a most hypnotic manner beneath the main temple containing more golden statues of the Buddha along with fruit, masses of flowers and clouds and the inevitable clouds of incense – some of the incense sticks were about a metre in length and as thick as a Buddhist monk’s arm.