Why Lantau at all
Lantau is the largest island in Hong Kong and the least like the city on the other side of the harbour. The airport sits on reclaimed land at its north; a cable car climbs five and a half kilometres from Tung Chung to a plateau at the middle of the island; and on the west coast there is a fishing town built on stilts over the tide. All three are on this day's route, and none of them is a theme park.
Morning - the cable car
Ngong Ping 360 opened on 18 September 2006 and runs 5.7 kilometres from Tung Chung up over the hills to the plateau, taking about twenty-five minutes. The line turns sixty degrees over the airport island on the way, which is why it appears to change direction in mid-air and why the runway opens out beneath you twice. Below the middle section lies the Lantau North Country Park; on a clear day, the whole estuary is visible. It is the largest cable car system of its kind and the first in Hong Kong to use a bi-cable design.
Late morning - the Tian Tan Buddha and Po Lin Monastery
The Buddha was begun in 1990 and dedicated on 29 December 1993, and it is the reason most people come up here. The figure is 26.4 metres from base to crown, about 34 metres including its podium, and it was cast in 202 separate bronze pieces - 160 for the body, 36 lotus petals and six cloud heads. Two hundred and sixty-eight steps lead up to it on Muyu Peak, and it ranks as the second-largest outdoor bronze seated Buddha in the world. The monastery behind it is older than the statue by nearly ninety years: founded in 1906 as a thatched hermitage by three monks from Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang, named Po Lin in 1924 by its first abbot, and now covering some 102 hectares of the plateau. We eat lunch in its vegetarian kitchen, which is the correct place to eat on this hill.
Cultural Insight
The 37 pillars of the Wisdom Path below the monastery are huanghuali hardwood, set out in a figure of eight on the hillside, and each one carries a section of the 268-character Heart Sutra. Completed in 2005, it is the largest group of wood-carved Buddhist scripture in the open air anywhere.
Afternoon - Tai O
Tai O is the last of Hong Kong's real fishing towns. Its houses are built on timber stilts over the tidal channel, arranged in rows so that neighbours can step from one home to the next, and the lanes between them are too narrow for anything but a bicycle. The village was a salt-producing centre as early as the Song and a garrison town under the Qing, and its Yeung Hau Temple dates from 1699; the boundary stone at the waterfront was cut in 1902. The rope-drawn ferry that once carried people across the channel lasted eighty-six years and has been replaced by a footbridge, and in 2002 the government abandoned its plan to clear the stilt houses and decided to keep them. A fire in July 2000 destroyed more than ninety of them, and the village has been rebuilt since.
We take a small boat out into the channel first, because the stilt houses only make sense from the water, then walk the lanes on foot: the temples, the salt pans and the shrimp-paste yards where the trade that built the town still works. Late afternoon, back over the island to your hotel.
Meals
Lunch (vegetarian, at Po Lin Monastery)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
