Today I played tourist.

We actually went to one of those tourist attractions that had been advertised all over Hong Kong.  This attraction was the Ngong Ping 360 – billed as the longest gondola ride in Asia.

Which meant we stood in line like every other sucker tourist.

At least I got to sit in Nicholas’ lap.  Everyone else stood.

And we waited in line like suckers.

For like hours.

And hours.  During that time, I learned that Ngong Ping 360 had partnered with Hello Kitty.

So this attraction was going to be littered with kitty propaganda and merchandising.

Great.  During this wait I learned more than I cared to about that cat.  Pokin also used up all her data and got billed twice.  Ka-Ching for the cell phone companies!

Well after said hours of waiting, we got there.

I willed myself to be excited.  After all, I had to justify to myself why I just spent the last 3 hours of my life waiting in line for a tourist ride.  Ooh gondola ride!  I am SOOO excited!!!

We had opted for the crystal ride, which had a glass bottom.

 

I actually dug that part and got a little excited for real.  It’s cool to look down and see what’s up.

Our destination at the other end was Ngong Ping village, which is home of the Big Buddha, another hyped up tourist attraction featuring an ANCIENT giant Buddha that was, oh, built in 2003.  There’s a picture of the buddha in the background of this photo, which is a picture of my bud eating some bun while I watched him eat the bun.

And here is the path to the actual buddha.

You have to climb 268 steps to reach the buddha.  I just got Nicholas to carry me.  So the walk up was easy.

Big Buddha is 34 metres tall (112ft).  That’s cool.  I dig a big buddha.  We loitered around the premise for a bit to soak in his bigness.  We also took the time to check out the view and take selfies in front of the other statues.

 

Once we had enough of that we made our way to Po Lin monastery.  Po Lin monastery was a legit monastery that was built in 1906, and housed visiting monks — that is until the MTR corporation went and built a giant tourist gondola line leading right to their back yard and began billing the area as a must-see.

Now flocks of tourists like myself go to gawk at the monks to help them master the ability to practice their buddhist-ing ways despite the distraction.  I’m sure it’s been great for their training.  It’s definitely been great for their budget.  This is the shiniest, best kept monastery I’ve seen to date in my travels.

    

I wonder how annoying we have to be as tourists before the monks get distracted.

I was getting ready to test out my theory when the gang told me it was time to go and move on to our next locale – Tai O.  On the bus we go!  I guess my plans to disrupt monks will have to wait.

Tai O was once a sleepy fishing village, before — you guessed it, it got turned into a big tourist attraction.  Tai O is now known for being a big tourist attraction that also happens to have traditional stilt houses.

  

I also noticed a lot of these metal houses.  Apparently they are shanty houses that are technically illegal but tolerated.  Mostly because if they didn’t tolerate these houses a lot of people would be homeless.  And a lot of people actually WERE homeless because a big fire that happened in these tin houses a few years back destroyed many of the homes.  This house, as you can probably tell was built after the fire.

Here’s a charred house.

A lot of the homes were actually really tiny.  Allow me to enter exhibit A, with Daniel standing beside the house for context.  This is certainly too small a home for this bear!

We were sort of in a hurry so we ran our way around town.  We had to catch the last ferry of the day that left within 40 minutes.  We underestimated a little the size of the loop, so after booking it for the last half of the circuit we go to the ferry terminal just as they began boarding.

 

Glad we made it on the ferry.  It would have been a long, windy, long and windy trip back otherwise.

Upon getting back to Hong Kong proper, we celebrated by eating.  And by eating again at a dessert shop.

And that was how I spent my day playing tourist in Hong Kong.