Visiting Big Buddha at Lantau Island, Hong Kong!

High five.

The Tian Tan Buddha at Lantau island, Hong Kong, is the second largest outdoor buddha in the world. I haven’t seen the biggest one in Taiwan but this one, in Hong Kong, was cool. It was picture perfect with mountains in the background and puffy clouds in blue sky above. Big buddha sits a short distance away from the cable car stop and the walk there was interesting, you will see 😉

One of my favorite things about Hong Kong is that it’s really easy to get to whatever attraction site you want with the public transportation system. To see big Buddha at Lantau Island, you got to take the MTR to Tung Chung station and the cable car terminal is just a few minutes away. City Gates, the largest outlet mall in Hong Kong, is there too. For more direction details, check out Ngong Ping’s official website (link embedded). In case you are wondering, Ngong Ping 360 is the name of the Lantau island tourism project. You could choose to take either a standard cabin or the slightly more expensive crystal one which has a glass bottom. There are even packages like heritage tour, sunset tour and Tai-O boat excursion. Awesome sceneries on the way into and out of Ngong Ping.

On the way to the big buddha, I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of roaming cows. Living in Singapore, I hardly, if not never, get to meet roaming animals on the streets (aside from dogs, cats and the occasional rodents), so I always find it super cool when I do overseas. And I totally wasn’t expecting cows to be there! For some unknown reasons, they found great joy in licking my roommate’s legs. He said their tongues felt like sandpaper.

Nope, I didn’t get his permission to upload this. Sadly, we are not in touch anymore but I pretty sure he wouldn’t mind 🙂 Good memories.

I really liked how the area is so mountainous. We didn’t go much actually, just took lots of photos, went to Po Lin monastery (you can get vegetarian meal there), the museum at the Tian Tan buddha podium, and just walked around.  If you have time, it might be a good idea to do some trekking or hop over to Tai-O, to make the trip more worthwhile.

It was especially crowded because it was public holiday. Almost impossible to get any photos without “cameos”. But you can try to picture this without them.

That’s it, my day at Lantau. Actually it could be done in half a day but it was a public holiday and we spent a few good hours queueing for the cable car. It might also save you some time if you book the cable car tickets in advance online. Anyhow, the time spent was pretty worth it to see the magnificent big buddha, mountains and friendly cows. 🙂