One Day in Hong Kong
When you decide to purchase international tickets departing in 1.5 days for 4 passengers to two destination countries (check our prior blog post for why) and you don’t want to totally break the bank, you need to be flexible on the routes. For us, this meant our flight to Ulaanbaatar would have a 19 hour stopover in Hong Kong. Yes Hong Kong of the recent protests.
Our 5 hour flight from Bali landed in Hong Kong at 11:35pm. One benefit of waiting till the last minute is that I could take advantage of last minute hotel deals. The Hong Kong SkyCity Marriott, right next to the airport, was sufficiently discounted that I could book a night for only $17 using my Hotels.com points. Given I was subjecting the family to a 11:35pm splash down, I wanted to treat the family to a nice hotel that also had breakfast included. When traveling with kids, having a hotel with breakfast included can simplify things significantly, and the SkyCity Marriott has the best breakfast buffet that I’ve ever had. The restaurant has as view of one section of the water and all sorts of food options, from kiwi to dragonfruit to stir fried noodles to smoked salmon to dim sum to bacon to waffles to ice cream with sprinkles. There was something for everyone. Truly fantastic.
With a 6:30pm flight departing for Mongolia, we narrowed down our Hong Kong tour to taking the Ngong Ping gondola near the airport on Lantau Island 3.5 miles (5.7 km) to the Ngong Ping Village, Po Lin Monastery, and Tian Tan Buddha. The trip takes each way so we booked the glass bottom cable cars so we could have good views.
The view from the cable car was really neat. The Ngong Ping Village is a “theme village” so it’s newly built for tourists, but uses the traditional style and architecture of the Ngong Ping area. There are also a few cows meandering around (more on that later).
We walked through the village to arrive at the Tian Tan Buddha. It’s the largest, seated, bronze buddha (that’s a mouthful) in the world. While we were inside the statue area I thought I remembered reading (there were extensive writings about the statute, China, and Hong Kong, that it was donated or paid for by China as respect for the autonomy of Hong Kong’s culture as it became part of China. I think I also read that the statue faces north to Beijing while all other buddha statues face east toward the rising sun. I searched online and couldn’t find anything about that any of that at all. Very strange.
Nonetheless, we had a great stopover in a very modern “special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China."
Also, there were random cows in the village park just wandering around or sitting in the shade. One got its head and horns stuck in a construction barrier so a few of us grabbed the cow (almost a bull) by the horns, and got her extricated. Good deed done.
And with that, we hopped the plane for Mongolia.
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