Hong Kong

Friday and Saturday, March 11 and 12, 2011

Hong Kong was hazy all the time we were there. (You call it fog; I call it air pollution)  In addition to haze, the overwhelming impression is simply the size of the apartment ranks.  They go on and on and behind the ones you can see are others.  Much of Hong Kong is on landfill, and if you look behind the new apartments and other buildings, you can see older, shorter ones which are where the shore used to be.

  The first night we were docked and the second day we had a rather long tender ride.  Apparently it is a very busy port and we could only get the dock for one night. 

The first day we wandered the town for six hours and visited the history museum which had an excellent and well-mounted display of Hong Kong history with a special show about the 1911 Revolution which ended the monarchy and set up conditions for the eventual rise of Communism. 

The second day we took a tour to the island of Lantau to a fishing village and a monastary.   We traveled over new roads and three bridges including the longest and the second longest suspension bridges in the world carrying both road and rail traffic.  I presume that last descriptor is an important qualifier.  There may be a longer bridge somewhwere, but anyway you look at it, this is very impressive engineering. 

Lantau was originally a buffer zone, not to be fully developed, and you had to prove a hereditary right to live there.  Today the fishing has declined as waters are fished out, and many residences in the fishing village are either empty or used for vacations.  Many parts of the island are empty except for retaining walls and neat little paths with stone steps for maintenance.  There is a trail one can hike to the monastery if one is very ambitious.

The enormous bronze Buddha is just twenty years old and the monastary itself is from the twentieth century.  Nevertheless it is a working monastery with worshipers and monks.  We had a delicious vegetarian lunch with really fresh vegetables and noticed a sign by the picnic tables stating that only vegetarian food can be eaten there.

Today Lantau is the site of the new airport built on landfill, and of the Hong Kong Disneyland.  New apartments jut up.  The pressure to develop it will be strong especcially since, we were told, the primary source of money for the government is land sales.  It is, however, very mountainous.

 z