Tai O, Away!

A couple of quick things.  I think I said something about having to step up to the bathroom in Japan.  I can’t remember if I mentioned that it’s been like that everywhere I’ve gone in Asia, to a greater or lesser degree.   I have yet to find a bathroom without some kind of impedance when entering the bathroom.  In my hotel it’s a marble sill about two inches high.  Just high enough to catch your toe when you stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  And send you stumbling head-first into the shower wall.

All the bathrooms have a drain in the floor in addition to the one in the shower.  Not only do they not expect all the water to stay in the shower, most of the time they don’t even try to keep it there.  In my current digs,  the lip along the edge of the shower stall is lower than the one in the doorway!  Which means there is a small lake on the bathroom floor when I get out of the shower.  If I don’t keep the mat far enough away from the shower, it’s soaked by the time I get out.   The bathroom floor in my hotel room doesn’t slope toward the drain in all places.  One area slopes toward the rear of the toilet.  I have taken to using the bottom of the trash can as a sort of squeegee to scrape the water toward the drain when I get out of the shower to help drain the swamp.  Oh, and lest I forget again, Asian beds are basically rocks with sheets.  There is no “give” whatsoever.   I’m just thankful that they have normal pillows instead of the actual stone or wood “pillows” that they used to use.

The other thing that is oh-so-common here are shops that sell everything your dearly departed family members need in the afterlife.   It is a firm part of their belief system (we’re talking about non-Christians here, which covers the majority) that if you don’t provide properly for you dead relatives, they will haunt you.   Not only haunt you, but make bad things happen.  You want to get audited by the IRS?  (or their version thereof), don’t send granny that beemer she always wanted before she died.

So, how do you get it to her?  You go the the afterlife store (They don’t actually call it that).  You can buy anything you can think of there, all very inexpensively, because it’s all made out of paper.  Suit and tie? Check.  Rolex?  Check.  Big fancy house complete with butler and maid and the BMW in the driveway?  Check.  The house will fold out like a doll house and everything those in the next life need to live there is already printed on the walls.  Should the appliances that are printed on the house walls not be spiffy enough, you can buy paper versions of the top of the line stove, TV, computer etc.

But how to get it to them without actually crossing over yourself?  Why, you set it on fire, of course!   The smoke carries it to them.  As for money, well you don’t want to set the real stuff on fire, so you take your money to the nearest temple and exchange it for fake money you can burn.  The temple gets to keep the real stuff for its own upkeep.  I don’t know what the going rate is for a million bucks, but it’s not a one-to-one ratio.

OK, enough for the small oddities department.  Today I returned to Lantau Island.  Not to ride the cable car again, but to go to another section of the island to see Tai O village.  To change things up, I went by ferry to Lantau this time, then took a bus into Tai O.  It was a pretty ride through the mountains, with stops at a few small towns along the way.  We passed a reservoir that was really  low.  It had a shoreline that looked as bleak as Lake Mead’s, in the low-water department.   The bus was passed by an ambulance, a couple of fire trucks and some police cars as we neared Tai O.  Seems that a mountain got set on fire somehow and they were trying to get it under control while the police were busy questioning a couple of young men that could have reported it, or could have started it, who knows?  But it was out within an hour of my arrival at the  village.

Tai O is the Hong Kong equivalent of an American Indian reservation.  There’s a small museum full of artifacts from the towns earlier days with specimens of the type of clothing the people used to wear, old fishing nets, household items and the like.   Once you leave the museum, it’s stall after stall primarily of dried fish.   But not all.  Some people make bean paste in huge plastic casks, stirring it with a power drill to which a huge mixing blade has been attached.  Others make and sell traditional teas, jewelry or resell items from mainland China.  Whatever will make them a livelihood.

The inhabitants have lived in stilt houses on the tidal flats for eons.  They have always been fishing folk.   They just have bigger boats and nicer nets now.  But most of them don’t fish anymore.  They just dry and cook the fish to sell to the tourists who flock to the town.  Or sell the fish fresh.  Really fresh.  As in still swimming around in a plastic tub when you pick out your dinner.   I saw tubs with all different types of fish, plus crabs and one with lobsters climbing all over each other.  A whole lot of antennas waving about in the air as the water wasn’t all that deep.   While I was watching the lobster antics, I saw a tentacle flop over the edge from the next tub, grope about then withdraw.  The octopi were restless, but that one apparently didn’t find what it was looking for.

If fishing isn’t lucrative enough, or too much like work, a villager may buy a small boat, put a few seats and life jackets in it and sell rides to the tourists.   For $20 HK you can get a 20-25 minute ride that takes you a little ways up into the village so that you can see some of it from the water.   Then the boats go out past the breakwater so the tourists can view a rock formation that’s called The Old Man’s Nose, or something like that.   Then you cruise around the area aimlessly for a few minutes trying to spot some of the famous white dolphins, which are actually pink.  (They have pictures of them, so they must exist, but I sure didn’t see any).  The ride back into the harbor was a blast. The captain of our little vessel got into a race with another boat and we were flying!  Jumping over the wakes of the other boats entering and leaving the harbor.  Leaping into the air and whacking back down sending big sheets of spray off to the sides, while also rocking side-to-side.   It was great.

Once we were back on land I wandered around the village and watched the various ways the natives make their living now.  Yes, many of them do still fish, but it seemed that the majority sold stuff to tourists.   I saw one house where the occupant was very into bonsai.  He must have had 50 to 80 trees of various sizes and types in his front yard.  They filled the whole yard, except for a small normal-sized tree that was doing double duty as a place to hang various guages of wire, some small rope and whatever else was needed in the bonsai dept.  They also  played mahjong.  I think Tuesday must be mahjong day.  Everywhere I went today, I saw people playing the game..   Since I hadn’t observed anyone doing so before this, I’m wondering if it’s a coincidence, or a Tuesday thing.   I’ll never know…

When I had had my fill of Tai O, I went back to the bus stop to leave.  Uh oh.  The line for the bus back to the ferry dock was several blocks long.  Literally.   I just couldn’t deal with the thought of standing in another line for over an hour and possibly two.  I started looking for another way back to my hotel.  I found another ferry that would take me from Tai O to Tung Chung, where I could get the MRT back to Hong Kong.  The only problem was that all the departures were full until 6:20 PM.  And it was only 4:05.  I was not a happy camper.  But sitting on a bench by the ocean for two hours beat the thought of standing in line for the same amount of time, so I bought a ticket.

I passed the time wandering along a lengthy causeway over the tidal flats, watching the egrets soar, the little fishes flashing silver as they jumped out of the water and the water bubbling up through grates that allow the ocean to flow in and out as the tides change.   The sun slowly set over the sea and I made my way back to the ferry dock to await my ride.   I got back to the hotel a lot later than I would have liked, but at least I wasn’t standing in a line becoming more tired and frustrated by the moment.  Instead I spent the time surrounded by the beauty of nature and inhaling that wonderful salt air.

I got back to my hotel with a plan to work on this post, then pack everything up so that I could leave the hotel early and ride the peak tram to Victoria Peak and walk around the park up there for awhile before I had to leave for the airport to return to Taiwan and begin the journey home.   What actually happened was that I was so tired when I got back that I did very little work on the post, ate some instant oatmeal in lieu of dinner, took a long, hot shower and went to bed after setting my alarm for an early wake-up.

Unfortunately, when the alarm went off in the morning I was dead tired, had a sore throat and was aching all over.   Great.  My last day of the trip and I’m sick.  Plus the one thing that every single tourist that comes to Hong Kong does without fail, I can’t do, unless I want to risk getting so sick that they might not let me on the plane.

They take their illness very seriously around here.  You actually walk through an infrared scanner as you get off the plane.  If you’re running a fever they pull you into a quarantine station.  I don’t know what it takes to get out of there, but I’m sure it entails proving you don’t have some deadly disease.   Which I have a feeling would mean missing your flight.  Something I did NOT want to have happen.  So I slept in.  Packed my enormously multiplied “stuff” just in time for check out then rode the trolley one last time for giggles.  After that I caught the shuttle to the airport.  I paid the extra money for the direct shuttle rather than take the free transfer from the hotel to a shuttle station.  My caution paid off.  I made my flight and passed the infrared coming into Taiwan with flying colors.  You can view yourself on the screen as you go through.  It’s pretty easy to spot anyone who’s engine is running a little warm.

About that multiplied “stuff”.  Next time I travel, I’m taking two changes of clothes, a dozen pair of socks and underwear and two empty (or mostly empty) suitcases.  I just couldn’t help myself.  Some things were just so cheap here that I did all my Christmas and birthday shopping for the next year!  The deals were too good to pass up.  At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

This paragraph is just for the ladies, Japan has the best underwear.  They are so comfy.   They don’t ride up in the wrong place, or slide down to below the comfort zone.  They fit like a glove that you never notice you have on, come in every color of the rainbow, and are cute as can be.  I guess since Japanese women have to dress so conservatively at work, they like to have something on that’s frilly and pretty and nice, so they wear those things where they don’t show.   I have never seen so many fancy bras, panties, slips, etc. in my life as in Japanese department stores.  Lacy and racy, flowers and colors, feminine to the extreme.  Of course some of the prices on those items where unbelievable, but I got a kick out of looking at the variety.  Then I just bought  the items that had me hooked on their sheer comfort.  I guess that shows my age more than anything.  The sexy stuff is cute to look at, but give me comfort every time.  It’s some much more important to me these days.

I’m writing this from a hotel in Taoyoan, Taiwan.   The Majesty Hotel.  It’s older, like just about everything in Taiwan, but it seems very nice.  Clean, good sized room, plenty of amenities, and they offer free taxi service back to the airport in the morning!  That will save me $500 NT right there.  Plus high-speed internet and free breakfast.  Can’t ask for more.    Night all!  (Pictures to come later…)

I’m Off the Island

Today I took the Star ferry from the island city of Hong Kong to the Peninsula, which is Kowloon.  I almost took the ferry across last night to watch the light show, but I was so tired that I scrapped that idea and just returned to the hotel.  Which brings me to something I found very interesting.

Yesterday I noticed hundreds of women in variously sized groups around  the central bus terminal,  MRT station and post office, which are all adjacent to one another.   These were women of differing ages and the groups could be from four to about a twelve people.  There were no males; there were no children.  It looked like dozens and dozens of little encampments of homeless people, except that all the women were nicely dressed, clean and obviously well fed.  Many had shopping bags from department stores or electronics stores, etc.   They generally had large quantities of food that the whole of each group was sharing.  The whole thing was rather mystifying to me at the time.

The women had  laid out flattened cardboard boxes to mark out  a space for their group.  The edge of the cardboard was the edge of their space.  All the places they congregated were wide, covered walkways.  So unless there was a monsoon and it started raining sideways, they were protected from whatever.   Mostly that’s the sun this time of year.

It seems that there a LOT of Filipino maids in Hong Kong.  These maids get one day per week off, on Sunday.   When their day off comes, they congregate in groups with their friends and/or relatives.  They eat, gossip, do each others hair and nails, go shopping and probably talk about their employers.  I even saw one young woman piercing another’s belly-button!  They do it all.  And they do it one the street.  By around 7 PM on Sunday night, city workers or staff start coming around and collecting the cardboard to haul it off the street.   There is a nightly light show at 8 PM that is best viewed from the other side of the bay but I think they want these women out of the way when the tourists are returning to their hotels for the night.

Oh, and as long as I’m talking about things Asian, they still use bamboo here for scaffolding when they’re constructing a new building.  Yes, still.  Really.  If you see a big pile of bamboo on the street you know that construction in the area is imminent.   It’s strong, pretty much impervious to the elements, cheap, very light weight and it can be used over and over again.  They put netting or plywood across the bamboo at street level to protect pedestrians and netting all the way around the building being constructed or rehabbed.  Everything is so close together that they can’t allow falling construction materials to go whichever way they want to.  Runaway items must be kept close to the building lest they smash into a car, another building or a person walking by.   It looks a little strange to the Western eye, but it works and seems quite sensible.

Anyway, enough of that.  Let’s move on to what I did in school today.  (The school of my international education anyway…)  Let’s see….I had taken the ferry to the peninsula.  The ferry costs $2.50 HK,  $7.20 HK equals $1.00 US.  So it’s cheap.  It takes about seven minutes to cross.  It gives one a nice view and some good photo ops, but I really wanted a little more, so I walked down a couple of piers and paid $80 HK for a one hour narrated tour of the harbor.  It was very informative and really interesting.  It also gave me a great orientation on how the various places I’ve been and things I’ve seen thus far interconnect.

Kowloon skyline

Hong Kong skyline

After the harbor tour, I headed for the MRT to go to bird park.  On the way to the MRT
(Subway, remember?), I passed a building advertising Chinese handicrafts.  OK, I’ll bite.  I like crafts, as long as they’re good.   So I went in.   Wow.  Let me say that again.  WOW!!!  These were handicrafts like Monet is finger painting.   Carved jade sculptures of the most fantastic workmanship I have ever seen.  Mammoth ivory.  Coral.  Jade in white, green, purple, rose.  Bunches of grapes with birds eating them, life-sized and carved from a single piece of jade.  Floral arrangements.  People doing various tasks. Animals, dragons.  Coral, jade, mammoth ivory in every direction, each piece more fantastic than the last.

Public art near ferry pier

One mammoth ivory piece was one of those balls inside of balls inside of balls things, on an ornate stand.  Each ball was open-work lace carved in ivory.  35 balls in all, each rotating freely inside of the other.    This is the stuff that fine are museums are made of.   This was the same kind and quality of art work that I saw in the Palace Museum in Taiwan.  Only all of this was for sale.

more sculpture

There were many antique pieces for sale also.  As I was looking at one of the cases an Aussie gentleman turned to me and said, “can you believe the prices they have on this stuff?  That one little bowl is over $1000 Euros!”  He was incredulous.  He also apparently thought I could relate to what a Euro is worth, but whatever…  I gently pointed out to him that the piece he was looking at was made sometime between the late 1600’s and early 1700’s and that it was something of a miracle that it was still intact and looking like new.   Only then did he read the rest of the card beside the bowl, that fine print below the price with all the details.  He said, “oh” rather quietly, “well I guess that explains it.”   Yes, I guess it does.

From their I rode the MRT to a point near my destination and walked to the Bird Park.  Well, eventually I got to the bird park.  First I passed the goldfish market.  About a block of every kind of goldfish you can possibly think of and quite a few I’m sure very few of you have seen before.  Plus turtles, salamanders, tiny lobsters, crayfish, you name it.  All for sale.  Many in plastic bags of water, hanging on pegboard in row upon row of fishies in baggies.   All very much alive, swimming in tiny circles.

bags of fish for sale

After the goldfish market, I came to the flower market.  This was larger, covering about three square blocks.  Every kind of plant and flower you can think of was for sale here.  And more orchids than I have seen in my life.  All at prices so cheap it almost made me cry.  And I couldn’t buy a single thing because there was absolutely no way for me to carry it legally back to the US.  Crud cakes (keeping it clean here…).

more flower market

flower market

Finally I reached the Bird Park.  I had read that people here are very fond of their birds.  That’s a really massive understatement.  The blurb I read said that people take their birds to this park in their little cages and sit around in the park with them.  Sort of.  Primarily this is a block-long birds and everything-related-to-birds market.  Yes, there were some people in the park with their pets.  The cages for these pets are ornate wood affairs with fancy porcelain bowls for their food and water.  Intricately carved wood and ivory holders for bits of fruit for the bird are hooked onto the wood.

someone’s pretty baby

more birds

birds anyone?

Some of the cages, which averaged about 10 inches across and 12 to 14 inches tall, easily ran $100 to $150 US, without the bird.  That’s just the cage and the goodies to make it a special home for Tweety.   The birds that were visiting the park with their owners were obvious points of pride.    And almost all of the owners strutting their stuff were men.  There guys were extremely proud of their little feathered friends and I could pay no greater compliment that to take a picture of one of these birds and their ornate “house”.   The guy holding the cage tended to preen more than the bird.

another pretty baby

Not so with the birds that were for sale.  A couple of times when I was about to take a picture of some birds that were for sale, the sellers got right up in my face and started chewing me out in Chinese.  I’m not sure why.  They weren’t doing anything illegal.  The birds were well cared for.  I don’t have a clue what ticked them off so much about my trying to take a picture, but they were absolutely P. O.ed about the whole thing.  Whatever.  I just moved on to another seller that wasn’t so touchy about their birds.  No rhyme or reason to it that I could discern.

Prime birds for sale

About the birds.  Most were small.  Almost all were songbirds of some type.  Beautiful to listen to.  Beautiful to look at.  A few were larger birds, parrots, mynahs, conures, etc., diverse and usually colorful.   Many shops sold bird food.  But not just seed or dried fruit.  We’re talking live food, crickets, grasshoppers, meal-worms, etc.   All kinds of stuff.   Plus all the cage furniture and the wood cages.  A small, nice-looking wood cage could go for as little as about $12-15 US, and up (of course).   They were really inexpensive for what was a really nice product.

I kept wishing I could find a way to get one home without the airline crushing it, but I’m not sure how.   Without adding another suitcase, hard-shell this time, and paying even more over-my-allowance fees. (I have made a vow to myself.  After this I’m traveling with one or two changes of clothes plus extra underwear and socks, and washing them often.  Either that or I have to completely refrain from buying souvenirs for everybody I can think of.  Plus, a trip like this causes me to do most of my Christmas and birthday shopping for close friends and family for the next year, ’cause, hey, when am I going to see stuff like this again?  And at these prices?  I think I’ve gotten a bit carried away.  OK, I know I’ve gotten a whole lot carried away.  But it’s all so pretty and so cheap!)   Can I justify or what?

Anyway, out of the bird park, which is more market than park.  Back past the flower market.  Another pang of regret for the things that could have graced my garden and home.  Back to the MRT.  All the while getting more and more hungry and looking for a place to eat.  Back to the docks and, in desperation, doing something I had thus far avoided, eating at a chain restaurant.  But at least it was an Outback, not a McDonalds!  Real food.  Red meat.  I even made them give me a salt shaker.  That’s another thing, Asian restaurants do NOT have salt and pepper shakers on the tables.  They look at you strangely if you ask for salt.     But I’ve been sweating like a pig for almost a month now (St. Louis isn’t humid.  Asia is humid.  And it never cools off.  Not even at night) salt and red meat (another thing that isn’t all that common here) have become a constant craving for me.  I satisfied both tonight.   Well, mostly.  I’m still salt deprived.   And there’s not enough water or juice on the planet to completely rehydrate my body.   Believe me, I’m trying to drink enough.  But I have to breathe sometime…Oh yeah, they have a soft drink here called “Pocari Sweat”  really.  It’s popular, supposed to be sort of a Gatorade-type thing.  I just can’t bring myself to drink something called “sweat”.  Ick.

After I ate I went back down by the ferry docks and found a spot on the raised viewing platform for what is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest, longest-running light and music show in the world.  A couple dozen buildings on the Hong Kong skyline near the harbor light up to music.  There’s a lot of neon and color here on most of the buildings.  Not as overwhelming as Las Vegas.  Sort of Vegas with taste.

HK adores its bling.  Everything is colored lights, bling and glitter.  Lots of crystal, chandeliers, etc.  Most commercial buildings have some kind of moving colored lights on their exterior walls at night.   So add some lasers on top of a few buildings that already have their own private light shows going on, co-ordinate them all, have them strut their stuff individually  and in concert with one another and set it all to music.  Voila!  You have HK’s nightly light and music extravaganza.  It was nice.  It was pretty to look at.  Maybe I was too tired.  I was underwhelmed.  But I’m glad I saw it.  I would have felt like I’d missed something if I hadn’t seen it.  It’s the one thing that everybody here talks about and says you just have to see it.   So see it I did.

Night skyline after the light show..

Light show

The I went down the stairs and walked the HK walk of fame.  Like the stars on Hollywood Blvd. in CA.  Except that I never saw a single name I recognized.  Plenty of stars and hand-prints in the concrete.  Just nobody most of us have ever heard of.  Granted, I only walked about two-thirds of it.  I’m told Bruce Lee is on it.  Him, I’ve heard of.  Never seen one of his movies, but at least I know who he is.   His star must have been on the other end of the walk.  Then I went back to the hotel.  And now I’m going to sleep.

Ngong Ping, Something

Since I got so far behind in Taiwan by not posting daily I’m going to try to avoid that here.  Which means I don’t  know when I’ll catch up on Taiwan, but I will sooner or later.

Today I took the trolley to Hong Kong Central station.  The trolleys here are a great value.  Each trip runs 2.30HK, or about  35 cents US.   They run the length of the island and get you to almost any metro (subway) station you could want.    I rode the length of the orange line, the Tung Chung line, to reach the Ngong Ping aerial tram.  The subway ride ran 22.30HK, or about $3.50 US each way.   I know it’s cheaper if you buy their special card, whatever it’s called, but I don’t know that I would use it enough to make it worthwhile.

The trip was quick, quiet and uneventful, even peaceful.  I did get a laugh when I reached the spur line that runs out to HK Disneyland.  Yep, Disney has it’s own MRT line here.  Not just their own line either, they also have their own special train where all the windows in each car are shaped like Mickey’s head and all the cars are painted dark blue with white stars all over them.  Cute.

Anyway, next stop the Ngong Ping 360.  Turns out the whole thing is run by some big HK tour company that pushes its tour packages all the way up the line from the time you get in line to buy the tram tickets until the time you manage to escape with any of you wallet intact.  All the shops above and below are owned by the company and staff by earnest young people dressed in the company’s signature green and gold (tan?) uniform.   I think they took their cue from a mixture of Disney and the cruise lines.  Everything is a package if they can sell it to you!

Ah, but enough on that.  It’s Sunday here today, which means oodles and oodles of people every which way you turn looking to see the sights.  So the line for the tram was long.  It took about an hour for me to actually be able to board the thing.  And I had to decide if I wanted to pay extra to ride in one of the glass-bottomed cars.  I passed as I tend to get vertigo when looking straight down from any height over about 30 feet.  I shouldn’t have.  The price difference was only about $3.00 US and the line was 75% shorter.  Which I didn’t find out until I turned the corner after buying my ticket.  I could have saved myself a whole lot of waiting if I had just kept my gaze straight out to the side.  Isn’t hindsight wonderful?

just getting started

The ride to the top was fabulous.  The mountains were beautiful.  The ocean was beautiful.   The view of the islands was beautiful.  The scenery along the tram route was beautiful.  I think you get the picture.  It was worth a lot of pictures.  Oh, there is a trail up the mountain.  You can hike up; you and hike down.   Either way you would do a whole lot of up and down.  And thousands of stairs both ways.  I have no idea how many hours it would take, but you had better be in pretty fantastic physical shape if you intend to try it.  But it looked lovely as I was floating over it in my comfy tram seat with a gentle breeze wafting through the car.

small section of the trail

The purpose of all this isn’t the picturesque tram ride.  That’s just a nice way to get to the top.  There are buses that go to the top.  I think you can just drive up if you have a vehicle.   The reason for the tram and the theme village the tram company built at the top (with lots and lots of gift shops!) is the Po Lin monastery, ancient temple and giant Buddha that are also up there.   The religious community is renowned for their possession of an actual artifact of the Buddha.  It’s a tiny fragment of bone that was left in the ashes after his cremation.  It’s housed in a little crystal shrine inside the giant statue.   You can view the crystal gizmo that holds the artifact and there is a photo of the bone fragment posted above it.  Looking at the two things I’m guessing that the fragment is about a quarter of an inch long.

just a few steps away

big Buddha

Once you manage to get out of the money-sucking portion of the journey, the mountain top itself is just a really nice place to be.  It’s much cooler than the city.  You’re above the smog.  There are great views in every direction and flowers, birds, butterflies and dragonflies galore.  In short, a little slice of heaven sitting just a 15 minute tram ride from the ant-hill apartment highrises of Hong Kong.   I hadn’t been there 30 minutes before I was wishing there was a hotel I could transfer to for the night just so that I could walk around up there after all the tourists had gone home for the day.   I also wished I had gotten there earlier in the day so that I could have had some time to spend hiking part of that trail that went up the mountain.

There was a wonderful slice cut between two folds of the mountain not far from the upper tram station (maybe 3/4 of a mile) where a small, crystalline stream flowed, tumbling over rocks into a series of small waterfalls and gentle pools that had my name written all over it.  But I had to choose.   The Buddha statue, monastery and temple, or the hike.  It was not a choice I enjoyed making.   But doing both would have meant missing the last tram down the mountain.  I probably could have still caught a bus down…or not.  It might have meant hiking down the mountain in the dark.  Not a happy thought to someone who is pretty much night-blind.

I truly enjoyed the things I did see.  Including a very old monk who was visiting from Tibet who was tying little woven bracelets around the wrists of people who were visiting the temple as a sort of blessing, something about health and long life.  He was attended by two younger monks whose job seemed to be keeping the old master comfortable and happy as he communed with the faithful.  I watched them rubbing his legs when he was tired and adjusting his wrap when his shoulders got cold.   They were really dedicated to the old guy.   They obviously cared for him deeply.

old monk

The temple at the Po Lin monastery is getting an enormous upgrade.  There is a building going up behind it that will be about five times the size of the current temple.
The current temple is beautiful and extremely ornate, as they all seem to be.  It is surrounded by lots and lots of flowers and on both sides of the “street” leading up to it there are places for the faithful to burn incense.  Not the little incense sticks we’re used to seeing.   The smallest of the incense sticks these people burn are at least 18 inches long.   The big ones can be close to three feet long and about and two inches thick.  And nobody lights just one.  They light the smaller ones by the dozen.   Everything is done in threes also, I don’t know why, but they do have a reason for it.    They clap three times before they worship.  Temples have three doors.   Worshipers bow three times when they bow.  It’s all part of the package.  I’ll have to look up the “why” of it all sometime.

figures in shrine

temple altar

temple courtyard

new construction

temple

 

 

 

 

 

 

flag courtyard

incense

Anyway, all good things come to an end and I figured my “end” here should come about an hour and a half before the last tram to avoid the rush of people who had to get down the mountain.  I should have headed down about an hour before I did, apparently.  I spent an hour and 15 minutes in line before I finally got to board a tram down.  I went down wedge between some Israeli guy, who spent the whole trip down talking animatedly with his friend sitting across from him (neither one bothered to look at the scenery until they were about 2 minutes from the bottom from what I could see) and a Chinese man on the other side who sat like a statue beside his wife all the down, neither of them speaking a word.

islands

The subway ride back wasn’t nearly so peaceful.  The car was crammed full of people and I couldn’t get a seat until about 2/3 of the way back to my station.  The trolley was just as crowded.   Everyone trying to get back home at the end of their weekend I guess.   Since my “weekend”, all 31 days of it, isn’t quite over, I wonder where tomorrow will find me.  Guess I’ll wrap this up and do some research on that.

dragon fruit in the market

Goddesses worshiping Buddha

Hangin’ in Hong Kong

I’m skipping forward to the present for the moment.   I still have three or four posts to write up for Taiwan, but i thought I’d actually write about today today!

This morning i slept in.  How’s that for excitement?  I don’t know what it is about airports, customs, immigration, dealing with baggage  (and over-weight charges…) and all that that wears me out so much, but it does.  So, this morning I slept until I felt like getting up.  Which meant that my day actually started around 11 AM by the time I had breakfast and showered, etc.

After that I went downstairs to the concierge desk and looked at tour brochures, then started talking to the most delightful young man behind the counter.  He let me know very quickly just how over-priced all the tours were and how to do it all on my own for a lot less money.  This had the added benefit of allowing me to decide how long I wish to linger at each venue.  I so adore honesty.

He gave me a map, highlighted the bus and tram routes that would take me to each place (including the bus numbers!) and told me how much each would cost so that I could have the exact change required by each method of conveyance.  I started off by going to the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Park, with plans to take the tram to Victoria Peak afterwards.

The tram dropped me about 1/2 mile from the zoo.  It wasn’t a long walk, just a very steep walk.  There are a lot of streets here that could give San Francisco a run for its money.  When you see a sign at the base of the street warning you to beware of cars rolling backwards, you know that the darn thing is steep with a capitol “S”.

Needless to say, with the high humidity and temperatures here, I was drenched with sweat by the time I got to the zoo.  But there was a nice breeze and a lot of big, shady trees, so I cooled off while lingering amongst the aviaries.

It’s not a big zoo, hardly a zoo at all, really.  A lot of beautiful birds, a mammal section that was pretty much completely primates and a reptile house that I never actually found.  I still managed to spend three hours there before I knew where they had gone.  I had lunch at the park at their “light refreshments” kiosk.  An egg and ham sandwich and a cup of very, very hot milk tea (it partially melted and deformed the little plastic spoon that came with it.  How hot is that?)  both made fresh by a little old man in the back of the kiosk as I waited and watched.  along with a snickers bar for dessert or a later pick-me-up I spent $38 HK–about $5.30 US.

Back to the birds: there were a lot of them!  I’ll add some pictures with their names.  Please keep in mind that the pictures could be better.  The wire on the cages was pretty heavy-duty and my camera kept wanting to focus on the wires rather than the birds.  When I did get it to focus on the birds, the wire became a blur over parts of their bodies.  Still, most of the pictures are quite clear.

Silver pheasant, male & female

wood duck

Malay peacock pheasant

Grey crowned crane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue crowned pigeon

 

 

 

 

 

The primates were a hoot.

Several of the cages had blue plastic barrels hanging inside from the roof.  the barrels had large openings on all sides and the primates would  pile in one at a time, or swung from the bottom while their fellow inmates got a free ride.  It literally was more fun for a barrel of monkeys.

The plant and flower part of the park was beautiful.   I’ll eventually get around to posting some of those too.

cherodendrum

cotton rose

Afterward, I headed for the tram to Victoria Peak.  Bad idea.  It’s Saturday here.  Saturday afternoon.  And the line was loooooooooong.   So very long.   After about half an hour I could see the ticket window.  Then I found out that after the ticket window (still about 20 minutes away) I would have to wait for the tram in a big hall with about 200 hundred of my closest friends (the way they were all packed in there, they would have be become “close” friends…), all sweltering in a pretty much airless space, waiting their turn to board.
A process that would take approximately another 45 minutes.   I bailed.  I’ll go again either early tomorrow or wait until Monday when things are less crowded.