Sivan's Blog: Day 5 – Lantau Island, Goodbye Hong Kong

Last days are always a problem when travelling, you are now travelling with your bags, you have no residence and you’re in that constant state of “I have a flight to catch” – given all that we decided to go and make the most of our last day in Hong Kong to go to Lantau Island, but before we could do that, we had to do something with our luggage.

Turns out, they thought of that over there and they came up with a thing called in-town check in where they let you check your luggage in the city, provided you take the train to the airport. Oh, and they also have free shuttles to the train station where you can do it. Pretty damn cool!

And indeed we took the shuttle, put our bags, showed the flight ticket to the person at the station. That’s when the guy told us that I don’t have a Visa for Australia. I know I have a visa without a doubt.

How do I know that?
To answer that we will have to go back three weeks to our kitchen in New York where as we were doing the dishes we were told that we would need a visa for Australia – we had no idea… We went on their website and were told it would take anywhere between 3-5 weeks to get it. Long story short, it took less than a week, but man, what a week… Oh, and while we were doing that, we noticed that my Passport was about to expire (within 8 months, but at the time we get back to NY it will be less than 6 months – not a good thing) so we took care of that as well.

Back to the story – after about 30 minutes of suspense the rep got back to us and updated us that he was mistaken and that everything is ok. PHEW!!!

And so we were on our way to Lantau where we should see a giant Budhaa statue – sounds like fun! We took the Airport Express train to the island and were impressed with how efficient it is (so much so, that when you arrive at the airport, there are baggage trollys waiting for you in front of each train door.

We took the bus from the airport to Lantau and it took us to an awesome international food court. So we spent about 45 minutes going between all of the options until we decided on Thai for Elad and Korean noodles for Sivan. We are very bad when presented with many options…

We took the Ngong Ping 360 cable car (Paid a few bucks extra for the diamond experience – see through floor and less lines). That was really nice, we were on the gondola for approximately 20 minutes to get up the hill and saw amazing views: the ocean, a forest, the city of lantau with apartment complexes which we deduced contain anywhere between 20 and 40 thousand people each and an ever growing Buddha sculpture.

After reaching the top, we proceeded towards the Buddha, through a garden of lesser god sculptures and up many many stairs we finally arrived at the sculpture. This was my first giant Buddha so I was impressed, Sivan had visited China and Tibet in the past so was slightly less impressed but it was really nice. It was sorrounded by smaller sculptures of what I imagined were maidens offering gifts to it and by a million tourists taking pictures with it.