Yesterday a couple of friends and I decided to explore a new part of Hong Kong called the New Territories. It was the last part of China that was annexed to Hong Kong while under British rule due to its military strategy, and as a result it bears that name.
We met outside the dorms and went to the subway station at Central. I saw an interesting vending machine and decided to try it out, turns out it sold frozen and shaken bottles of coke so that it would explode on your face the second you opened it. My friend actually knew about this so he managed to get a video of it.
From there we rode the Red Line to Mong Kok, then switched to the Green Line until Kowloon Tang and finally to the Light Blue Line to Tai Wai. The journey took about an hour but we finally arrived to our stop.
We asked for directions on how to get to the Ten Thousand Buddha Monastery and got very shallow explanations. We started walking in the direction and finally arrived at the place. It was a very traditional chinese-looking structure with the pagodas and ponds so we decided to go in. We started seeing many stairs going up so we assumed that we were in the right place since we had heard that there where over 500 stairs to the top. We entered a room with about 100 buddhas and were really impressed, so we decided to keep going up. After about a half-hour of hiking we saw a fence in the top separating us from a place with giant golden buddhas. We asked how to get there and found out that we had entered the wrong building. We went inside the cemetery rather than the Monastery. We turned around and began descending the whole trajectory. Once we arrived at the bottom we saw a very slim alley that actually took us to the right place. You'd think that one of the oldest civilizations in the world would know how to signal where stuff is.
We started our hike up again but this time we found hundreds of buddhas leading the track. It was an amazing experience since every single buddha was different in a certain aspect. Either their face was totally different, or their direction or hand gestures.
It was truly remarkable. After about a 15-20 minutes of a nice track we finally arrived at the top, and saw a giant room were people went to pray. We went inside and noticed how the walls were covered by little buddhas. We counted 23 rows down in the smaller walls, and 30 on the longer ones, and approximated that there were about 100 or more sideways. It was an amazing view to be surrounded by that many buddhas! The coolest thing is that they all had a different name and hand sign. There was one bigger buddha in the middle of the room that had an interesting story behind it. A Reverend decided that he wanted his body to be covered in gold once he died and be placed in exhibition next to the other buddha's, and he got his wish granted.
We left the giant room and walked around for a bit. There was another pagoda and a tower covered by buddhas, and then a smaller track that kept going up. We followed it and found ourselves in a different buddha environment, this time colored ones rather than golden ones and more japanese looking, all of them leading to a waterfall with a giant white buddha behind. We took some pictures and headed back down.
Olga and Evalina got hungry and decided that they wanted to go inside IKEA to eat. Who would have thought that there was such thing as IKEA food. Anyways, this turned out to be a convenient stop for me to buy a pair of sheets to be used as a toga for Maude's party on Tuesday Night. Afterwards we got back on the trains and headed back home.
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