Lara's Singapore Blog » Hong Kong

Hong Kong: Ten Thousand Buddhas Temple

Lara — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:12:25 +0000

I went to this temple in 1993. It’s still there, but there are a lot more Buddha statues. Now the whole trail up the mountain (some 460 stairs) is lined with life-sized gold-painted Buddhas in astonishing variety:

These are the ones you can see from the main pavilion about two thirds of the way up. And if you look down, you can see the ones who helped you up this far:

At this level, the main one that most people seem to be able to get to, there is a pagoda with a lot of seated Buddha statues. You can go up inside it, but it’s mostly a circular staircase and nothing else. There’s a restaurant; there’s a temple with the gilded corpse of an abbot of the local monastery in it – sorry, again no pictures inside the temples, which is just good manners – and there’s a small chapel to one side with arhats in it. The arhats are enlightened buddhas who have escaped from the cycle of reincarnation, but I have a feeling these have been interspersed with various Taoist heroes to spruce up the temple precincts (and appeal to a wider audience). There’s one whose eyebrows grow down to his waist, and others with various other attributes. But the one who caught our attention is this one:

Maybe he’s an earhat.

Anyway, they were painting this pavilion with the typical bright and beautiful temple decorations that you can see on a lot of fancy Chinese temples. I’d never seen temple painters at work, so I photographed them.

More arhats below:

Once you’ve completed your devotions or tourism at this level, you can follow the Buddha trail further up the mountain until you reach the top. At this level the trail ends and there are several structures: an old house that might have been the original monastery; two new temples, both air conditioned (! just like the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore’s Chinatown!), that contain many ancestral tablets, and maybe a few ancestral ashes, for worship and remembrance. One of these new temples has an enormous seated Buddha with a glowing stone bindhi in its forehead. If you watch long enough the bindhi changes colors, from red to orange, pink to blue, green back to red. It’s an LED. Again, alas, courtesy forebad the taking of photos.
But if you go outside and dodge the scent of stinky tofu wafting up from below, you can see a small red pavilion which contains a statue of the beloved abbot whose gilded corpse resides in the main temple area below. This area is adjacent to a Buddha-filled grotto, which is to some extent still under construction. Here are the golden Buddhas to keep the abbot company:

Here is the newly carved sleeping Buddha atop the as-yet-incomplete water feature:

Here is the lovely and popular GuanYin, the Goddess of Mercy, who when her scaffolding is removed will overlook the entire valley (will her bindhi change colors too?):

And finally, here is the sign in English that caps the entire experience for me:

Hong Kong – Lamma Island

Lara — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:19:22 +0000

As you could probably see from my previous post, we saw a lot of Hong Kong from the surface of the surrounding water. Hong Kong is a bunch of islands, some of which are largely uninhabited. We visited Lamma Island to do some hiking, swimming and sightseeing. Pix below.

One thing I didn’t get pictures of were the Kamikaze Grottos. During World War II the occupying Japanese dug or blasted these out of the rocky slopes at the waterline, and stuffed them with small motorboats and soldiers. In case the Allies tried to take Lamma Island from the Japanese, the soldiers were to load themselves into the boats, launch themselves at the new invaders, and blow them up. But all that is behind us now…..

Here’s the beach, filled with expats on a Monday afternoon. The water was fairly clean, the showers, restrooms and changing rooms as good as anything I saw in California before that state began to run budget deficits and cut back on public services. There’s a big power plant off to the right, but you can’t see it from the beach. It didn’t look nuclear to me.

Next: Hiking. We saw this sizeable spider near the trail. Its body was about 1.5 inches long. The arachnaphobes in our party fell to the rear with alacrity. If you look carefully you can see that it shares its web with friends.

Further along the trail there’s the lookout pavilion, from which you can see the village where you catch the ferry back to the city. All those floating platforms are fishermen’s equipment and tiny shacks. The “hiking” trail, I should mention, is a paved sidewalk 4 feet wide; the most hazardous thing on it is little tractors carrying small-scale construction equipment. You could hike in high heels, should the need arise.

Below, a less complicated view.

Hong Kong is just chock-full of steep hills and mountains rising out of the sea. Not a lot of beach or flat land to work with. Hence the skyscrapers.

This is the brand-new Heavenly Queen temple, located on the path that leads from the lookout, past a couple of farms, past the Kamikaze Grottoes, and to the ferry pier. We went inside and admired the new carvings, statues, and paint jobs. They have also got an enormous (7 foot-long) preserved oarfish in a lucite box, fished locally and presented to a local seafood restaurant, which in turn preserved it and donated it to the temple. A wierd beast and well worth viewing; but a sign inside the temple asked us not to take pictures, so we didn’t. You’ll just have to go see it yourself.

On the way to the pier there are a few shops and eateries. Please note that this shop can not eat or drink.

From the ferry, you can look back at Lamma Island and see the sun beginning to set. If I didn’t have to run off to work, I’d spend a little time to rotate this photo so that the horizon is, er, horizontal.

A Trip to Hong Kong

Lara — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:50:51 +0000

Singapore is always comparing itself to Hong Kong, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Singapore’s train system is the MRT; Hong Kong’s is the MTR.
I haven’t been to Hong Kong since 1993. It’s changed a bit.

For instance, these buildings used to be on the waterfront. Now, thanks to land reclamation and wild building, they are about 3 skyscrapers away from the water.

There are a lot more skyscrapers, holding a lot more financial industry workers. Hong Kong’s shipping business has largely gone to Shanghai, so finance is the big dog here. That and construction, relentless large-scale construction. The new airport is on a separate island, connected by fantastic huge bridges to Hong Kong Island – the airport sprawls everywhere. Very modern and safe, but a lot less adventurous to land there. When I landed at the old airport I could look into the windows of the skyscrapers and wave to the workers there. Kind of like reading the license plates on the 405 when you land at LAX.

These new apartment buildings have holes in them, each hole taking up the space of at least 10 apartments. Why? It’s not for aerodynamics. It’s for feng shui; the necromancers persuaded the builders and architects that the spirits would object to these buildings and dash their evil influence against them. But with these nice big holes, the spirits will be ineffective; they’ll just fly harmlessly through the holes. The builders are taking a sizeable financial hit with these holes, but they make a good story.

This private boat was so huge I’m not sure it fit entirely into my viewfinder. But what I like about this is its dependence on the tiny rusty tugboat at its flank.

Below is the view of the Hong Kong skyline at night.