Big Buddha

Greetings all. Our holiday is nearing an end, we have less than one week until we fly back to the UK.

After my last post we had a break from sightseeing for a few days as Jordan felt really ill. After a couple of days we decided it might be a good idea to go to the hospital to get her checked out. This turned out to be a much easier than we expected. A lady from the guesthouse escorted us by taxi to the hospital. We registered quickly and were seen in less than 10 minutes. The doctor diagnosed the problem as an infection of the stomach or intestines and prescribed a cocktail of drugs. The total cost of this great service... 269HK$ (about 20 quid). She's fine now.

As Jordan was feeling better we headed off to a couple of the outlying islands over the last few days. The island of Lamma is about 2km south of Hong Kong island and has no roads or cars (although I did spot a couple of cars so I reakon this is all a scam). The island has a huge coal fired power station that overlooks one of the beaches. It's a very odd sight to behold as it is surrounded by lush green scenery and a small fishing villiage teeming with expats.

Today we visited Lantau island and caught a cable car up to the Buddhist Monastary close to the peak (around 900m up). This was a fairly... unnerving experience. In the words of Edward Hitler 'On a scale of one to ten I think it's bicycle clip time.' You'll have to look at the pictures and video on Flickr to see what I mean. At the monastary there is a rather large statue of Buddha and a very dissapointing vegetarian restaurant. You can tell these monks tend not to visit nearby Hong Kong island as their idea of vegetarian food is fairly pretty basic. We caught the cable car back down the mountain (even scarier than the way up) and headed back to the bright lights of Hong Kong.