Hong Kong in October, end

Dai Fut

October 26

Today we got to do something that not everybody can say he’s done. We went up to meet the Big Buddha in the sky and came back to brag about it.

We moved this morning to the Regal Airport Hotel, which is on the grounds of the airport on Lantau Island. This way we don’t have to work too hard to get to the terminal by eight in the morning.

A bus right outside the hotel took us in about 10 minutes to the cable car terminal in Tung Chung, where the kids were playing in a fountain.

The cable goes over a couple of mountains and an arm of a bay to the giant Buddha to Tian Tan. (That’s Mandarin, Joanna told me. It’s Tin Tan in Cantonese. “Tin” means “sky.” “Tan” I’m not sure.)

When the ride started, we got a view of the apartment towers. I don’t really know if the hill beyond them is really called Butt Crack Mountain.

 Now, I say that not everybody can say he’s done this. But quite a few have. The cable car ride takes less than 10 minutes. It goes through two turns and at least a half dozen towers.

 The cable car route is also traversed by a foot trail, which I estimate would take about a week instead of 10 minutes for the trip.

One of the men in the car with us had Jackie Chan sneakers, which Joanna was able to catch.

In the bay under us, a group of people were wading about waist deep and working with floating boxes. This was like something out of a Kurosawa movie. A lady in the car with us said they were probably harvesting oysters. The wetland on the bayshore was dotted with white boxes.

 Several small cemeteries have been built into the hillside. One is near the top of one of the peaks and is accessible only by a long and daunting path paved with stones. There are several miles of paths like that, including long stretches of steps.

The big Buddha (dai Fut in Cantonese) is visible after you cross the first peak.

The cable car lets you off at Ngong Ping, a tourist village of chain eateries—Subway, Ebeneezer’s Pizza and Kabobs—and yes, a 7-eleven. There is also a shop called Walk With Buddha, and a Walt Disney-style plastic structure representing the bodhi tree. The original is a fabled tree under which Siddhartha Gautama sat when he reached enlightenment. “Bodhi” means “enlightenment,” if I remember right from my Jack Kerouac days. You are invited to make wishes at the tree in Ngong Ping. I wonder if wishes made under a fake tree are supposed to come true.

I am already a wise-ass so I skipped the Wisdom Path.

Just beyond the village and at the foot of the steps leading to the dai Fut is a real monastery, called Po Ling. We ate the vegetarian lunch at the monastery’s cafeteria to earn merit and also to fortify ourselves for the climb of 200 steps to the statue. The food was extraordinary. A soup contained a kind of squash with a very tough rind, and also a seed, maybe lotus, that doesn’t taste like much when you first bite it, but then blossoms with a flowery flavor. There were carrots and other things in the soup, too. The broth was fantastic.

One tofu dish had yellow corn and peas in a savory sauce with a mild touch of chile. The bean curd, oddly enough, didn’t pick up the flavor and by itself was pretty tasteless. Another dish, with bell peppers and something like cucumber, had smoked tofu, which was very tasty.

No beer with lunch.

The monks were chanting in a ceremony in the temple basement.

The upper floor was open to the public.

A sign outside told us that incense was not permitted inside the temple. The incense burning was concentrated around a flaming urn in the open, outside the temple courtyard.

While we were eating lunch, a downpour lasting perhaps half an hour drenched the flame, but the incense kept burning.

The most difficult thing about climbing the stone stairs to the Buddha is that everyone has to stop now and then to snap photos. So you have to pick your way up through a milling crowd.

But we did it. The photo of the day is proof.

The Buddha is several stories high and seated on a lotus. The receipt for lunch got us free admission to the museum under the lotus. It is an exhibit of manuscripts representing the monastery’s collection.

It is on two levels and takes you up to the base of the lotus. It was hard to lean back and look up at a Buddha this size from directly underneath and not lose my hat.

When we came down from our visit to dai Fut, we encountered the herd of sacred—or maybe just nonchalant—cattle. They were milling around the bus terminal.

I have ridden cable cars before and am usually all right with them, although glass elevators can sometimes give my stomach a turn. We elected to take a car with a solid floor rather than glass.

I’m glad we did. I’ve stood on glass floors before, like the one on the back of Lucy the Elephant at Margate, and the experience is just too weird for me.

The only spooky illusion in the ride was on the way back. After we crossed the tower at the last peak, which has a very steep, falling-away slope, the car seemed to be launching into the air, and I expected a lurch that never came.

The airport hotel is very modern and almost as fancy as the Lisboa in Macau. They charge $120 H.K. ($15 U.S.) a day for Internet service, but give you two hours free in the lobby every day. Not great, but not bad either.

We went to the bar at the China Coast, which bills itself as an American steak restaurant in the hotel. We had filled up on vegetarian and had no room for steak, but as I pointed out, there was no beer at the monastery.

Sure, I could buy it at the tourist village, could even buy a pint of whiskey or vodka at 7-Eleven, but when I saw the kids in silly hats trying, with difficulty, to get a guitar and a tom-tom working together, I knew it was time to leave. They weren't being rowdy or spontaneous; they were working for one of the attractions

It was after six local time by the time we hit China Coast, and Harry was dry.

I ordered something I may have had before, but am not sure—Kilkenny Irish beer. It’s a lager, like most of the brews that are popular here, but surprisingly tasty. I ordered a half pint so I could try more of the taps. When I was finishing it, the bartender handed me another of the same. It was two-for-one happy hour.

A singer and piano player were doing American standards, “Won’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” for example. Then came request time. The singer actually asked me, what’s my favorite song. I told her “Hallelujah,” a song by Leonard Cohen. It was in the sound track of “Shrek,” but otherwise is fairly obscure. Something (not sure what) had made me think of the song earlier in the day, so it was on my mind and just popped out.

She went back to consult the piano player and a few minutes later, they were doing it. This one always makes me tear up. I think I was into my second half pint of Kronenbourg by the time, and I wasn’t near drunk enough for this.

When the song was over, the piano went into a brief riff of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was flat out terrific.

I ordered Jameson after that because I needed the nourishment. Joanna took a small sip, which is the most appropriate way to drink a whiskey that tasty. She got the nose of it and the bittersweet burn. It was her first hit of spirits.

When the show was over, the piano player came over to talk to us. His name is Jay-Jay. He had never done the song before, but knew it. He knew a version done by an American pop singer named Justin Timberlake, who performed it during a benefit concert for Haiti.

There was one guy at the corner of the bar who had sat with pints of Carlsberg and hardly moved at all. I never even saw him pick up the pint, but I'm pretty sure he did, because the beer level kept changing.

Turns out, he’s Mike, an audio engineer from Germany who was waiting in Hong Kong for a visa to get into the People’s Republic of China. He has been hired to do audio at a golf tournament that will be aired on German TV. He told us Tiger Woods is going to play there.

Mike was hired and sent in a hurry. What about the visa?

Won’t take long.

I think he’s been waiting four days.

I bought him a Carlsberg. He bought me a whiskey, and then it was time to call it a night.

I didn’t even get to the bar on the mezzanine floor.

Way Home

October 27

We booked at an airport hotel so we wouldn’t have to get up too early to be at the airport two hours ahead of a ten a.m. flight. I figured it’s a short run to the terminal and we would either take a shuttle bus or a cab. Maybe 15 minutes, tops, if we had to wait. We didn’t need to wait, didn’t need a cab either. There is an enclosed walkway from the hotel to the terminal. It was that close, a five-minute walk even dragging bags.

The first adventure of the day turned out all right, but given a language barrier, working with a clerk at eight in the morning Hong Kong time, and no memory of this kind of thing happening last January on my way back from Asia, it was a little disturbing to my equanimity.

The lady couldn’t issue us boarding passes for the third stage of the trip, from O’Hare to Newark.

I knew we had to pass through immigration at ORD, because we were switching to a domestic flight. But I didn’t recall having to reclaim and recheck my suitcase last time and go to another departures desk for a boarding ticket.

No problems at Narita. A quick passport check before you go through security. You don’t even have to take off your shoes. That’s only in America.

We stop at a place for a snack and a couple of beers. They sell a black brew called Yebisu. Never heard of it and am not sure whether to stress the first or second syllable. I choose the first because it sounds more like Toshiro Mifune, whom I have adopted as my Japanese dialog coach. His drunks are the best on film.

The Yebisu black is very much like a dry Irish stout. It could be a distant cousin, too, of the black ale at U Flecku in Prague.

I had the Yebisu with some fried dumplings.

The place was also selling hot dogs. I had noticed small food stands prominently advertising hot dogs in Hong Kong and Macau. I had wondered if they had an Asian twist. So I ordered one when I went back to get a blond Yebisu. Just like a ball game.

They are basic hot dogs, served with a little sauerkraut in the bun and butter, an unusual condiment in my hot dog experience, which by the way is not exhaustive by any means. The catsup packet was bigger than the mustard, and most of the pictures of hot dogs I had seen in Asia showed them served with catsup. But that and the butter were the only real differences from American style hot dogs.

I did some writing on the plane, watched a movie in which John Cusack is Edgar Allen Poe tracking down a serial killer, and slept.

The connection at O’Hare worked very smoothly. The plane from Tokyo arrived about 20 minutes behind schedule. We went through passport control without too much delay. One bag was waiting for us and another arrived less than five minutes later. They were already booked through to EWR so we just handed them over.

This was nothing like Newark, where they take care of you when they get around to it.

Security, however, made me feel more at home. There are two lines for X-ray machines, one scanner, and nothing’s moving. There was a first-class security gate a little farther down the terminal and nobody was using that.

I wonder how many of our Homeland Security tax dollars pay for that?

We were to leave at gate G9. We were following endless signs. I assured Joanna that it would be the farthest away. It always is. And it almost was. But I wasn’t complaining. Directly across from it was a small bar serving Sam Adams on tap.

This stretch was on a toy airplane with a tight aisle and four tight seats across. I kept falling asleep and the waking up as I fell forward in the seat.

We were in the last row, but in different seats. Somehow American had lost the record of my original seat bookings. I have had better planes and better service than American offered, but I can’t complain too loud.

I think it can be fun to change planes on a long trip, because it gives a chance to stretch and move around. But I have learned that United has a daily non-stop from Newark to Hong Kong.  I’ll look into that for next time.

Hong Kong was terrific, and I could see myself going back next year, although I have a curiosity about Singapore and Malaysia. But I digress.

The cab got us back home a little after ten. I unwound with a beer before passing out.

Love to all.

Harry