We’re at a touristy spot. Prime set-piece photo location. We
have guests. That can only mean one thing. It’s posing po-faced with a nescafé
o’clock!
So here’s Nic in front the enormous Buddha out on Lantau,
looking admirably serious given how hard she found it to suppress her laughter.
This is a tourist must-do whilst here according to the
guidebooks, as it’s a full day out. You grab a cable car that holds some record
or other (Longest? Longest in Asia? Longest with glass bottomed cars?), which
hoists you up from sea level to the top of a mountain, over a bay. Very
impressive. Then there’s the whole tourist apparatus – kitsch shops, restos
galore, walks, a monastery and of course the Buddha itself.
Imagine my shock, nay, indignation then when it turns out
that while the monastery is pretty old the Buddha was airlifted there in the 1980s to
create a tourist spot. Cynical, much?! People do go to pray at it, and
the monks do many devotional things with it still, but that strikes me as odd –
like building a new cathedral in Mediaeval style just for tourists in the UK.
Unexpected happening of the day – the monastery’s Shaolin
monks turned out to be the kind that do martial arts as part of their
devotions. And put on a rather odd, but awesomely frightening show – whirling swords,
whirring nunchuks and ample ‘HIII-EEE-YAH!’-ing. Photo two is the burliest,
strongest monk snapping a bamboo stave over a colleague’s arm. Ouch.
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