I had been in Hong Kong for several days but still hadn't found anyone wearing those funny-looking hats that I had been led to believe were the national headgear of choice. You know, the straw ones with the wide brims and the high peaks that, if thrown into the air and photographed, might look very much like those blurry pictures of UFOs that were all the rage a few years back. Those.
I was leaving China soon and realized that if I was to have any hope of spotting these iconic hats, I'd have to get out of the city and explore someplace a bit more "traditional." Asking around put me onto the trail of the Giant Buddha of Lantau.
Under normal circumstances, getting from Hong Kong to the giant Buddha statue on Lantau Island would have been a minimally traumatic experience. One could hop on the subway to Kowloon for five-minutes of rattling and jolting under Hong Kong Harbor; spend another five-minutes taking a cab to the Sky Ride; then take the scenic ten-minute jaunt in the Sky Ride's suspended gondola above the dark green slopes of Lantau's gentle peaks to the monastery where the giant Buddha and, hopefully, funny hats, could be seen.
Unfortunately, Hong Kong and surrounds (including Lantau Island, only six miles west of Hong Kong as a Chinese crow flies) had recently been subjected to what the locals called a "black rain": a rain that pours down so hard and so fast that it makes it impossible to see. A rain that is unleashed in such prodigious quantities that roads are washed out, mountains slide into oceans, and animals start looking for someone who'd had enough foresight to build an ark.
The Sky Ride was still shut down as a result of the rains, and all but one road on Lantau Island was still a mess of mud and erosion gullies. There was only one way to get to the giant Buddha: a tour.
As a rule, I don't like organized tours. Most of them share the same faults:
1). They take you to too many places, most of which you'd rather not know existed, let alone spend time visiting.
2). They don't let you linger nearly long enough at the places you really would like to see.
3). There's always a side-trip to some "authentic" local shop selling overpriced trinkets "handmade" by locals (probably children working twenty-five hour days in sweatshops … er … "handicraft communes").
4). There's always a poorly planned bulk meal that involves sitting at a vast table with a dozen people you don't know and whom you really don't want to get to know, all of whom are wearing brightly-colored Hawaiian shirts and who are, to a person, complaining about why the food couldn't be more like what you'd find at a McDonald's back home.
5). And all tours, as a rule they must agree to abide by before they are granted their tour licenses by the local Tourism Bureau, must keep the tourists on a bus for at least three-quarters of the time allotted for the tour.
I prefer to wander around and stumble onto Places-of-Interest by accident, or by looking at a poorly-marked map and saying, "Hey, let's go…er…THERE!" and pointing randomly. But I was desperate to see the funny hats, and if a tour was the only way I could manage it, then, by golly and by gum, a tour it would be.
As expected, there were the usual pitfalls, although I will grant points for originality: instead of just making us spend hours upon hours on a bus, they also made us spend hours upon hours on a ferry. Both bus and ferry, however, had uncomfortable seats.
One of our secondary stops turned out to be a highway rest stop, complete with a scenic overlook that gave onto a stunning view of an industrial plant. On the plus side, the meal, although spent with people who squinted at the food and said, "Um, do you have any burgers?" was tasty.
Finally, we arrived at the Giant Buddha of Lantau Island. It was a statue thirty-feet tall, surrounded by reverent Bodhisattvas (saintly figures representing various traits of the Buddha, such as wisdom or loving kindness, if I understood the tour guide correctly), all perched on the summit of a mountain at the top of an untold number of steps.
It was very calm, very tranquil, very serene, very all the things one would expect of a holy site located on the summit of a mountain at the top of an untold number of steps. Most importantly for my purposes, however, was that there was someone wearing a funny hat. And not just one person, but two!
I stalked my prey cautiously, anxious to get a picture of a genuine funny-looking hat being worn by a genuine local-type, but not wishing to scare them off. Camera in hand, I sneaked up behind my subjects and waited until they turned. I sighed and lowered my camera.
Tourists.
The author is spending the summer travelling around Asia while teaching onboard the USS Ronald Reagan.
