Flying into Hong Kong is a marvelous experience, especially if you're lucky enough to get a window seat on a relatively clear day. I awoke from a pill-induced slumber on a 12 hour flight from London to Hong Kong and discovered the Quantas jetliner I was on was passing over countless intriguing islands of varying shape and size. As you get closer to HK, you see a series of small, crooked islands, and jagged green outcroppings of rock and land that poke up out of the water like the knuckles of some undersea giant. Each island looks
almost livable, if you had a seaworthy boat to support you, and I was reminded of how British smugglers shaped history here during the
Opium Wars, using these islands as temporary bases that helped them infiltrate China with cargos of Opium from India... It's one of those chapters of history rich with irony, a glaring example of the inherent evils of imperialism, but with a surprisingly happy ending. The British used drugs to force imperial China to open up their markets to trade... Today, the Chinese have reclaimed Hong Kong, after Britain's 99-year lease expired in 1997, and although Hong Kong functions largely as an autonomous city-state, it's China's prize. As the fog of sleep cleared I found my anticipation rising for an imminent arrival to one of the greatest cities on Earth...
As we descended into Hong Kong International Airport, I caught sight out of my window of a gigantic Buddha statue sitting on one of the peaks of the islands, surrounded by lush green valleys & good hiking terrain.
I could see cable cars in the distance hauling people up the mountain to the Buddha, and decided right than and there that I was going to get myself into one of those cars as soon as possible.
We landed at the airport, which turns out to have been built from
reclaimed land, and as we boarded a taxi to Tai Koo Shing Road, in the Quarry Bay area of HK island, I took a last look at
Lantau island behind us. Mountainous, lush, and intriguing,
Lantau is a gorgeous island filled with beautiful scenery, and it's the largest island of the components that make up Hong Kong as a Chinese administrative region. HK is comprised of HK Island, the Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories (which Lantau belongs to). Considering that this is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, it's pretty amazing that there's a setting as serene as Lantau island just a short ride away...
