Destination Hong Kong :: One

This is the first of two installments of personal images that I took while in Hong Kong in October. I’m so glad that I have finally gotten the chance to finish them ~ I wanted to wait until the new blog was done before posting these!

The first part of the storyboard pretty much sums up Hong Kong ~ busy, loud, crowded and just plain intense. I went to visit the Times Square Hong Kong mall and oh my goodness, have never experienced anything like that in my life. It was a ginormous 7-floor mall, not including a few levels of “food court,” which essentially were floors of restaurants. Real restaurants. And beneath all of this, the rapid transit system hums busily along, transporting thousands of people a day all across the city. Even though the MTR was fantastic (some of the best urban transit I have come across yet), I tried to stay out of the underground tunnels as much as possible and take taxis. It began to feel a little too claustrophobic to me and combined with the humidity and pollution just made me want to avoid it altogether.

The architecture in Hong Kong is interesting and plentiful ~ I could have spent so much time just shooting buildings. A great deal of it is reminiscent of Vancouver, which made that aspect of the city very familiar.

I managed to spend a day at the Po Lin Monastery and the Giant Buddha on the island of Lantau. This was certainly one of the highlights for me on this trip and a welcome break into some nature. It’s a bit of a novelty getting there ~ a cable car with a crystal floor whisked us up into the misty hills. The scenery was incredible, so lush, and since I had ventured out earlier in the day, the air was definitely cooler. But what a treat it was to see such a culturally significant piece of history. I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the Buddha, the monastery and eventually making my way down a shaded trail to the Wisdom Path. I was loving all of the different kinds of plants that made up the forest ~ it’s always so neat to see what grows in different places.

I’m hoping to post some more images tomorrow to cap off my Hong Kong travels ~ tomorrow we’ll visit The Peak as well as some various markets. Stay tuned!