Horner travels ... Of all the pages in a book, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport...

Because the cable car to Ngong Ping didn't open 'til 10am or so, we decided on an early start to avoid tourist crowds After enjoying breakfast, 7:30am, at Pacific Coffee Company (our ever-reliable source of western food and coffee)we boarded a local bus on much the same route as Tai O - back up the mountains - a 40 minute ride. At the top of Ngong Ping are many tourist sites- we started by viewing the Big Buddha peacefully perched on top of another mountain. We were unable to climb up to it and experience it's grandeur size as the gates were closed until 10am.Mum was thankful to avoid the 100's and 100's of steps after yesterday's heart testing climb. Next we thoroughly enjoyed the Po Lin Nunnery exerience - my favourite temple so far with elaborate, artistic and colourful Indian influenced ceiling art. The shrines were surrounded with plentiful, perfumed floral arrangements- absolute bliss. Everything was gorgeous in the temple but I couldn't find any info' on it - I assume they were buddhists/taoists. After this, we followed the white cobble-stoned road aligned with numerous gift stores and made a few more purchases. At the end was the cable car. Knowing it was one of the longest in the world and that it went over mountains and down into valleys and across water, we hesitated  about taking it down to Citygate and considered taking the bus back but after seeing so many people getting off - especially the elderly and children who didn;t look grey in the face- we decided we just had to do it! For those of you who don't know, we both have a fear of heights and get numb, tingly legs in such situations. The 1-way ticket was $80HKD back (just over $11 AUD)so we bought one and jumped on board (gently so as not to rock the cabin). Mum held on to her seat the whole way! I stood a couple of times to look out the glass clearly and take photos but also held onto rails while doing so. We are useless but neither of has had a panic attack and were able to walk at the end of it as we disembarked at City gate. The scenery was lovely as you can see from the photos - it was a bit foggy as we reached the city area and crossed the water. There were some very steep declines but the ride was very smooth. Back at Citygate, we saw the endless queue of visitors at the cable car waiting to go up to Ngong Ping 360. We were so glad that we had chosen to do it a different way and were back before these poor people had even left. We returned to The Marriott to retreive our luggage and boarded the shuttle bus to the airport. We had a few hours until our 5:30pm flight to KL so wandered around all of Terminals 1 & 2 and did a little more shopping! Who would believe that we are both underbudget and coming home with money? Arrived in KL after 10pm and it was 29d.celcius and humid - whooah. Found the shuttle bus to Tune Hotel then wound down at their impossible computers - it took 45minutes to try and get my gmail account up so we gave up after an hour and spent the night sleeping in what felt like a desert. In the morning we realised our air-con, which we had paid for didn't work- mmm.