Over at Travel and History I posted one of Charley’s buddah pix from Hong Kong. Thanks to the eee PC crash I lost over 100 of my Hong Kong area and train trip pictures from the first 3 days of the China adventure. Luckily Charley and I had each taken quite a few.
This was the beginning of our adventure that took us from Hong Kong’s piers out to Lantau Island via a big ferry, then via a small ferry to unknown China Sea territories looking for the Tai O fishing village, which we did not find.
Joe Duck 
Holy Lotus-flower Batman. That’s one large Buddha. Make the Enlightened One’s head spin around, or even his eyes to glow (Godzilla-style), and maybe some of us would repent and take up the cliffsnotes to the Dharma. Or not. Is there a bistro serving monkey-brains nearby? At least serving some …..geisha. j-k.
Not to wax political but the brits should have held on to H-K (and Portugal to Macau–that would be an interesting jaunt).
Horatiox the mist kept us from seeing the Big Buddah in all his glory but it made the area around the monastery seem very mystical, especially as we stumbled into a very large patio area filled with incense smoke from huge burners and people praying for, I think, relatives who had passed away.
Brits and HK – have you been watching too much of the film “Tai Pan”? Research from that (inaccurate) history led me to find that the British drug dealing and smuggling in of Opium, against the wishes of the China Emperors, was a cornerstone of “opening” China to the West.
But….I should add that I think although English style colonialsm was clearly an outmoded model it was in many instances a lot less violent and exploitative than the systems that replaced it. Ghandi’s “non-violence” brought independence to India, but soon after his death during the creation of Pakistan about 600,000 died in the fighting. That was not Ghandi’s fault but I think it is also unreasonable to blame it on colonialism as is often done in the type of revisionist histories so prevalent today.