I know that we're going to have plenty of scripted experiences here in China: Ride this bus, climb that Wall, look over there, take a picture. Experience awe. Repeat. Return on said bus.And that’s all okay. Any trip to China would be incomplete without riding a bus full of camera-wielding tourists to see the Great Wall. But I also hope that our time in China is more than one tourist experience after another. I hope that our time here offers us a few experiences that are personal, local, and spontaneous.
Lantau is a large island just west of Hong Kong Island. With the exception of the new airport that opened a few years ago, Lantau is largely undeveloped. It is peppered with numerous fishing villages that look much the way they did 200 years ago.
As the school nurse, Julie has worked closely with a young woman from the front office named Colleen who grew up in Hong Kong as a missionary kid from the States. Years ago her family purchased one of fifteen cabins on the second-highest peak on Lantau Island. Because they had limited funds to do summer excursions, this relatively inexpensive cottage was an affordable way for their family to spend their summer vacations.
Colleen was a little sketchy on the details, but it is believed that each of these cabins was built sometime in the forties by Japanese prisoners of war. She told us that the only way to get to the cabins is on foot. A bus gets you about one third of the way up, but then it’s about a two-hour hike, she explained.
Although her cabin sleeps six, Colleen had other commitments that prevented her from staying overnight with us, but she volunteered to take us up Saturday morning.
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