Someone please explain this to me. For the life of me, I don’t understand why Hong Kong sees the Golden Bauhinia as a tourist attraction. The first time I was in Wan Chai with the HK Walks booklet I followed their suggested path and went all the way – 20 minutes – from Wan Chai MTR station to the Golden Bauhinia expecting – what was I expecting? – expecting a magnificent structure, atleast the size of the Statue of Liberty, that will cause me to go “wow”. But, as I ventured around not sure where to find the big statue I asked a local person offering photoshopped shots for camera-less visitors where it was. He looked at me like I’m stupid and pointed at a yellow torchy thing just behind me. I turned back, looked at it, scratched my head and asked the guy “that’s it? that’s the big attraction?”. “Hey!”, he responded back sounding offended, “people come everywhere China see this!”.
But why do they? I guess I understand the patriotic nationalistic feelings of getting possession over Hong Kong which is what this statue is suppose to represent, but that doesn’t explain why this is a tourist attraction and why people would choose to invest any efforts or money to go see this. “Did you atleast go see the Big Buddha on Lantau?” I asked the mainland couple who insisted on taking a photo with me infront of this odd symbol. “Weishenme? Buddha no interesting”. Indeed.
Oh well. To each his own, I’ve always been told. Who am I to say what’s an attraction and what’s not. I had the chance to revisit the place a few times during my stay in Hong Kong following some convention at the building just next to it, and it seemed stranger every time. Granted, it looks a bit better at night time, but there’s no doubt that if you’re already there probably the more interesting thing is the boardwalk overlooking west HK island and the Kowloon side skyline.
Like this view here…
Wasn’t that a lovely night panorama? It’s amazing what camera auto-modes can achieve these days.
Yeah, so lets have a bit more of that…
But you want to know more about the Golden Bauhinia, don’t you? why? okay, okay, so this is what the square looks like…
And if you really insist on seeing it from all possible directions, I’ll atleast try and save you the trouble…
If you get a bit further away…
Lovely, wasn’t it? it wasn’t, so now that you’ve crossed it off your HK travel schedule, let’s move on to something more interesting…
Damn that is tacky. The Buddha statue is much more inspiring. Tks for the warning, Fili. Will bypass it if ever I was in HK.