My friend is going to Hong Kong soon. He wants to go atop of the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. I haven't been there for many years, and I heard you have to pay an admission price and eat vegaterian food (jai) in order to go up. Is this true?

No, it is free to climb the steps to the Big Buddha. What the meal ticket includes is a visit to the exhibits INSIDE the base of the Big Buddha. It includes some drawings as well as supposedly a relic.

As rkkwan says, people at the ticket office will encourage you to buy tickets at the ticket offices at the foot of the steps, but these are not required if you simply want to go up the steps and walk around the platforms at the base of the Buddha. The exhibition is, frankly, not really worth paying money for. If you decide you want to eat some vegetarian food at the restaurant then there is an area where you can do so in a normal cafeteria style just paying for what you want. The ticket sold at the base of the Buddha includes a sort of set meal at a fixed time in a "school lunch" style - I would suggest just the pay as you go option.

FYI - I visited the Big Buddha in January. It was Chinese New Years weekend, so I know there was some extra interest, but the place was swarmed. It took 2 hours to get through the cable car line.

Is it worth to wait for the cable car instead of taking the bus? When I last visited there, cable car did not exist and bus ride took 45 minutes.

The cable car is definitely worth a trip. Other than major holidays, the line shouldn't be long, especially on weekdays. You can take the bus one-way and the cable car the other.

Cable car is definitely worth it. Like most tourist attractions, the lines are much shorter if you arrive first thing in the morning. By doing this the Big Buddha won't be as crowded either.

CNY. This is the queue to get up to the queue in the concourse.

On the other hand I have visited the Big Buddha four times and have yet to get a good view for more than ten minutes (on one trip). So consult the HKG area weather forecast before you get your hopes up. But I have missed/avoided the main summer months.......

I will support the cable car trip. Outstanding. It may be related to the conditions indicated in paragraph one but there were no lines and the clouds disappeared after passing a couple of towers on the way down.

Combine the cable car with a bus trip and a ferry to/from Mui Wo

Happy wandering

Fred

Regarding the cable car (ropeway), you can now purchase tickets online with reservations for a particular time. When you get there, there's a special line at the ticket window for people with reservations, and then a separate line for boarding. So, if you have enough visibility in your schedule to book a specific date and time in advance, you can avoid long lines regardless of how crowded it is that day.

You can also pay slightly more for the Crystal Cabin, which has a glass floor. There is a separate, shorter line for that, although if it's as crowded as showin in the picture above, I'm guessing it's going to take you quite a while to get to the ticket window in the first place.

Besides the line-jumping (subject to waiting for a Crystal Cabin to come around), I think it was worth the modest price supplement, at least one way. Unless you're afraid of heights. In which case, skip the cable car altogether!

When I visited the Big Buddha about 1.5 years ago, the cable car was closed due to an accident. So I had to take the bus both ways. It's a fairly comfortable "tourist coach" type bus. I remember it was one of the most memorable bus rides I ever had, because of the length (over an hour each way, up and down a bunch of hills that seemed to last forever), the interesting scenery, and the amount of road construction going on, resulting in some interesting maneuvering, at one point our bus was driving backwards up a hill, in order to allow opposing traffic to pass on a temporary one way-road. I recommend taking the bus at least one-way if you have the time and patience. I'm thinking about going to the Big Buddha again this weekend just to ride that bus and the cable car.

Just a quick first hand experience - I took the cable car today around 2pm to start a hike at Ngong Ping. There was absolutely no queue to buy tickets, and less than 5 minutes wait to get on a car. Peopel were being loaded 4-6 to a cabin - well below their full load, but nice from the point of view of moving around, taking pictures, etc. It was a beautiful day, and it's the school holidays here, so maybe it really is only at peak times like CNY that it is very busy. It is, presumably, also a bit busier at weekends.

That's nice.

Yes it does get busy at the weekends. It's also hell in Citygate too. But the rest of the time, it's very pleasant living in Tung Chung.