I spent a week exploring Hong Kong at the end of October.
I hadn’t put in much preparation for my trip. I had got hold of a guidebook to read up the basic stuff about currency, tipping etc and to fix a few ideas of areas I wanted to check out. And on the basis of that I had booked a couple of hotels. I made sure my VPN was working well, I bought an eSIM that I would activate when I landed, I had warned my bank I was travelling abroad and I had enough euros in my pocket to change as I went along. My concern was not so much to tick off all the usual tourist spots, but to explore the territory and, to the extent possible, get a sense of Hong Kong as a whole.
Let’s set the scene first by situating Hong Kong in South East Asia :
Hong Kong is located on the south coast of China at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, and looks out onto the South China Sea. The climate is a “subtropical” one – it’s warm throughout the year and, thankfully, has distinct seasons, unlike Singapore which is equatorial.
The whole of India and SE Asia are subject to the monsoon. This seasonal wind pattern is caused by the land warming up faster than the ocean during the summer months, creating low pressure which sucks in the moist ocean air and then dumps it on the land. The term “monsoon” is perhaps more associated with the Indian subcontinent, and we talk about the “rainy season” elsewhere. Heavy rains tend to fall between May and September, depending on where you are. Thailand’s peak is August-October, Malaysia’s rainy season is much longer and can stretch until February. Tōkyō is centered on June and July. Hong Kong sees most of the rain in June and August, but typhoons are experienced as late as October.
The majority of the population here is ethnically Han Chinese, and mostly hail from the Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province of Southern China. They’re of medium height and have round faces. Northern Chinese tend to be taller with fairer skin, stronger jawlines and slender physique. You also see plenty of Filipinos and Indonesians living here, many as domestic workers. This is in fact an important element of the economy – as you arrive at the airport there’s one queue for visitors, one for HK residents, and one queue for “foreign domestic helpers”. There’s also quite a well-established Indian population (Indian in the broad sense), I guess due to the British connection. And finally there are Western expats – but fewer and fewer as we’ll discuss later. The vast majority of tourists these days come from Mainland China.
Now let’s zoom in on Hong Kong itself :
Hong Kong is composed of the mainland piece – the southern peninsula of the mainland is called “Kowloon” (pronounced “cow-loon”, think of “mad cow” if that helps), coloured brown in the map, and the “New Territories” stretch north. We have the island of Hong Kong to the south (shaded green here), and then hundreds of other islands, the largest of which is Lantau to the West. I’ve boxed the areas on the map I had time to visit.
Hong Kong Island is the best known, and for some travellers almost synonymous with Hong Kong itself. The main part of the Island is shown in the bottom half of this map:
Sitting at the harbour of Kowloon and looking over Victoria Bay, I eavesdropped on a father explaining to his children “Here we are in China, and there across the water is Hong Kong”. But the whole thing is Hong Kong – not a country, not a province or an island but a “territory” (or politically an “special administrative region” of China). Whether we should consider Hong Kong now as fully part of China is a moot point.
At the airport, i knew to procure an “Octopus Card” which would allow me to take public transport – train, tram, bus, ferry – very easily. I was hit by the delicious warm humid air, and set off on the airport bus, alighted near the Yau Ma Tei MTR station and then walked a couple of blocks to my hotel. I had looked forward to this bus ride as the route crosses two bridges and could have been spectacular. But it was raining a bit, I was on the bottom deck and I didn’t see much.
In the upcoming posts I’ll cover the following topics:
part 2 – architecture
part 3 – food
part 4 – walking around south Kowloon
part 5 – further sights from Kowloon
part 6 – Hong Kong Island
part 7 – exploring the North
part 8 – history, economics, politics and the housing crisis
part 9 – final thoughts, and a day in Hong Kong
Of course in only a week I couldn’t see everything. Lantau island is a popular destination and sounds worth checking out (my guidebook mentions the Big Buddha, the cable car, the fishing village, DisneyLand, beaches, nature reserves and hiking trails). And I had planned on catching the ferry and spending a day at Macau too, but I ran out of time.
Before signing off, here were a few immediate impressions that struck me.
The image one has of a place beforehand gets displaced very quickly so it’s difficult now to recall exactly what images Hong Kong conjured up for me in my mind’s eye, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how green and spacious it was. Hong Kong is densely packed of course, but it’s also dotted with parks, tree-lined roads, outdoor basketball courts and exercise areas.
Hong Kong is efficient and feels very safe everywhere. The public transport system is superb – clean, cheap and easy to use.
I was also struck by the bright reds – it seems the local colour, and restaurant names are often up in red, either in neon lights or painted red on white. It’s no surprise Hong Kong restaurants in the West copy over this colour scheme.
I was surprised how small Hong Kong was, and most districts can be covered by foot.
Language was a real barrier. As much as I love hearing that distinctive Cantonese melody, I needed to be understood. I had assumed that Hong Kong was a bilingual territory but it is not. Granted, on the Island and southern Kowloon you’ll hear some English (it sounds Singaporean), but in the north the English level is next to zero. You sit down at a restaurant, there’s no English menu, and the waiting staff don’t even understand words like “beer”, “tea” or “cold” – so ordering is very hit and miss. Hong Kong didn’t present a culture shock for me as I already know some other Asian countries, but the language was certainly an issue.
