Hong Kong — Chungking to Victoria Peak

Crossing the Harbour

The Peninsula Hotel stands on the Kowloon waterfront like an old colonial aunt who refuses to acknowledge the glass towers crowding around her. Built in 1928, it was once the grandest hotel east of Suez. Now it shares the skyline with a hundred buildings twice its height, but somehow still commands the street. I walked past its Rolls-Royce fleet and kept going. My budget ran to Chungking Mansions, not The Peninsula.

Hong Kong hits you in layers. The noise first — double-decker trams, jackhammers, Cantonese shouted across market stalls. Then the density, buildings so close together that laundry lines bridge the gap between them. Then the smell: char siu from a roast meat shop, diesel from the harbour, incense drifting from a temple doorway. Three days would not be enough. Three months might not be enough.

SoHo & the Vertical City

From the temple I climbed into SoHo, where the Mid-Levels escalator carries commuters uphill through a canyon of bars, galleries and overpriced coffee. At dusk, Peel Street’s neon signs flicker to life and the narrow lanes fill with after-work drinkers spilling onto the pavement.

Hong Kong is one of the last places on earth where construction workers still use bamboo scaffolding. You’ll see it everywhere — lashed together with nylon straps, climbing thirty storeys up a glass tower, swaying slightly in the harbour breeze. It looks terrifying. It’s been used here for centuries. The bamboo is stronger than steel per unit weight, and the men who build these structures are artists.

The Bar Crawl

Hong Kong drinking starts civilised and ends chaotic. We began at a place with a spin-to-win wheel on the wall offering dares like “arm wrestle the bartender” and “buy a beer for a stranger.” We ended at a Belgian bar in a basement where the owner poured us things we hadn’t ordered and refused payment.

Between those two points: street art, chalkboard cocktail menus, heart-shaped sticky notes left by visitors from every country on earth, a Corona bottle repurposed as a soap dispenser, and a group of new friends from Brussels who taught us Flemish drinking songs. The kind of night that only happens when you stop planning and start saying yes.

Peel Street & Lan Kwai Fong

Peel Street is Hong Kong nightlife distilled — tiny bars carved into the hillside steps, people standing on the street with drinks because there’s no room inside, the constant soundtrack of laughter and clinking glass. Lan Kwai Fong nearby is louder, flashier, more tourist-friendly. Between the two, you could drink for a week and never visit the same place twice.

Victoria Peak — The View That Stops You

The Peak Tram has been hauling people up Victoria Peak since 1888. At 552 metres, it’s not the highest point in Hong Kong, but it’s the one with the view that makes you understand why seven million people choose to live on a few rocks in the South China Sea.

I went at dusk and stayed until well after dark. On the south side, Lamma Island and the outlying islands dissolve into haze. Then you walk around to the north side and the city detonates below you. Every skyscraper lit from within, the harbour black and glittering, the ICC tower in Kowloon scrolling “Welcome” in letters five storeys high. The clouds catch the city’s light and glow pink and orange above the skyline. It is, without qualification, the most beautiful urban panorama on earth.