Hong Kong Classic: Harbour, History & Hills

Grace meets you at Hong Kong International Airport — around twelve hours' flight from London — and transfers you to your hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, directly on Victoria Harbour. After the flight, the rest of the afternoon is yours: a nap, a walk along the Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade with the harbour glittering ahead of you, or simply a first cup of Hong Kong milk tea from the café on the corner. In the evening, Grace accompanies you to your first dinner: roast goose and char siu pork at a family restaurant in Jordan that has been doing this for thirty years, followed by the Symphony of Lights — the nightly harbour light show that illuminates the towers of Hong Kong Island from across the water.

The Star Ferry to Hong Kong Island — the same seven-minute crossing that Somerset Maugham wrote about and which still costs less than a pound — begins a full day on the Island. Your first stop is Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Road, Hong Kong's oldest, where enormous spiralling incense coils hang from the ceiling and the smoke curls up through shafts of light. Then the Graham Street wet market, where the city's best restaurants shop, and a Cantonese lunch at a restaurant that has never needed to advertise. After lunch, the Peak Tram: the vintage funicular that has carried visitors up Victoria Peak since 1888, climbing at an angle steep enough to make the buildings appear sideways. At the top, the views across the harbour, Kowloon and — on a clear day — as far as Guangdong Province. Grace times this to avoid the midday crowds and finds you a quiet corner with coffee while the visitors thin. On the way back down, a gentle walk through the Botanical and Zoological Gardens to the Mid-Levels Escalator — the world's longest covered outdoor escalator — which glides back down through a neighbourhood of wet markets, flower shops and dim sum restaurants.

A morning on Kowloon's historic streets, beginning with a proper Hong Kong breakfast at Grace's favourite cha chaan teng in Sham Shui Po: pineapple bun warm from the oven, a fried egg sandwich and Hong Kong-style milk tea — the breakfast every local knows. Then Wong Tai Sin Temple, the great Taoist complex where worshippers come to pray, consult fortune tellers (the practitioners here are among the best in the city), and shake their kau cim sticks for answers. The Jade Market, in its canvas-covered arcade, is a ribbon of green light — jade in every shade, from pale lavender to deep imperial green, and Grace knows which stalls have the real thing. A dim sum lunch in Yau Ma Tei — har gow, siu mai, cheung fun and turnip cake, eaten slowly with jasmine tea. An afternoon rest at the hotel before the Temple Street Night Market: Grace takes you in around seven, when the food stalls are firing, the fortune tellers are working and Cantonese opera plays from a stage at the northern end.

A morning excursion by private car into the New Territories, the mainland side of Hong Kong that most visitors never reach. The Nan Lian Garden in Diamond Hill is a Tang-dynasty-style classical garden of pavilions, stone bridges, lotus ponds and bonsai — immaculately kept, almost always peaceful, and a profound contrast to the towers that surround it. Adjacent, the Chi Lin Nunnery: a large, beautifully crafted wooden temple complex built entirely without nails, where monks and nuns tend the flame trees and incense burns quietly before the Buddha figures. Then Kat Hing Wai, the best-preserved of Hong Kong's walled villages, where the same Hakka clan has lived inside its four-hundred-year-old fortified walls since the Ming dynasty, and where elderly women in traditional black-fringed hats still sit at the gate. Return to Kowloon for a final afternoon at leisure — perhaps the Kowloon Park, the Avenue of Stars, or simply a last hour at the harbour watching the ferries cross.

A gentle final morning on the south side of Hong Kong Island, away from the towers. The drive over the ridge to Stanley winds through a residential Hong Kong that is leafy, calm and entirely different from Kowloon: colonial architecture, the old Stanley Prison, a waterfront market of silks and curios, and a café table looking out over a bay where sailing junks still drift. Repulse Bay, a short drive along the coast, is Hong Kong's most beautiful beach — set between green hills and a turquoise South China Sea, flanked by the 1920s Repulse Bay Hotel where Noël Coward and Ernest Hemingway once stayed. Afternoon tea or a final dim sum lunch, then Grace transfers you to Hong Kong International Airport for your flight home.