What we would skip in Hong Kong

This is the article that costs us the most to write and earns us the most trust. Everything below is our own view, formed with our partner team in Hong Kong, and you are welcome to disagree. If you want any of it, we will book it and we will not sulk.

Skip outright

The Symphony of Lights as a reason to be somewhere

The nightly light and sound show across the harbour at eight is, honestly, modest. Buildings blink, music plays through speakers on the promenade, and it lasts about ten minutes.

The harbour at eight is magnificent. So watch the harbour, from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade or from the deck of a ferry, and treat the show as a bonus rather than as the reason you are standing there. What we would not do is book a dinner cruise sold on the show, or rearrange an evening around it.

Temple Street night market, for shopping

Smaller, thinner and more ordinary than its reputation, selling the same phone cases and luggage as everywhere else. The market has been shrinking for years and we would rather say so.

The food stalls at the northern end after eight are still genuinely good: clay pot rice, seafood, cheap beer at plastic tables. Go for those, eat, and leave the stalls alone.

The Peak in flat midday haze

Not the Peak. The Peak at the wrong hour. In the middle of the day, in haze or fog, you get a forty minute queue, a tram, a shopping centre and a view of grey. In spring, fog can sit on the hills for days, and the tram will still run and still deliver you into a cloud.

Go in the late afternoon, be on the terrace as the light goes, and watch the city switch on. And before you pay for the terrace, walk the Lugard Road loop from the tram terminus, which is free, flat, about an hour, and gives better and quieter views than the platform above it. On a genuinely foggy day, skip it entirely and put the evening on the water instead.

A day trip into mainland China

You can. We usually advise against it. It is a full border crossing into a separate jurisdiction, in most cases with a Chinese visa arranged in advance, and the practical result is that half your day is immigration halls.

If the mainland interests you, give it three days or more. Guangzhou is 48 minutes from West Kowloon by high-speed rail and is a serious food city that deserves its own nights. Guilin and Yangshuo, around three and a half hours away, are the best add-on a Hong Kong trip has. Either of those is a real trip. A day in Shenzhen is a border story.

Any crossing means we set up and test a VPN and the payment apps with you before departure so your usual apps work normally on the other side, with your travel group on WhatsApp as always and a WeChat group offered alongside as a local fallback.

Hotel buffets and the international dining rooms on night one

In a city where a plate of roast goose over rice costs six dollars and is one of the best meals in Asia, spending eighty on a buffet is a strange decision. The high-end Cantonese dining rooms are superb and worth one evening later in the trip. Not the first night, and not instead of the cooked food centres. See what to eat in Hong Kong.

The shopping malls as an activity

Hong Kong has excellent shopping and the malls are cool, clean and enormous. They are also the same brands you have at home at prices that are no longer the bargain they were twenty years ago. They earn their place as a refuge on a 90F (32C) August afternoon or in a typhoon, and not as a morning.

Only worth it under specific conditions

The Big Buddha and Ngong Ping

A good half day, and it is conditional on two things. Go early, before the cable car queue and the coach groups build. And check the cloud, because the plateau sits in cloud for large parts of the spring and the statue disappears into it.

Done right it is one of the better days in the territory, particularly combined with the stilt village at Tai O in the afternoon. Done at midday in April it is a queue for a view of fog.

Ocean Park and Disneyland

Both are good at what they do. Neither is a reason to come to Hong Kong, and in a four day trip either one costs you a quarter of the city.

With children they make sense, and Ocean Park is the one we would pick, because it is a real aquarium and zoo built into a hillside and it belongs to this place in a way the other does not. With no children, skip both.

The Peak Tram as transport

The tram itself is a fine piece of Victorian engineering and the ride is short. The queue can be an hour at peak times. If the queue is long, take a taxi or the bus up, which takes fifteen minutes and costs less, and use the tram for the descent when the queue is shorter.

A junk boat afternoon

Genuinely one of the best things you can do in Hong Kong, and expensive: seven hundred to fifteen hundred dollars for the boat. With a group of six or eight it is excellent value and one of the days people remember. With two people it is a lot of money for a boat.

Sai Kung seafood, if nobody confirms the price

The seafood villages are a real pleasure and they are priced by weight. Confirm the price of the specific fish before it goes to the kitchen rather than after. We give you the shops our partner team uses and the sentence to say. Done casually, this is the one place in Hong Kong where a bill can be a surprise.

What we would do with the time instead

Every hour you save from the list above has a better use, and here are the six we would spend it on.

A ridge or a coast path. Three quarters of the territory is country park and almost no visitor walks in it. The Dragon’s Back is about 5 miles (8 km) with a beach at the end. The Sai Kung coast is better still. Our hiking article has the honest distances.

A ferry to an outlying island. Lamma end to end in ninety minutes with a seafood lunch, or Cheung Chau for a fishing town with no cars. Two hours from Central and a complete change of tempo.

A morning market before nine. Sheung Wan’s dried seafood street, or the Yau Ma Tei fruit market, when they are working rather than performing.

A long yum cha. Not fitted in around sightseeing. Planned as the centre of the day, ordered in two rounds, ninety minutes.

The tram, with no destination. Upper deck, front seat, an hour east. About forty cents and it shows you more of the city at the correct height than anything else.

Nothing. One free morning in a five day trip is the difference between a good trip and a tiring one, and it is the first thing people cut and the last thing they should.

The bigger skip: the extra week

The largest thing we would skip in Hong Kong is time itself. Four to five days covers the city properly, seven with Macau and the islands. Beyond that you are paying premium room rates to repeat yourself.

If you have longer, the answer is a combination rather than an extension: a night or two in Macau, an outlying island stay, or a mainland leg to Guangzhou, Guilin or further southwest. We set out where the cut-off falls in how many days do you need in Hong Kong.

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Keep reading

• Hong Kong: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Hong Kong in four days, district by district
• The Hong Kong hiking trails almost no visitor finds
• Dim sum, cha chaan teng and what to order
• Hiking and islands in 7 days
• All our Hong Kong trips

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