Hong Kong: the skyline, the dim sum and the green islands

Hong Kong hit me first as a wall of light. I'd come down from mainland China the day before — passports, a different SIM mindset, that low hum of always checking which app still worked — and then the Star Ferry pushed off across Victoria Harbour and the whole skyline stood up in front of me like a tide. Towers stacked on towers, ferries crossing, the green hump of the Peak behind it all. A city built straight up a mountain that hadn't quite given it permission, and somehow still finding room to breathe.

The plan was loose on purpose: a few days on Hong Kong Island for the verticals and the trams, then ferries and the MTR out to Kowloon's markets, and finally a full day on Lantau, swapping skyscrapers for monastery bells and a coastline of fishing stilts. A Special Administrative Region with its own currency, its own rhythm, and — I'd been told, and was quietly relieved to confirm — its own open internet.

The vertical city, from the Peak to the « ding ding »

I rode the Peak Tram up Victoria Peak on my first clear morning, that funicular hauling itself up a slope so steep the towers below seemed to tilt. From the top, the city unrolled all the way to the harbour and the hills of Kowloon beyond — the kind of view that rearranges how you picture a place. Back down in Central I let the trams do the rest. The old double-deckers — everyone calls them the « ding ding » for the bell — rattle through the canyons of glass for a couple of Hong Kong dollars, and the top deck, front seat, is the best slow cinema in town.

« Hong Kong stacks itself toward the sky, then hands you a ferry and a hillside to remind you there's still ground. »

Here's the honest connectivity bit, and after the mainland it felt like exhaling. Hong Kong runs on an open internet — no Great Firewall — so the apps I'd been nursing carefully the week before simply worked again: my usual maps, my messengers, the whole habit of being online without a second thought. The network itself is excellent everywhere I went, MTR tunnels included, which still feels like a small magic trick underground. So the eSIM here wasn't a lifeline against blocks or dead zones — it was just about landing at the airport already connected, with maps and my Octopus-card top-up guide open before I'd even found the Airport Express platform.

Star Ferry, Kowloon and the night markets

The Star Ferry became my favourite habit — a few minutes and a couple of coins to cross from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui, the cheapest harbour cruise on earth, salt wind in your face and that skyline swinging past. I timed one crossing for dusk and stayed on the Kowloon waterfront for the Symphony of Lights, the nightly show where the towers across the water pulse and beam in time. Then I went looking for noise: Mong Kok's market streets folding into one another, and Temple Street after dark, all sizzling woks, fortune tellers and stalls selling everything you didn't know you needed.

And the mornings belonged to dim sum. Yum cha — « drink tea » — is the proper ritual: a clatter of bamboo steamers, a pot of tea topped up endlessly, and you point at trolleys or tick a paper card until the table disappears under little plates. Har gow, char siu bao, a soup dumpling that scalds you because you never wait long enough. I ate alone most mornings and never felt it; a dim sum hall at 9am is the least lonely place I know.

Lantau, green and quiet at the edge

For my last full day I took the MTR and a cable car out to Lantau, and the city fell away into something I hadn't expected so close to all that glass: green hills, mist, silence. The Tian Tan Buddha — the Big Buddha — sits enormous and calm at the top of a long flight of steps, with the Po Lin Monastery below sending up incense and the smell of vegetarian lunch. Later I rode out to Tai O, a fishing village of houses on stilts over the water, where the pace drops to nothing and the sea does the talking. Another day, closer to town, I'd walked a stretch of the Dragon's Back trail along the island's spine, the ridge dropping to surf beaches on one side and the city haze on the other.

What I take away

Hong Kong is two cities wearing one skin: the vertical, neon, never-stops one, and the green, ferry-slow, monastery-quiet one a half-hour away. Coming straight from behind the firewall, I also got a small gift I won't forget — the simple relief of an open connection, my whole phone working like it does at home. Get yourself online before you land, then let the trams and the ferries set the pace, one bamboo steamer at a time.

— Léa, between a harbour crossing and the next plate of dumplings.