Four days in Hong Kong: Vertical, crowded, and greener than anyone tells you

Three nights in Kowloon: the harbour front and the light show on arrival, a day on Lantau for the big Buddha and a stilt village, temples and markets on the third, and the museums at West Kowloon before the airport.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Hong Kong
Places
11 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Hong Kong is the densest place most people will ever stand in, and about three quarters of it is countryside. Both facts are true at once, which is the thing nobody warns you about: you can be in a street with a hundred and thirty thousand people to the square kilometre, get on a bus, and be walking a ridge over the sea forty minutes later.

It is also the easiest place in this part of the world to travel in. English is everywhere, the transport is superb, Google Maps works, and an Octopus card pays for the metro, the ferry, the tram and a bowl of noodles.

Four days is enough for the harbour, an island, the markets and the museums. It is not enough for the hiking, the outlying islands or the eating, and nobody has ever come back and said they wished they had stayed less.

Highlights

  • The harbour from the Kowloon side at eight in the evening, when both skylines start firing lasers at each other
  • The cable car over the sea and the hills to a two hundred and fifty tonne bronze Buddha on a hilltop
  • Tai O, a fishing village on stilts over a tidal creek, an hour from the world's busiest district
  • Fortune sticks being shaken and dropped at Wong Tai Sin, the most enthusiastically used temple in the city
  • Songbirds in bamboo cages at the bird garden, brought by their owners for an outing

Where to stay

Hong Kong, three nights

Stay in Tsim Sha Tsui. It puts the harbour, the museums, the markets and two MTR lines within walking distance, the Airport Express is one stop away at Kowloon, and the view back at Hong Kong Island is the one you came for.

Central and Sheung Wan on the island side are the alternative: better bars, steeper streets, higher prices. Mong Kok is cheaper and louder and closer to the markets. Avoid anything that describes itself as being in the New Territories unless you have a reason.

Day by day

Day 1 in Hong Kong

The waterfront, and the show at eight

The whole point of Kowloon is that it faces the good view. The promenade runs east from the ferry pier along the water, and the skyline opposite is one of the two or three genuinely astonishing city views on earth.

Walk it in the late afternoon while there is still light on the towers, then find a spot along the railings before eight for the light show. It is short, it is silly, and the setting carries it completely.

Nothing today is more than fifteen minutes' walk from anything else, which is what you want after a long flight.

  1. 16:00

    Tsim Sha Tsui Clock Tower

    Architecture

    The last piece of the Kowloon Canton Railway terminus, forty four metres of red brick and granite left standing when the station was demolished in the 1970s. Everyone who left China by train from here in the last century started at this platform.

  2. 17:15

    Avenue of Stars

    Other

    A waterfront promenade of handprints and statues honouring the Hong Kong film industry, which for two decades made more films a year than almost anywhere. Bruce Lee is the one people photograph. Walk it for the harbour rather than the plaques.

  3. 19:30

    A Symphony of Lights

    Other

    Lasers and searchlights fired off the towers on both sides of the harbour every night at eight, with narration in English on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Ten minutes long, best watched from the Tsim Sha Tsui railings, and free.

With more time: The Star Ferry runs from the pier beside the clock tower until half past eleven, and crossing to Central and straight back costs less than a coffee.

Day 2 in Hong Kong

Lantau: a cable car, a bronze Buddha and a village on stilts

Lantau is nearly twice the size of Hong Kong Island and largely empty, and a day out there is the best correction to the idea that Hong Kong is only towers.

Take the MTR to Tung Chung and the cable car up. The line crosses the bay and then climbs the ridge, and the last stretch, when the Buddha appears on the hilltop opposite, is worth booking a glass floored cabin for.

Afterwards, take the bus west to Tai O. It is twenty minutes of hairpins across the plateau and it drops you in a village of houses on stilts above a tidal creek, with dried fish hanging outside them and small boats heading out into the estuary.

Book the cable car online and go early. When the weather closes in the cable car stops running, and the alternative is a long bus up the same hill.

  1. 09:30

    Ngong Ping 360

    Other

    Five and a half kilometres of cable car from Tung Chung, over the bay and then over the ridge, ending at a themed village below the Buddha. Twenty five minutes each way. Book a timed ticket, and take the crystal cabin if the day is clear.

  2. 11:30

    Tian Tan Buddha

    Other

    A seated bronze Buddha of more than two hundred and fifty tonnes on a hilltop, reached by 268 steps, and for twenty years the largest of its kind anywhere. Free to approach, and the view off the platform runs to the sea on both sides.

  3. 15:00

    Tai O

    Other

    A fishing village of stilt houses over a tidal creek at the western end of the island, reached by bus from the Buddha in about twenty minutes. Dried seafood, small bridges, and boat trips out to look for pink dolphins. Go before the last bus back fills up.

With more time: Po Lin Monastery sits at the foot of the Buddha's steps and runs a vegetarian canteen that is far better than it needs to be, which is where lunch should happen.

Day 3 in Hong Kong

Fortune sticks, a Tang garden, and the markets

Northern Kowloon holds the two things Hong Kong does that nowhere else quite manages: a Taoist temple that is genuinely busy with people asking for things, and a Tang dynasty garden built in the 2000s without a single nail.

Wong Tai Sin is loud, smoky and completely unselfconscious. People kneel with a canister of numbered bamboo sticks, shake it until one falls out, and take the number to a fortune teller in the arcade below.

The garden and nunnery are one stop away and are the exact opposite: silent, wooden, and laid out to Tang proportions with a golden pavilion in the middle of a pond.

Then go south into Mong Kok for the markets, which are organised by product in a way that is hard to believe until you see it. One street for goldfish, one for flowers, one for songbirds.

  1. 09:00

    Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple

    Visit

    The busiest Taoist temple in the city, next to its own MTR station, where people shake numbered sticks out of a canister and take the answer to a fortune teller. Free, always crowded, and the practice has almost died out on the mainland.

  2. 11:00

    Nan Lian Garden

    Nature

    A Tang dynasty style garden attached to the Chi Lin Nunnery, built with interlocking timber and no nails, with rock groups, a lotus pond and a gold roofed pavilion. Free, immaculate, and a strange thing to find under a flyover.

  3. 15:00

    Yuen Po Street Bird Garden

    Nature

    A courtyard market of hundreds of songbirds in carved bamboo cages, where owners bring their own birds along for company. Ten minutes from the flower market, which is worth the detour whether or not you want a plant.

  4. 18:30

    Temple Street

    Landmark

    Kowloon's night market street, open from mid afternoon and going until late, with clay pot rice, seafood stalls, fortune tellers and Cantonese opera singers competing at the far end. Eat at the plastic tables rather than the restaurants.

With more time: Mong Kok proper is a few minutes south and is reckoned to be the most densely populated urban district on earth, which is worth walking through once at eight in the evening simply to feel it.

Day 4 in Hong Kong

West Kowloon, and the two new museums

The strip of reclaimed land west of Tsim Sha Tsui was empty for twenty years and now holds two of the best museums in Asia, two hundred metres apart, with a lawn and the harbour in front of them.

M+ is the contemporary one and the more interesting: design, architecture, film and art, heavily Chinese, with a permanent collection assembled fast and well. The Palace Museum next door borrows from the Forbidden City.

Kowloon station and the Airport Express are a ten minute walk away, which makes this a genuinely relaxed last morning.

  1. 10:00

    M+

    Culture

    A museum of contemporary visual culture in a building shaped like an inverted T, with a screen on the harbour facade. Design, moving image, architecture and art, and much stronger on Chinese work than anywhere outside the mainland. Allow two hours.

  2. 13:00

    Hong Kong Palace Museum

    Culture

    Nine galleries of objects lent from the Forbidden City, rotated regularly, in a building shaped like a Chinese vessel. Smaller than M+ and easier to do properly in ninety minutes.

With more time: The Hong Kong Museum of History in Tsim Sha Tsui is the other option for a last morning, and tells the whole story from fishing villages to 1997 in a way that makes the rest of the trip make sense.

Before you go

Getting around

Buy an Octopus card at the airport or tap a contactless card. It works on the MTR, buses, the Star Ferry, the tram and in convenience stores, and it removes every fare decision from the trip.

The MTR is fast, clean and signed in English, and reaches almost everything. The Airport Express takes twenty four minutes to Kowloon and is worth the money on arrival and departure.

The Star Ferry crosses the harbour for the price of a sweet and is the best value sightseeing anywhere. The double decker trams on Hong Kong Island cost even less and are slower and better.

When to come

October to December is the good season: dry, clear, warm in the day and cool at night. That is also when the hiking is worth doing.

March to May is humid and often fogged in, which matters if you were planning on views. June to September is hot, wet and the typhoon season, when a signal 8 shuts the whole city for a day.

January and February are cool and grey, and Chinese New Year fills the temples and empties the restaurants, since many close for a week.

Money and entry

Hong Kong has its own currency, its own immigration and its own visa rules, all separate from the mainland. Most Western passports enter without a visa; a mainland Chinese visa does not cover Hong Kong and vice versa.

Cards are accepted almost everywhere, but street stalls and older restaurants are cash only. Keep a few hundred Hong Kong dollars.

If you are going on to the mainland, the high speed train from West Kowloon does mainland immigration inside the station, and Shenzhen is fourteen minutes away.

Hong Kong sells itself on the skyline, and the skyline deserves it. But the thing that stays with people is usually the gap between two scales: a bus that leaves a street of neon and market stalls and puts you, half an hour later, on a hillside with nobody on it.

Four days is enough to notice that. It is not enough to get bored, which is why almost nobody manages a first visit without planning a second.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

What about the Peak?
Go, and go at the right time. The Peak Tram climbs from Central and the queue at weekends and after five can run past an hour, so buy a timed ticket online or take bus 15 from Central instead. Early morning and after nine at night are the quiet windows, and the free Lugard Road walk around the summit gives you the same view without the terrace ticket.
Is four days enough?
For the city, yes. Four days covers the harbour, Lantau, the temples, the markets and the museums. It leaves out Hong Kong Island's south side, the outlying islands and the hiking, all of which are worth an extra day each. The Dragon's Back ridge walk is two or three hours and is the one to add first.
Do I need a separate visa from mainland China?
Yes. Hong Kong runs its own immigration and most Western passports enter visa free for anything from seven to ninety days. A mainland Chinese visa does not admit you to Hong Kong, and a Hong Kong entry does not admit you to the mainland. Crossing between them means clearing immigration both ways.
Can I do Macau as a day trip?
You can, on a ferry that takes an hour, and it is a poor way to see it. Macau's old town needs a full day and the evening is when it is at its best. One night there is much better than a rushed return trip.
Can I change this plan?
Yes. Copy it into the planner, swap the last morning for the Peak, or add a night and put a hike in the middle.