Six days in Hong Kong and Macau: Two Riverbank Stories Across the Delta

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. The light show is short and 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.

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, twenty minutes of hairpins across the plateau, which drops you in a village of houses on stilts over a tidal creek with dried fish hanging outside them.

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

Northern Kowloon holds the two things Hong Kong does that nowhere else quite manages: a Taoist temple 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 nunnery garden one stop away is the exact opposite: silent, wooden, and laid out to Tang proportions with a golden pavilion in the middle of a pond.

Then south into Mong Kok, where the markets 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. Pack tonight; the ferry goes in the morning.

An hour across the delta, and at the other end an immigration hall and then a town square with a wave-patterned mosaic pavement and pastel arcades that could be in the Alentejo.

Everything on the world heritage list is inside a square kilometre, so the afternoon walks it. From Senado Square a pedestrian street climbs north for ten minutes to the ruins of St Paul's: one enormous stone wall at the head of a wide staircase, all that a fire in 1835 left of a Jesuit church.

The fort is above and behind, a five minute climb, holding the city museum and the best view over the peninsula with the Grand Lisboa's gold ellipse rising out of the old town.

Stay out for dinner. The old streets are much better once the day trip ferries have gone.

The southern tip of the peninsula is the quiet half and holds the oldest thing in Macau. A-Ma Temple was there before the Portuguese landed, and when they asked what this place was called, the answer they misheard became the name of the territory.

Nearby, the Mandarin House is a walled Chinese courtyard compound from the 1880s, beautifully restored, with a reformist thinker's study, oyster shell windows and a lot of quiet rooms nobody else is in.

In the evening go to Cotai on a free shuttle. A Venetian campanile, a half scale Eiffel Tower and a version of Big Ben all light up within four hundred metres of each other, which is absurd and genuinely worth seeing.

You do not have to gamble, and walking from one resort to the next through the malls, canals and lobbies costs nothing.

Coloane is the southern island and the part of Macau that has not been rebuilt. Half an hour by bus from the peninsula, and you get out among pastel houses on a channel with mainland China a few hundred metres across the water.

A small yellow chapel, a shipyard, a couple of temples and a bakery with a permanent queue. That is the whole village, it takes ninety minutes to see, and most people stay longer.

Taipa village on the way back has the old colonial houses and the best value restaurants in the territory.

The airport and the Taipa ferry terminal are both fifteen minutes from here, so this works cleanly before an afternoon departure in either direction.