5-Day Hong Kong Itinerary — Dragon's Back, Sai Kung & Stanley

Apliu Street Flea Market

📍 Sham Shui Po, Kowloon

Two blocks of pavement stalls selling salvaged electronics, vacuum tubes, watch parts and hi-fi separates. It has been a street market since the 1930s and is where the city's tinkerers still shop.

Mei Ho House

📍 Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon

The last surviving block of the 1954 resettlement estate built after the Shek Kip Mei fire left 53,000 people homeless overnight. A free ground-floor museum reconstructs the 11-square-metre flats families lived in.

Lau Sum Kee Noodle

📍 Fuk Wing Street, Sham Shui Po

One of the last shops still pressing noodle dough under a bamboo pole ridden like a see-saw. Order the dry shrimp-roe noodles; the texture is the whole point and it does not survive delivery.

Kung Wo Dou Bun Chong

📍 Pei Ho Street, Sham Shui Po

A tofu shop still grinding its soybeans on a stone mill in the back. Fried tofu squares and a bowl of warm tofu pudding cost less than a coffee.

Kowloon Walled City Park

📍 Kowloon City

A Jiangnan-style garden on the footprint of the densest settlement that has ever existed — 33,000 people in 2.6 hectares, demolished in 1994. The yamen building and a scale model of the alleys survive.

Lei Yue Mun Seafood Village

📍 Yau Tong, Kowloon

A former quarry village at the harbour's narrowest point. You pick fish from a tank at one shop and carry it to a restaurant next door to be cooked; the bill splits between the two.

Aberdeen Promenade

📍 Aberdeen, Hong Kong Island

The typhoon shelter where several hundred boat-dwelling families still moor. Sampan operators run 30-minute loops past the floating homes and the shipyards from the promenade steps.

Ap Lei Chau Wind Tower Park

📍 Ap Lei Chau

Across the bridge on what is one of the most densely populated islands on Earth. The waterfront park looks straight back at the anchored sampans and is almost always empty.

Repulse Bay Beach

📍 Repulse Bay

A long crescent of imported sand under the wave-shaped apartment block with a hole through its middle, cut so the dragon in the hill behind can reach the water.

Kwun Yam Shrine

📍 Repulse Bay

At the beach's eastern end, a crowd of full-size statues of Kwun Yam, Tin Hau and assorted deities around a small temple. Crossing the Longevity Bridge is said to add three days to your life.

Stanley Market

📍 Stanley

Narrow lanes of linen, silk and chopstick stalls on the far side of the island. It is unashamedly a tourist market, but the setting — a fishing village against a green headland — is the reason to come.

Murray House

📍 Stanley Waterfront

An 1844 Victorian barracks that stood in Central until 1982, then was taken apart into 3,000 numbered blocks and rebuilt here. The seafront terrace under its colonnade is where the day ends.

Dragon's Back

📍 To Tei Wan, Shek O Road

Start early from the To Tei Wan roadside trailhead. The ridge undulates — hence the name — with Shek O, Big Wave Bay and the South China Sea on one side and the reservoir valley on the other. Four kilometres, about two hours, almost no shade.

Big Wave Bay Beach

📍 Big Wave Bay

Where the trail comes out. The only reliable surf beach in Hong Kong, with boards for hire on the sand and a Bronze Age rock carving on the headland above the eastern end.

Shek O Beach

📍 Shek O

Twenty minutes south around the headland and considerably calmer than Big Wave Bay. Rope swings under the trees at the back of the sand and a headland walk out to the Lovers' Bridge.

Shek O Village

📍 Shek O

A grid of low houses behind the beach with a handful of Thai and Chinese kitchens facing the bus terminus. Nothing here is polished, which is exactly what the village has been defending since the 1950s.

Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence

📍 Shau Kei Wan

Built into the Lei Yue Mun Fort of 1887, where the island's guns covered the eastern harbour approach. The redoubt tunnels and the ridge battery path are the exhibit; the harbour view is free.

Montane Mansion

📍 Quarry Bay

The 'Monster Building' — five interlocking estates from the 1960s stacked around a single courtyard, about 2,200 flats deep. Residents live here, so keep to the courtyard edge and keep the noise down.

Sai Kung Pier

📍 Sai Kung Town

The waterfront where fishing boats sell the morning catch straight off the deck to anyone with a bucket, and where the kaito ferries to the islands leave from.

Sharp Island

📍 Kiu Tsui Chau, Sai Kung

Fifteen minutes out by kaito. At low tide a tombolo — a natural causeway of pineapple-bun-shaped volcanic boulders — surfaces and you can walk to the islet of Kiu Tau. Check the tide table before you go.

Chuen Kee Seafood Restaurant

📍 Sai Kung Waterfront

Tanks along the pavement, upstairs dining room. Steamed garoupa, salt-and-pepper mantis shrimp, and razor clams with vermicelli and garlic — priced by weight, confirmed before it is cooked.

Sheung Yiu Folk Museum

📍 Pak Tam Chung, Sai Kung

A restored 19th-century Hakka village, walled and raised on a platform, that made its living burning lime from coral. Abandoned in the 1960s and left with its furniture and kilns in place.

High Island Reservoir East Dam

📍 Sai Kung East Country Park

The reason the Geopark has UNESCO status: cliffs of hexagonal rhyolite columns, some of them folded into an S-curve, formed in a caldera collapse 140 million years ago. Also a sea cave and a dolosse-armoured seawall.

Sai Kung Waterfront Park

📍 Sai Kung Town

Back in town for the last of the light over the harbour and the islands you were standing on this morning.

Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery

📍 Sha Tin, New Territories

430 steps up the hillside, lined the whole way by life-size gilded arhat statues, no two of them the same. Nearly 13,000 Buddha figures line the main hall. Closes mid-afternoon, so this is a morning.

Che Kung Temple

📍 Sha Tin, New Territories

Dedicated to a Song-dynasty general credited with ending a plague. Worshippers turn a brass fan-wheel three times for luck; it is at its most extreme on the third day of Chinese New Year.

Hong Kong Heritage Museum

📍 Sha Tin, New Territories

The best museum in the territory outside Kowloon, with permanent galleries on Cantonese opera and on the New Territories' walled clan villages — useful context for everything on this day.

Fu Shin Street Market

📍 Tai Po, New Territories

An open-air street market laid out in 1892 and still running the length of Fu Shin Street: dried seafood, herbal shops, and the tofu pudding and cha chaan teng stalls the market town was built around.

Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees

📍 Lam Tsuen, Tai Po

Two banyans beside the Tin Hau temple where wishes written on joss paper are tied to an orange and thrown into the branches. The real trees now take wishes on a rack — a branch came down under the weight in 2005.

Tai Po Waterfront Park

📍 Tai Po, New Territories

The largest park in the territory, on reclaimed land at the head of Tolo Harbour. Climb the 32-metre Spiral Lookout Tower for the view back over the New Territories hills you have spent the day in.