Gangplanks, Gin-Soaked Skybars, and a Crispy Chicken Apocalypse: A Brit’s Chaotic Waltz Through Hong Kong’s Time-Warp Tango"

 "Gangplanks, Gin-Soaked Skybars, and a Crispy Chicken Apocalypse: A Brit’s Chaotic Waltz Through Hong Kong’s Time-Warp Tango"

Two Queens together. Awoke to find that

the Queen Elizabeth had moored snugly beside us, rendering our escape via gangplank a logistical conundrum worthy of calculus. Mercifully, it proved a breeze—or perhaps I was still half-asleep.  

Day two dawned, and we shuffled onto the shuttle into town, spilling out onto Chatham Road like disorientated penguins. By now you would have expected us to be totally orientated.  From there, it was a lung-testing climb to the Garden of Stars, where Hong Kong Island loomed across the harbour like a mirage of glass and ambition. The view was all vertiginous splendour, though the descent to the waterfront left my knees in open revolt.  Still suffering from the party the night before. Then again if eyes had been opened would have seen elevators and lifts. 

A mist-cloaked promenade beckoned. The seafront, I should note, bore as much resemblance to its 1989 self as a fax machine does to a TikTok reel. Where once there had been unassuming wharves and the occasional suspicious kiosk, now rose a forest of skyscrapers—towering apartments, the K11 Musea (a shopping mall masquerading as a Louvre for capitalism), Fortnum & Mason (because nothing says “Hong Kong” like £50 marmalade), and the Museum of Art, its angular façade glaring at the harbour like an affronted librarian.  

Risking life and limb to dart across eight lanes of kamikaze traffic, we reached The Peninsula Hotel—a relic of colonial grandeur that seems to have spent the last three decades engaged in a passive-aggressive height contest with its neighbours. “Expanded skyward?” I mused aloud, squinting. “Or is it just the three G&Ts I had in 1992 fogging my memory?” Inside, the palatial lounge hummed with the genteel chaos of high tea: clinking porcelain, murmured gossip, and floral arrangements so vast they could plausibly house a family of dormice, or even two.  

Next, the Star Ferry, a creaking, paint-peeled marvel that chugged us to Hong Kong Island with all the haste of a pensioner admiring dahlias. Alighting at Pier 7, we embarked on a labyrinthine trek to the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator, a mile-long contraption that defies the laws of both physics and common sense. En route, we wove past aromatic vegetable stalls, their air thick with ginger, star anise, and the earthy whiff of dried mushrooms—a olfactory symphony abruptly drowned out by the lunchtime stampede. Office workers surged like pinstriped wildebeest, herding us into covered walkways where we gaped at the chaos below: trams clattering, buses belching, and hand-drawn carts dodging doom with the grace of ballet dancers.  

By the time we were spat out near the old Victorian prison—now a hipster enclave of overpriced gin bars—we were ripe for respite. Hunger, however, had other plans. The sight of commuters slurping noodle soups from clandestine cubbyholes left our gastric juices howling. In a moment of tragicomic surrender, we ducked into a McDonald’s - a decision prompted entirely by Michael, the ship’s “entertainment director,” whose rhapsodies about their crispy chicken burger could’ve moved a stone to tears. Verdict? Astonishingly sublime. The chicken was so succulent I half-suspected it had been brined in unicorn tears. We wedged ourselves between teenagers and harried bankers, silently vowing never to doubt Michael again (out loud).  

Back in Kowloon, we braved the museum gift shops—temples to overpriced trinketry—before retracing our steps along the seafront. The promenade now teemed with instergrammers in varying states of contortion: limbs akimbo, pouts perfected, knees bent at angles Euclid would’ve deemed “problematic.” It was a carnival of vanity, age-blind and relentless.  

As dusk fell, we slumped aboard the Queen Anne, where the day’s pièce de résistance awaited: a 360-degree “cruise”of the harbour (a nautical manoeuvre I can only assume involved spinning the ship like a drunk ballerina) to showcase Hong Kong’s nightly light show. Towers pulsed with LEDs, lasers sliced the smog, and a soundtrack on board of synth-pop blared—a spectacle so gloriously over-the-top it could only be described as “Las Vegas meets Blade Runner after three espressos.”  

Exhausted, slightly greasy, and quietly triumphant, we collapsed into bed. Hong Kong, it seems, remains a city that insists on leaving you equal parts enchanted and bewildered—a place where the past and future are locked in a perpetual, dazzling tug-of-war.  

now repurposed with the haphazard charm of a car boot sale—we were ushered onto a shuttle bus. The driver, with the breezy confidence of someone who’d never actually timed the journey, promised a 45-minute slog. Miraculously, we hurtled through the urban jungle in a mere 15 minutes, as if the bus had slipped into a secret vortex between skyscrapers. Hong Kong’s skyline unfolded like a pop-up book: gleaming towers elbowing aside crumbling tenements, their façades a tapestry of peeling paint, defiant washing lines, and black mould cascading like morbid wallpaper. One building flaunted exterior plumbing with the pride of a Victorian exhibitionist; its neighbour, a glass-clad colossus, shimmered as if fresh from a spaceship.  

The shuttle spat us onto Chatham Road South, where we followed cryptic MTA signs into a lift that plunged us into a subterranean utopia. Behold, the underground: a realm of Scandinavian flat-pack nirvana (IKEA, no less), gliding walkways, and corridors so polished you could perform surgery on the floor. Maps? Pah. We embarked on a comedy of errors, ricocheting between platforms like pinballs until, by divine luck, we found the correct line. Hong Kong’s MTR, it turns out, is a marvel of efficiency—trains so pristine you could eat dim sum off the floors, screens blaring adverts for nasal sprays, and the revelation that tapping a credit card trumps faffing with an Octopus card. Technology, eh?  

Alighting at Chi Lin Nunnery—end of the line, both literally and spiritually—we surfaced via spotless loos (a traveller’s oasis) into a vehicular maelstrom. Amid the honking chaos, a wooden temple rose serenely, cradled by foliage. Behind it loomed high-rises, their balconyless façades betraying their social housing pedigree. The nunnery itself was a sanctuary of calm: cloud-pruned trees, lotus-dappled ponds, and stones inscribed with Confucian wisdom, as if the ancients had left  reviews. Inside, the air thrummed with murmured prayers, crescendoing into chants as devotees prostrated themselves before deities—presumably requesting better Wi-Fi or lottery numbers.  

The gift shop, commendably un-greedy, peddled trinkets with proceeds going to charity—or so my banking app chirruped approvingly. Then, across the road, Nan Lian Garden awaited: a Zen masterpiece where koi glided through ponds and every pebble had been placed by a monk with OCD. 

We stumbled upon a delightfully ramshackle dining spot nestled in what might charitably be called a garden—though “cafeteria” perhaps better captures its unpretentious charm. Steering clear of the gleaming tourist trap across the way (the one with the Instagrammable water features and menus in six languages), we found ourselves in a pocket of splendid authenticity. The establishment was presided over by two beaming local matrons, their heads crowned with peaked cotton caps and their frames swaddled in riotously floral aprons. Between them, they commanded not a single syllable of English, nor seemed the slightest bit troubled by it. We had, it became clear, blundered into a culinary haven reserved for those in the know.  

Mercifully, communication unfolded via a laminated pictorial tome—its pages glossy with years of loving use—showcasing their repertoire of “deliciouses” (a word I just made up on the spot). Each dish, we were assured via enthusiastic gestures, was prepared fresh to order. We embarked on a gastronomic gambit: a steaming bowl of pho, its broth fragrant with star anise; plump rice paper dumplings stuffed with mysteries of pork and herb; and a wobbly tower of jewel-like jellies, crowned with berries that glistened like rubies. The air hummed with the scent of lemongrass and chili, and every bite delivered a symphony of textures—slippery, crisp, unctuous, bright.  

It was the sort of meal that makes one quietly grateful for tourist hubs steering the crowds elsewhere. Here, amid chipped Formica tables and the ladies’ musical chatter, we dined not just on food, but on the warm, unvarnished soul of the place. And isn’t that, after all, the very essence of travel?

Hours of joy stumbling through and around cloud trees, the prerequisite red bridges and towering pagodas we slump exhausted, cultured out.

Stepping outside, however, and humanity swarmed like ants on espresso, eyes glued to phones, trailing one another in hypnotic oblivion.  

The adjacent mall was a cathedral of consumerism, where shoppers flung cash like confetti. Back on the MTR, we emerged at Nathan Road, where the air served a sensory slap: roasting duck, sweet and succulent, followed by the gut-punch of open drains. Hong Kong’s streets teemed with youth—teenagers and twenty-somethings, all apparently en route to the world’s most urgent hair appointment.  

Every inch of this vertical city hummed with life. Bamboo scaffolding clung to towers like improbable lace; apartment blocks bore water stains in Rorschach patterns, their laundry fluttering like Tibetan prayer flags. A grubby garage, its mechanic scowling over a scooter, neighboured a Ferrari showroom—capitalism’s comedy duo.  

And so Hong Kong unfolded: a city where tranquillity and bedlam waltzed in perfect step, where ancient wisdom nestled between iPhone stores, and every crumbling wall whispered tales of a hundred lives. Glorious, grubby, relentless—it shouldn’t work. And yet, magnificently, it does.

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