Return to Hong Kong: the new, the old and the no longer

Back then, I had no idea what to expect in Asia. On the Cathay Pacific flight from London Heathrow, I remember telling my girlfriend there was a squat toilet in the 747's bathroom.

She believed me.

For people like me, Hong Kong was the gateway to Asia, the place to ease into the unknown. It was still a British colony: many people spoke English, the public phone boxes and post boxes were pillar-box red, and there were even trams - trams! - on the roads.

I loved it, but I didn't stay. I backpacked to Australia, where I began a far better life than that I had lived in England, but the territory never lost its place in my heart.

I've been back, but not as often as I would have liked.

Australians began to stay away from Hong Kong in 2019, when protestors staged sit-ins at the airport, clashing with riot police and shouting "Free Hong Kong!"

Demonstrations against Beijing's erosion of Hong Kong's political autonomy continued into 2020, then the pandemic struck and Hong Kong, like China, closed to the world.

When the territory reopened to tourists this year, I was keen to see what had changed - and hopeful that much remained the same.

As the Qantas plane from Sydney (complete with Western-style toilet) banked on approach to Hong Kong International Airport, I saw a land much greener than I remembered, islands shaped like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and smudges of families on beaches: I had forgotten that there were beaches here.

I spend my first night in Kowloon Peninsula, in the neighbourhood of Mongkok, where the roads are lined with shops and restaurants, then stuffed with market stalls, barely leaving space to move between them.

I won't name my "hotel", because I made a last-minute booking of the second cheapest room in Kowloon, and I knew what I was letting myself in for - but even I was surprised to find wallpaper stuck to the wall with sticky tape.

The streets of Kowloon are still rackety and crowded and vital and exciting and disorienting and exhausting, and the only thing noisier is the malfunctioning air-conditioner in my room.

Hong Kong's marking of the anniversary of the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989 has been banned since 2020. This year on June 4, police arrested 23 people who allegedly attempted to stage a rally, and the traditional site of the protest, Victoria Park in Hong Kong Island, was given over to a stilted and artificial "hometown carnival fair" organised by various pro-Beijing groups.

But away from the protests, police are nowhere much to be seen, except for the Ladies Market in Mongkok, where backpackers like me once picked up identical wardrobes of knock-off branded clothing. Today, armed officers lean against a van plastered with Chinese and English-language slogans warning against copyright infringement and piracy - and there are far fewer obviously pirated goods visible on the stalls.

On nearby Fa Yuen Street, legit sportswear costs much the same as it might in Australia. These days, Hong Kongers make a weekend dash to the mainland to buy up cheap shoes and clothes.

The big old traditional markets are still in operation - from Flower Road Market to Bird Street - and souvenir shops sell ornaments and toys that look back to the old days: red phone boxes and post boxes, Union Jack flags and, strangest of all, plastic models of tenements in the Walled City, a Colonial-era Kowloon slum.

I visited the Walled City in 1987, believing it must be a Ming dynasty fortress, like the Forbidden City in Beijing, which had been unaccountably overlooked by the Lonely Planet guidebook. It turned out to be a triad-ridden centre for the vice trade (and, curiously, unlicensed dentistry), whose denizens seemed as nonplussed to be visited by a tourist as I was to find no actual wall.

The most striking recent change to Kowloon is the development of West Kowloon Cultural District, a relatively secluded arts precinct built for the Hong Kong Palace Museum, which opened last year on the 25th anniversary of the handover of the territory to Beijing. The new museum is the outpost of Imperial China that I once imagined the Walled City to be. It showcases treasures from the national Palace Museum in the Forbidden City, and makes a clear statement about the power of Beijing. The collection is dazzling and the design of the building is commanding, but the institution seems a bit out of place, both culturally and geographically, like a museum of Darwin that has, for some reason, opened in Tasmania.

But the cafes in the museum offer wonderful daytime views across Victoria Harbour from outdoor tables where diners can enjoy a meal, a drink and - one of the rarest qualities in Kowloon - silence, while watching the endlessly engrossing spectacle of the working harbour.

The lovely old Star Ferry still plies its time-honoured route between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. While the Star Ferry Pier could do with a bit more renovation, the nearby Harbour City mall, whose four storeys house 450 shops, 80 restaurants, the Marco Polo Hongkong Hotel and the Gateway Hotel, is back at the top of its game.

The higher-end restaurants with the best views tend to have the window tables booked out in the evenings but, at least when I visit, the ground-floor Hexa, near the very tip of Kowloon Point, serves drinks in a delightful, uncrowded garden - the ideal place to watch Hong Kong's extraordinary A Symphony of Lights show, which begins at 8pm when buildings on both side of the harbour light up and dance.

A couple of blocks away, in what is probably the best location in the territory, stands the majestic Peninsula Hong Kong, one of the world's most beloved and storied hotels, still pampering the very top of the market.

From my hovel in Kowloon, I move across the water to the luxurious hipster fantasy that is the Ovolo Southside hotel in southwestern Hong Kong Island, near the floating village of Aberdeen.

At least, that's where I think it is.

When I ask two of the impeccably obliging reception staff how to get to the floating village, they each point me in different directions. Then they turn and face each other, consult, agree, and stretch their arms towards a single point, as if rehearsing a TikTok dance.

Even with their help, it proves unexpectedly difficult to find the floating village. I ask many local people, although fewer seem to speak fluent English than in the past. Standards of English-language teaching have reportedly fallen and many of the 113,000 Hong Kongers who left the territory in 2022 were probably among the most proficient speakers. Meanwhile, migrants from the mainland on a one-way permit system arrive at a rate of about 55,000 per year to join hundreds of thousands of Chinese-born residents on other visas, as part of a demographic and cultural shift encouraged by the Communist Party's rumoured policy to "keep Hong Kong but not its people".

As was always the way with Hong Kongers, everything seems like an imposition but nothing is too much trouble. If you need help (or even if you don't), most people will rise to the occasion and enlist passers-by in their effort. The sole exception to this rule is the desk officer at Aberdeen Division Police Station who assures me Aberdeen is nowhere nearby, when in fact he is sitting in front of it.

When I finally find the row of moorings from which sampans traditionally leave to tour the floating village, I realise what the problem is: the historic village is no longer here - all that remains of its glory days is a frieze of black and white photographs on a harbourside wall.

At the first occupied sampan mooring waits a small boat piloted by a woman whose only words of English seem to be the price of the fare for a 30-minute harbour tour (a very reasonable $HK60, about $11.50).

Instead of the floating village, where fisherpeople used to live on their boats (the majority have now moved to high-rises like everyone else), she takes me on a loop of Aberdeen Bay and its surrounds. There remains a local fishing industry, but many of the established families of boat people no longer work the trawlers. Today the sinewy, sunburned men mending nets on deck tend to be migrants, hired hands from the mainland.

The most striking symbol of old Aberdeen was the bizarre Jumbo Kingdom, made up of the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant and the huge Jumbo Floating Restaurant. Together, they resembled a cross between a theme park, a paddle-steamer dock and a Chinatown in flood.

Both restaurants closed in 2020. Jumbo was towed to Cambodia and capsized in the South China Sea. Tai Pak still floats, abandoned, in the harbour, and its ghostly gaiety is a highpoint of my sampan tour - which turns out to be a magnificent way to spend half an hour weaving through a marina of luxury yachts and the remains of the fishing fleet.

Elsewhere on Hong Kong Island, the commercial and political centre is still impossibly crowded. On the streets of the Central and Stanley districts, suits and skirt-suits from every banking nation in the world hurry between offices, meetings, and lunches at restaurants serving every imaginable cuisine at every conceivable price point. There can be few other places in the world where a visitor can find comparative peace in a frenetically busy underground railway station, but Central MTR is calmer and quieter than the roads above.

In search of a gentler experience, I decide to return to the fishing village of Tai O on Lantau Island. I visited Tai O on my first trip to Hong Kong, and I remember feeling vaguely conned. Although the chaotically built village is sometimes known as "the Venice of Hong Kong", it's difficult to imagine anyone referring to Venice as "the Tai O of Italy".

Tourists come to Tai O to see waterways lined with traditional stilt houses, and I step off a bus expecting at best a nostalgic pootle through a dilapidated curiosity and at worst to find that Tai O, like Aberdeen floating village, no longer exists.

A sign at Tai O bus station claims that the village is now an ecotourism hub, but Hong Kong is cluttered with deceptive signage - to places that aren't there anymore, such as the floating restaurants in Aberdeen, and businesses that haven't reopened yet, such as the café at the Star Ferry Pier.

A tout offers me a sampan tour for $HK40 (about $8). He works for Dolphin Travel, and another foreigner asks if a dolphin sighting is guaranteed. The tout admits that it isn't, and the foreigner sniffs and wanders off. But I am glowingly pleased to see that Tai O is just how I remember it and - like all of us - it seems to have become more romantic and attractive even as it has been worn with time. Exhilarated by the sight of the village canals and the rickety and eccentric fisherpeople's homes, I agree to my second Hong Kong sampan tour (which, after all, costs less than the price of a beer). It turns out to be one of the best cruises I have taken anywhere in the world - and certainly the cheapest.

I can't see a boat, but that's because it has already left. The tout calls it back for me and we sail through the village, beneath the stilt houses and into open water. My chest tightens and my heart almost stops when I catch sight of the tail of what turns out to be a Chinese white dolphin, briefly suspended above the water. For another moment, there is nothing to see but gentle waves, then suddenly a fin and, finally, an exquisitely beautiful white dolphin appears. And then another. They jump out of the sea and wheel like celestial pink rainbows. Time and time again. I find it hard to breathe while watching them dive, impossible to imagine anything more lovely.

The fact that the tour is over in 20 minutes somehow makes it even more perfect. Back on shore in Tai O, I am light-headed and buzzing and perhaps a little hysterical when I stumble upon my favourite piece of OLD signage in the territory: a board displaying the Hong Kong Manhole Covers History Exhibition, organised by the Drainage Services Department in 2021 to draw attention to the fact that Hong Kong has about 160,000 manhole covers and Tai O boasts some particularly interesting examples. The manhole-cover awareness campaign even has a bug-eyed mascot, Drainy, which wears a manhole cover on its head.

Brilliant.

The writer paid for most of his own trip to Hong Kong but was given four nights' accommodation at the Ovolo Southside and a preloaded Octopus card by the Hong Kong Tourism Board.

Australians have been slow to return to Hong Kong. Visitor numbers stand at only about 46 per cent of 2019 levels. While Hong Kong is ranked the fourth most expensive city in the world to live in, it doesn't feel especially pricey to visit from Australia. Sure, it's costlier than China, but there are a lot of middle-range and budget hotel rooms, and you'd have to be particularly unlucky to end up in one that cellotapes up the wallpaper.

I had a great time at the Ovolo Southside in a warehouse district near where Aberdeen floating village isn't anymore. Every fixture, fitting and gesture at the Ovolo Southside comes with a wink, a smile, a trick, a pun, a trompe-l'oeil, a sleight of hand - and it's mostly pretty funny. The books on the bookshelves have no pages; the retro boxing gloves mounted in the gym have no space in which to slip your hands; small gifts appear as if from nowhere; and time itself stretches and bends.

The "social hour" of sundowner drinks at the hotel's Rooftop Bar is the most elastic 60 minutes I've ever experienced, and the free-flowing drinks and snacks can save a visitor a lot of money. If you're alone at social hour, the staff will come and socialise with you.

Mini queen rooms with continental breakfast start at about $195 plus fees and taxes. ovolohotels.com

Getting there: Qantas and Cathay Pacific fly direct from Australia to Hong Kong. Fares start at $1080.

Getting around: You'll want an Octopus card to get around Hong Kong. Although you can use cash to buy individual fares, it's far easier to use Octopus on buses, ferries, trams and the MTR. You can download the Octopus for Tourists app or buy a physical Tourist Octopus from convenience stores and the MTR stations at Hong Kong International Airport and West Kowloon.

How to pay: Octopus can be used for a surprising number of things other than travel, such as buying goods from certain supermarkets and meals from selected restaurants. Credit cards are accepted in many places, but you will still need cash to pay taxi drivers and buy street food.

Explore more: discoverhongkong.com