Travel Guide: Hong Kong, China

Hanging out at the M+ Museum

Listen, I was primed to love Hong Kong.

After a pretty underwhelming stay in Shenzhen, I arrived in Hong Kong expecting all the Wong Kar Wai mood lighting, neon alleys, and late-night noodles of my dreams. Instead, what I found was a city that felt… dimmed. Literally and metaphorically. The neon is mostly gone post-2020 for the sake of the residents who didn’t like living with the bright neon shining all night, which means a lot of streets are just dark.

There’s also a heaviness in the air related to the economy and Hong Kong’s evolving relationship with mainland China. Most people we met looked exhausted, upset, and downright sad.

And because I always tell you the truth on this blog, here it is: Hong Kong ended up being my least favorite stop on this China trip. Maybe even more so than Shenzhen.

That said, this isn’t a “never go” post. There were bright spots — including one surprisingly delightful day at Hong Kong Disneyland, an actually great hotel, and some very solid pineapple buns, milk tea, and deep fried peanut butter French toast.

Also, quick note before we dive in. If you’re reading this because you also want to travel the world, test-drive cities, and still keep your client work and income flowing, that’s literally what ✍️ Make Writing Your Job exists for. It’s my paid newsletter and writing job board where I share remote-only, well-paid writing jobs 5x/week so you can build a location-independent writing career and read posts like this from your own hotel balcony somewhere.

Alright. Let’s talk Hong Kong.

Where to Stay in Hong Kong

View from our room in the Kerry Hotel

If Hong Kong itself didn’t quite steal my heart, our hotel absolutely tried its best. We stayed at the Kerry Hotel, Hong Kong in Hung Hom, and I loved it. It’s a waterfront lifestyle hotel with big views over Victoria Harbour and the skyline, plus a gorgeous pool deck and airy public spaces that feel more “urban resort” than “business box.”  (Also, big thanks to the hotel for giving us a complimentary upgrade to a corner room with a gorgeous ocean view!)

The real star for me though was the huge, modern gym which also had insane ocean views and tons of new equipment. After bouncing around China and encountering a series of tragic hotel gyms with sad dumbbells and broken treadmills, the Kerry Hotel gym felt like walking into a high-end fitness club. Actual weights. Space to move. Cardio machines that worked. What a dream.

A few things to know if you’re considering staying here:

• Location vibes

  • Hung Hom is on the Kowloon side, a bit removed from the tourist circus of Tsim Sha Tsui and Central. That can be a pro or a con depending on what you’re looking for..

  • There’s a waterfront promenade right outside, so you get peaceful harbor walks instead of honking taxis.

• Getting around

  • You’re near Whampoa MTR station, plus buses and taxis.

  • There’s also ferry access from nearby piers that will take you over to Hong Kong Island and other spots, which is way more pleasant than being stuck in traffic. 

If you want a calmer base with great views, a stellar gym, and you don’t mind public transit hops to the main attractions, I’d absolutely recommend the Kerry Hotel. If your priority is nightlife and being right in the middle of things, you may prefer staying in Central or Tsim Sha Tsui and sacrificing some serenity.

What to Do in Hong Kong

Here’s what we did, what I’d recommend, and what I’d skip.

M+ Museum on the Waterfront

If you like contemporary art and architecture, M+, the museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District, is worth a few hours. It’s a dedicated museum for twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture, with galleries for moving image, design, and immersive installations. 

The building itself is striking, and the best part might actually be its location. After you’re done wandering the exhibits, you can stroll along the waterfront promenade with views of the skyline, grab something from a coffee or snack truck, and take in the harbor breeze.

Yes, tickets are on the pricier side compared to museums in mainland China, but if you’re an art person, this is one of the few activities that felt aligned with what I wanted Hong Kong to be.

The Free Zoo in the Park

There’s a small, old-school zoo right in the city at the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens. It’s free, compact, and home to a bunch of monkeys, birds, and a mix of other animals. 

I’m not really a zoo person, and monkeys are not on the top of my list of favorite animals, so this wasn’t my personal highlight. But if you’re traveling with kids or you love seeing how older city zoos operate, it’s an easy, low-effort stop on Hong Kong Island.

Ferries and Crossing the Bay

We crossed the harbor multiple times using ferries, which is one of the nicer ways to get around Hong Kong.

• Classic tourist route: Star Ferry between Tsim Sha Tsui and Central, with short crossings every few minutes and postcard-ready skyline views. 

• From the Hung Hom / Kerry Hotel area, there are ferries that connect to other piers so you’re not always stuck on the MTR. If you do stay at the Kerry Hotel, the ferry stop is literally a 3-minute walk behind the hotel.

The ferry rides themselves were lovely. The destinations on the other side, less so.

The Peak Tram and Victoria Peak

We did the Peak Tram to Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island because, of course, we did. It’s one of those tourist checklists you feel weird skipping.

I personally didn’t love it. Here’s why:

• The tram experience was overcrowded and pushy, in the way where you feel like a sardine with a camera.

• The top spits you out into a mall complex with a fairly generic mix of shops and food options, including a very mid bakery (especially compared to other bakeries in the city!)

• The view is… fine. But when you’re surrounded by a crowd all taking the exact same photo, the magic evaporates.

If you live for city skylines and don’t mind crowds, you might want to do this once. If you’re sensitive to chaos, there are calmer ways to see Hong Kong from above or from the water.

A Spellcaster Under the Freeway

One of the more surreal experiences we had was visiting one of the many spellcasters/witches who operates under a freeway overpass, offering rituals for abundance, curse-breaking, and energetic clean-up. What they focus on is clearing your negative energy and sending any curses from you and back to the sender.

If you’re curious about local spiritual practices and don’t mind a bit of theatricality, this can be a memorable detour. I wouldn’t fly to Hong Kong just for this, but as a “well, that was different” travel story, it delivers.

Hong Kong Disneyland

And now for the plot twist: the best day we had in Hong Kong was at Hong Kong Disneyland.

This was the last Disneyland on our list (we’ve been to all the others in the world!) and while we’re not necessarily “Disney People” we still had a great tiime. Highlights:

• Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars — a mine cart coaster that has a surprising little narrative twist and a more thrilling layout than I expected.

• Mystic Manor — Hong Kong’s version of the haunted mansion, which trades ghosts for whimsical, slightly chaotic magic artifacts coming to life. It’s charming and technologically impressive.

• The park is compact enough that you can do a lot in one day without collapsing, which I appreciated. 

If you’re already a Disney parks enjoyer or you’re traveling with a partner or kids who are, I’d absolutely slot a day here into your itinerary. It was the one Hong Kong activity that felt purely joyful and not tinged with the city’s heavier mood.

Where to Eat (and Drink Tea!) in Hong Kong

Breakfast of champions at Lan Fong Yuen

Here’s where Hong Kong redeemed itself a bit. While I found a lot of the food scene overpriced and dingier than mainland cities — I saw too many cockroaches for my personal comfort level, especially around some street stalls — there were a few standout things worth seeking out.

Pineapple Buns

Hong Kong’s pineapple buns are reason enough to leave your hotel. These classic buns don’t actually contain pineapple. The name comes from the crackly, golden, crunchy top that looks like pineapple skin, wrapped around soft, fluffy bread, often with a thick slab of butter tucked inside.

If you want the classic experience, head to:

• Kam Wah Cafe (金華冰廳) in Mong Kok

  • Famous for baking thousands of pineapple buns a day, with a constant stream of locals picking up fresh trays. 

  • Google Maps: https://maps.google.com/?q=Kam+Wah+Cafe+Hong+Kong

Expect it to be crowded, slightly chaotic, and very worth it. Pair your bun with milk tea and you’ll understand why this combo has its own cult following.

Hong Kong Milk Tea

If you google “best Hong Kong milk tea,” you will inevitably end up at Lan Fong Yuen (蘭芳園) in Central, one of the city’s oldest and most iconic cha chaan tengs. They’re famous for their “silk-stocking” milk tea, made by supposedly filtering a blend of teas through a cloth to create that rich, smooth texture. 

• Lan Fong Yuen (Central)

  • Address: 2 Gage Street, Central

  • Google Maps: https://maps.google.com/?q=Lan+Fong+Yuen+Central+Hong+Kong

Be prepared to queue, especially during breakfast and lunch hours. If you manage to sit down, order:

• A hot or iced milk tea

• Maybe their pork chop bun if you eat meat

• And, yes, the French toast (my favorite!)

Which brings us to…

Deep Fried Peanut Butter French Toast

Hong Kong’s version of French toast is pure chaos in the best way. Thick slices of bread, sandwiched together with peanut butter (or another filling), dipped in egg, deep fried, and then served with butter and syrup or condensed milk.

You can find variations of this at cha chaan tengs all over the city, but again, Lan Fong Yuen is an easy one-stop shop where you can try:

• Milk tea

• Pineapple bun-adjacent snacks

• Hong Kong–style French toast in one go 

If you want to go deeper, search for “茶餐廳” (cha chaan teng) or “冰室” (bing sutt) in Google Maps and look for spots rated 3.8+ stars, then follow your curiosity. 

A Note on Food Tours

We took several food tours in Hong Kong hoping they’d unlock the city for us the way food tours often do. Instead, we kept bumping into the same problems:

• Higher prices for lower quality than we’d been getting in mainland China — and really sad vegetarian options and with tour guides who wouldn’t accommodate me despite saying they would when we checked with them in advance before booking the tour!

• Hygiene standards that made me reconsider my life choices

• A general sense that the city’s food scene has been better in the past than it is right now

If Hong Kong is your first stop in Asia, you might not feel this contrast as strongly. Coming from Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing, though, the downgrade was noticeable.

Tips for Getting Around Hong Kong

Transportation in Hong Kong is generally reliable, efficient, and easy to navigate — even if it’s not quite as spotless or spacious as what you’ll find in mainland China.

Uber works well here and is fairly affordable for shorter rides. Most drivers speak English, and the app experience is smooth and familiar. We used it often when we didn’t feel like squeezing into a packed subway car.

That said, the MTR subway is the backbone of Hong Kong’s public transport system. It’s fast, covers nearly everywhere you’ll want to go, and is much better than anything you’ll find in the U.S. (which, let’s be honest, has almost no public transportation worth comparing). Expect more crowds and a little less polish than in mainland China, but it’s still a solid option.

To ride the MTR, ferries, or even pay at some restaurants, you’ll need an Octopus card. The easiest way to get one is by downloading the Octopus Tourist App, creating a digital card, and adding it to your Apple Wallet if you’re using an iPhone. You can load funds directly through the app and tap to pay for just about everything — subway rides, ferry crossings, and even snacks at convenience stores.

Do note that cash is still king in some parts of Hong Kong. You’ll need it for smaller vendors, juice stalls, and certain street food spots. Unlike mainland China, WeChat Pay and Alipay aren’t simple to use here unless you have a local Hong Kong phone number, and you can’t rely on the same mainland accounts.

Most credit cards work fine (especially Mastercard and American Express), but Visa can occasionally get declined, so it’s smart to carry more than one card and a bit of cash at all times.

In short: download the Octopus app, keep a little cash in your pocket, and use Uber when the humidity wins.

Final Impressions of Hong Kong

Is Hong Kong still worth visiting in 2025 and beyond? That depends on what you’re looking for.

From my vantage point on this particular trip, Hong Kong felt like a city in a strange in-between state.

• The iconic neon that once defined its image has mostly been removed, which literally makes the city feel darker at night. 

• Multiple guides and locals referenced economic struggles and shifting politics in ways that gave the city a low, heavy hum of anxiety.

• We even took a tour about the housing crisis run by an NGO, only to later hear from a former staffer that conditions had improved more than the organization wanted to admit publicly due to trying to get more donations from tourists on the tour, which added another layer of “what’s actually real here?” to the experience.

This is, by design, an apolitical blog, so I’m not here to dig into the history of everything Hong Kong has gone through (but I do recommend that you look into it as they’ve definitely been through quite a bit.) I’m just here to tell you how it felt to walk its streets, ride its trams, and drink its milk tea in this moment in time.

And the feeling I kept coming back to was this: the vibe is off.

There were bright spots — that beautiful day at Hong Kong Disneyland, late-night harbor views from the Kerry Hotel, a perfect pineapple bun — but the overall energy wasn’t something I’d rush back to, especially when there are cities in Asia like Singapore that felt more vibrant, creative, and alive to me right now.

If you’ve always wanted to see Hong Kong, go, absolutely. Eat the buns. Ride the ferry. Have your curses removed by a witch under an overpass if that calls to you. Just adjust your expectations away from the cinematic, neon-drenched city of old and toward something quieter, more complicated, and a little frayed at the edges.

And if your dream is less “Should I visit Hong Kong?” and more “How do I become the kind of person who can slow-travel through Asia while my client work is handled from a laptop?”, then that’s my favorite question to help you answer.

That’s exactly what ✍️ Make Writing Your Job is for — a writing job board and community built to help you find real remote writing work, not race-to-the-bottom assignments, so your next disappointing city can at least come with a great harbor view and a flexible calendar.

Want to Become a Writer and Travel the World? 

For the past 5 years, I’ve been able to travel the world and spend my weeks bouncing from spas to banquets to food tours while using my writing to fund my adventures. 

Want to become a freelance writer or pitch your personal essays or articles and get paid by publications? Or maybe you want to get paid by a grant, contest, or residency to live somewhere unique and get paid to work on your own creative projects? 

Over at ✍️ Make Writing Your Job, we’ve built a writing job board to help you get hired and funded for your writing. 

Subscribe now for just $15/month to get our daily (5x/week) writing job board as well as all of our other awesome features, such as… 

• ✍️ The Writing Job Board — updated 5x/week with high-paying freelance and ghostwriting work

• ⭐ Featured Jobs — exclusive roles from clients who post directly to our board (and often nowhere else)

• 📬 Pitch List — 2x/week newsletter of fresh pitch calls, open submissions, and editors looking for your ideas

  🌍 Grants, Residencies & Contests — 1x/week roundup of opportunities that pay you to write, travel, and create

• ⚡️ New! Job Hunting Assistant — an AI-powered tool that helps you filter listings and find your next dream client even faster

• 🧠 ClassStack — live classes + our replay library

• 💬 Subscriber Chat — our private community where our curators drop fresh jobs, and our writers swap wins and advice daily

• 📰 GuestStack — our $1/word commissioned essay column (and your chance to get published + paid)

Basically, everything you need to make writing your job. See you inside!

-Amy