So I finally made it down to Hong Kong a couple weekends back. It was, and most likely remains, awesome. A funny string of events led to our travel party being composed of Andrew, myself, and a mutual friend from high school neither of us had seen in years. He was backpacking China, visiting another friend in our program when we saw him outside of school. So amid catching up we made plans to visit Hong Kong over the weekend.

The journey from the apartment to Hong Kong takes near two hours, combining a bus stop, metro ride, border crossing, and a commuter rail hop that took us into central Kowloon, the southernmost part of the peninsula. The first thing I noticed were the streets…full of white people and non-Chinese, to a degree I haven’t seen in a while now. Was a bizarre change from my day to day. We hopped a ride on the Star Ferry across the harbor to Hong Kong Island, where the great skyline seen in pictures is sprawled out. The ferry has been running for something like 100 years and offers a relaxing, quick jaunt across the harbor with great views.

The city is layed out along a little shelf of land that stretches the entire northern rim of the island, creeping up onto the hills that loom above. It is a very compact, very urban center that bustles and has a history that you don’t have in a young city like Shenzhen, and double-decker trolleys that have seen better days run along the spine of the city. The streets are narrow canyons of buildings, and I can only imagine the type of logistics and preparation needed to construct a 600-foot building or highway in such an environment.

Our goal was to get to the Peak, an outlook with a great view over the city via the old Peak Tram, running up a ridiculously steep grade to the Peak. The line was long, and as we are all intrepid youngsters, decided instead to walk up. It was steep. Hong Kong is hot. But the hills above the city are also quite green, peaceful, and have some fantastic views. It’s amazing how you can go from ordered chaos of the streets to quiet greenery in a fifteen minute walk.

On the way down we passed into the Mid-Levels neighborhood or district, situated just above the shoreline part of central. The area is the Hong Kong of cinema, the massive structures and bustling, hilly streets with neon signs spanning the width and crowded sidewalks. One of the more recent additions to the neighborhood is the Mid-Levels Escalator, a big (notice a pattern of scale?) elevated walkway that runs, we discovered, from the Star Ferry port all the way up into the Mid-Levels and to a point undetermined because time was not our ally.

In summation it fit everything I had hoped of Hong Kong, and also matched the expectations I had had in the sense that prices are much higher than the mainland where I get paid. Hong Kong is worth the price though. It’s one of a kind.