[ ITINERARY · THE DISPATCH ]

3 Days in Hong Kong: Skyline Trams, Dim Sum, and Islands Off the Grid

A honest 3-day Hong Kong itinerary for the vertical city: the tram up the Peak, dim sum done right, and a ferry day to a tiny island where nobody is in a hurry. Day-by-day, no fluff.

I have a theory about this place, and I’ll just say it: most people do a Hong Kong 3 day itinerary completely backwards. They sprint to the Peak at noon, stand in a sweaty queue with four thousand strangers, photograph a wall of haze, and then wonder why the postcard lied to them. So let me fix that for you. This is the trip I wish someone had handed me the first time, when I got off the Airport Express jet-lagged and stupid and immediately overpaid for a taxi I didn’t need.

Three days is enough to fall for the place. It’s vertical, it’s loud, it smells like ginger and diesel and sea, and it rewards people who slow down at exactly the moments everyone else speeds up.

Start on Hong Kong Island. Skip breakfast at the hotel (overpriced, sad) and find a cha chaan teng instead — these are the old neighbourhood diners, all formica and clatter. Order a pineapple bun with a slab of cold butter shoved inside it, a bo lo yau, and a milk tea so strong it could file a tax return. Mine cost about HK$30. It is perfect and I will hear no arguments.

Then the Star Ferry. Lower deck, upper deck, doesn’t matter — it’s HK$5 and it’s the best five dollars in the city. You cross the harbour with the towers stacking up behind you and for seven minutes the whole place makes sense.

Here is the bit nobody tells you. Do NOT do the Peak at midday. Go up around 4:30pm so you catch daylight, the gold hour, AND the lights coming on, all in one visit. The Peak Tram is fun (it’s been hauling people up that absurd gradient since 1888) but the queue can swallow an hour. So buy your tram-and-Sky-Terrace ticket online before you go, and turn up early-ish.

Dinner: wander down into Soho and the streets off Hollywood Road. Loud, a bit smug, but the dumplings are good and the people-watching is excellent.

Cross back over for the Kowloon day. The famous waterfront promenade with the skyline view is fine, it does the job, but I find it a touch overrated — too polished now. The real Kowloon is two streets back.

Lunch is the point of today. Proper dim sum. Skip the Michelin-starred cheap one everyone screenshots (the queue is genuinely two hours and life is short) and go to a rowdy, working dai pai dong-style teahouse where the trolleys still squeak past. You want har gow, the prawn ones, with skins so thin you can see the pink through them. Char siu bao. A plate of gai lan in oyster sauce. And the custard buns, the lava ones, that explode in a slightly dangerous way. Tap the table with two fingers when someone pours your tea — it’s a quiet thank-you, and the the locals notice when you know it.

Afternoon, get lost on purpose around Sham Shui Po. This is my favourite corner of the whole city. Fabric stalls, electronics, a man who’ll sell you eighty resistors and a bowl of tofu pudding from the same square metre. It’s not pretty. It’s better than pretty. It’s alive.

Then the night markets on Temple Street when it gets dark. Haggle, but kindly. Eat the clay-pot rice. Have a beer from a plastic stool on the pavement and watch the fortune tellers set up.

This is the day people skip, and it’s the day that makes the trip. From Central pier, hop a ferry to Lamma Island (about 30 minutes) or, if you want a beach and a kite-flying festival energy, Cheung Chau.

Lamma has no cars. None. You walk a concrete path through hills and old fishing villages, past the seafood restaurants at Sok Kwu Wan, and you can swim at Hung Shing Yeh beach if the weather’s behaving. I once spent a whole afternoon there doing absolutely nothing but eating steamed garlic prawns and watching ferries chug past, and it remains one of my favourite days in Asia. Cheap, too — the ferry’s a few dollars each way.

Cheung Chau is the rowdier pick. Bigger, more pilgrims and seafood and bikes for rent, and a temple to the sea goddess that’s worth the walk. Either way, you’re trading the towers for green and salt and quiet, and after two days of glorious chaos that swap feels like a deep breath.

Come back in the evening, tired and salty, and do one last thing: take the ding ding, the ancient double-decker tram, the length of the island for HK$3. Sit up top at the front. It rattles, it’s slow, it stops for everything. It is the cheapest and most romantic ride in the city and I refuse to leave Hong Kong without doing it.

A few honest logistics. Get an Octopus card at the airport — it pays for the ferry, the tram, the MTR, the 7-Eleven, basically your whole life here. The MTR is so clean it’s faintly embarrassing. And don’t bother with taxis unless it’s late; the trains beat them on time and price almost every time.

That’s it. That’s the city. Vertical, briny, generous, exhausting in the best way. Three days won’t be enough and that’s exactly the point — you’ll already be plotting the next trip on the flight home.

Go for the skyline, stay for the ferry — and if you only remember one thing, it’s this: get the ding ding, not the taxi.

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