Spent about two and a half weeks in Hong Kong in late September. First ten days I was working out of Cyberport, then took a week off and moved over to the Kowloon side. All iPhone photos, mostly shot after work or late at night.
I thought I'd come back with skyline shots. Instead, almost everything I kept is street level. Taxis, trams, minibuses, and old apartment blocks with air con units stacked forty floors high.
Image notes:
1–2: Mid-Levels and the hillside roads above Central. The jungle just spills over the retaining walls between the towers. Never got used to it.
3–5: The trams. HK$3.30 a ride, and the front seat on the upper deck is the best view in the city. I rode them end to end a few times just to look out the window.
6–7: Yick Cheong (the Monster Building) in Quarry Bay. Residents banned photos in the courtyard, so these are from King's Road. Exterior is more interesting anyway imo.
8: Same stretch of King's Road. Half the old blocks are wrapped in green scaffold netting.
9: Taxi outside Mido Cafe in Yau Ma Tei.
10: A side street on the Kowloon side. Taxis are half the traffic.
11: Kids kicking a ball around a public pitch, squeezed in between the towers.
12: Minibuses lined up on a side street in Sai Ying Pun with the harbour at the bottom. If you're going, figure these out. They go everywhere the MTR doesn't.
13: A red taxi under a glass office tower. Old and new right next to each other.
14: Back on King's Road. Footbridges, tram tracks, and the hills right behind.
15: Monster Building again, looking straight up.
16: Happy Valley on a Wednesday race night. HK$10 to get in, beer garden in the middle of the track, skyline behind the back straight. Best ten bucks I spent.
17–18: Neon in Jordan and Mong Kok after rain. A lot of it has been pulled down over the last few years, so what's left feels worth shooting while it's there.
19: The beautiful building in the background with the crazy lines is the Bank of China Tower in Central. The one skyline-ish shot that made the cut.
20: A street corner well after midnight. The red taxis never really stop.
Only having evenings free for the first ten days turned out to be fine. The city is better after dark anyway. Cooler, emptier, and after rain everything reflects.
Stuff that stuck with me:
Transit is absurd. Octopus card and you can do MTR, trams, buses, ferries, minibuses, 7-Eleven, everything.
Old and new aren't in separate neighborhoods. A hundred year old shophouse sits under a glass tower and nobody thinks that's weird.
It is a walking city on a hill. Bring better shoes than I did.
Food deserves its own post. Short version: clear soup brisket at Sister Wah, roast goose at Tin Lung, wontons at Shing Kee. Mid-Autumn fell during the trip, so mooncakes everywhere and lanterns in Victoria Park.
Not perfect. Expensive, humid, hotel rooms are tiny. But I get why people get obsessive about this place.