Hong Kong Cruise Port Guide

Sailing into Victoria Harbour at night with the Symphony of Lights laser show exploding across a thousand skyscrapers is hands-down the most jaw-dropping port entrance after Sydney. Hong Kong scores perfect 5.0. This magnificent harbour—named for Queen Victoria who reigned when Britain established the colony in 1841—remains the largest in China and third largest in the world. Those deep, sheltered waters that made Hong Kong strategically irresistible to the British Empire now cradle cruise ships beneath a forest of glass towers that pierce the tropical sky. The contrast between ancient fishing village roots and this vertical metropolis of seven million souls never stops astonishing me.

My perfect day begins aboard the Star Ferry, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it's the best transit experience on earth. For less than a dollar, I cross Victoria Harbour on a vessel whose lineage stretches back to 1888, when a Parsee merchant named Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala launched the Kowloon Ferry Company. Renamed the Star Ferry in 1898, this fleet of twelve green-and-white workhorses now carries seventy thousand passengers daily—twenty-six million a year—and National Geographic Traveler named it one of the "50 places of a lifetime." Standing at the rail with the salt breeze in my face, skyscrapers rising on both shores, I understand why. From there I ride the Ngong Ping 360 cable car to the Big Buddha and Po Lin Monastery, then return for the Victoria Peak tram at sunset. At 552 meters, Victoria Peak is the highest point on Hong Kong Island, and that historic funicular railway—clinging to the mountainside at impossible angles—delivers me to a viewing platform where the entire harbour sprawls below like a glittering circuit board coming to life as dusk falls.

For sustenance, I hunt down dim sum at Tim Ho Wan (yes, Michelin-starred and shockingly cheap), then plunge into Temple Street Night Market in Kowloon, where the air hangs thick with sizzling wok smoke, soy-glazed meats, and the calls of fortune tellers. Vendors hawk jade trinkets and knockoff handbags beneath strings of bare bulbs, while Cantonese opera singers perform on makeshift stages. Here, amid the chaos of stinky tofu carts and clay-pot rice stalls, I glimpse the old Hong Kong—the one that existed before the skyscrapers, when this was a collection of fishing villages clinging to a rocky island. That tension between ancient traditions and relentless modernity is Hong Kong's heartbeat, and in the night markets, both pulse at once.

Lantau Island beaches or a junk boat harbour cruise with unlimited drinks are heavenly. Hong Kong is chaotic, delicious, vertical, and absolutely electric.