Aberdeen

The towers arrived around Aberdeen Harbour eventually, the way they arrive everywhere in Hong Kong, but the harbor itself refused to modernize at the same pace. Sampans and fishing junks still pack the typhoon shelter three and four boats deep, some of them still lived on full-time by families who’ve never known another address. I hired a small sampan with an elderly woman rowing it standing up, a technique I later learned is specific to this harbor and takes years to do properly without capsizing, and she took us on a twenty-minute loop through the boats for less than the price of a beer.

What struck me most wasn’t the boats themselves but the density of an entire floating community — laundry strung between hulls, someone frying fish on a portable stove balanced on the stern, a kid doing homework at a fold-out table with the whole harbor rocking gently underneath him. This is a way of life that’s shrinking fast as the older generation ages out and their children move onto land, and there’s something quietly moving about catching a glimpse of it while it still exists.

Jumbo Kingdom, the enormous floating restaurant done up like an imperial palace on pontoons, closed its restaurant operations a few years back and had a genuinely dramatic capsizing incident during towing, which somehow felt fitting for a structure that always seemed slightly too improbable to be real. Part of it has since been restored and reopened for limited public viewing, and even from the water it’s worth seeing — this gaudy, magnificent relic of 1970s Hong Kong excess, still lit up in gold and red, floating in a harbor otherwise dominated by working fishing vessels.

On land, Aberdeen’s wet market and the promenade along the waterfront are worth an hour of wandering, especially in the late afternoon when the fishing boats start coming back in and the whole harbor gets busy with the day’s catch being unloaded, weighed, and sold before it even reaches the market stalls.

When to go: Late afternoon, when the fishing fleet returns and the harbor is at its most active. Avoid typhoon season (July–September) when boat trips get cancelled with little notice.