Cheung Sha

Cheung Sha runs for nearly three kilometres along Lantau’s south coast, split by a small headland into Upper and Lower Cheung Sha, and it is by a wide margin the longest beach in the entire territory. I got there by bus from Tung Chung, a winding forty-minute ride over Lantau’s hills that is scenic enough to be worth doing for its own sake, and stepped off into something that genuinely does not match the mental image most people carry of Hong Kong — a wide, pale sand beach with actual rolling surf, backed by casuarina trees and a scattering of low-key beach bars rather than towers.

Lower Cheung Sha, the smaller southern section, has the better swimming and a genuine, if modest, surf scene — a handful of local instructors run lessons on the days when the swell cooperates, mostly small windswept waves rather than anything serious, but enough that I saw people actually surfing in Hong Kong, which took a minute to process. Upper Cheung Sha is the longer stretch, popular with local families on weekends, dogs off leads in the early morning before the lifeguards start their shift, and a horse riding operation that leads short rides along the sand that looked, from a distance, deeply relaxing for everyone except possibly the horses.

The beach bars set back from Upper Cheung Sha — a loose row of casual restaurants with names like The Stoep and Boat House, serving everything from South African bobotie to Thai curries — have become an unlikely institution among Hong Kong Island expats making the trek out for a weekend. I had a sundowner at one with feet still sandy, watching the light go orange over the water, and it was hard to reconcile with the idea that Central’s towers were less than an hour away by bus and ferry.

When to go: April through October for actual swimming weather, though weekday visits are considerably quieter than weekends when Hong Kong Island empties out toward Lantau’s beaches. Avoid the days right after heavy rain, when runoff can affect water quality along this stretch of coast.