Clearwater Bay

Clearwater Bay is a peninsula off the eastern edge of the New Territories, past Sai Kung’s town centre and out along a road that runs through country park and golf course before dead-ending at the sea, and the name is not aspirational marketing — the water really is that color, a pale turquoise that has more in common with parts of the Philippines than with the murkier green of Hong Kong’s inner harbour waters. Lia found a listing for the beach on a hiking forum, and neither of us quite believed the photos until we were standing there.

The peninsula’s other identity, less visible but historically significant, is as the home of Shaw Studios, the production company behind the classic wave of Hong Kong martial arts films in the 1960s and 70s — a huge stretch of Clearwater Bay Road still belongs to the studio, and location scouts have used the peninsula’s coastline and hills for decades of local film and television. None of that is obvious from the beach itself, but knowing it changes how you look at the cliffs on the way in, half-expecting a period drama to be shooting just out of sight.

We took a bus to Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club and then walked the coastal path down to the beach proper, past a small Tin Hau temple perched on the headland that fishing families have maintained for generations, dedicated to the sea goddess who watches over anyone making a living from these waters. The beach itself, once you reach it, is small and clean and largely occupied by families and a handful of divers, with none of the crowd density you’d brace for on a hot Saturday closer to the city. There’s a walking trail that continues further out to Tai Long Wan (a different, smaller bay from the more famous Sai Kung beach of the same name), and the views back across the water toward the peninsula’s cliffs are some of the best coastal scenery I found anywhere in the territory.

We ate lunch afterward at a small noodle shop near the golf club, sunburned and salt-crusted, and spent most of it trying to reconcile the beach we’d just left with the version of Hong Kong we’d flown in expecting. That gap — between the skyline everyone photographs and the coastline almost nobody mentions — is, at this point, the thing I’ve come to associate most with the territory as a whole.

When to go: Late spring through early autumn for actual swimming weather, though summer brings the heaviest crowds and occasional jellyfish. Shoulder months (April-May, October) offer warm enough water with a much quieter beach.