Deep Water Bay

Deep Water Bay sits on the bus route everyone takes to somewhere else — Repulse Bay, Stanley, the ocean park further along the coast — and as a result it gets treated as a scenic blur rather than a destination, which suits it fine. This is a small, tidy crescent of beach on the south side of Hong Kong Island, backed by one of the territory’s oldest golf clubs and a scattering of some of the most expensive real estate in the city, and it has a settled, understated quality that its more famous neighbor down the road doesn’t bother with. Roger Moore and a small army of a 1970s film crew shot part of a Bond movie here, and there’s a low-key local pride about it that surfaces if you ask anyone who’s lived nearby long enough.

The beach is compact, shark-netted, lifeguarded, and about as calm as water gets in Hong Kong, since the bay’s shape shelters it from most of the swell that reaches the more exposed beaches further south. Families with young children and older residents doing slow, steady laps parallel to the shore make up most of the crowd, and there’s a barbecue area and a couple of straightforward restaurants set back from the sand rather than anything trying too hard. Lia and I ended up here almost by accident, hopping off the bus on a whim rather than continuing on to Repulse Bay, and found exactly what we didn’t know we wanted: a quiet swim without a production around it.

What I’ve come to appreciate about Deep Water Bay on repeat visits is how well it demonstrates the strange proximity Hong Kong specializes in — from the sand you can see both the ridgeline of the Twins peaks rising steeply behind the golf course and, in the other direction, the mouth of the bay opening out toward the wider harbor traffic of the south side. It’s not a beach that photographs as dramatically as Tai Long Wan or draws crowds like Repulse Bay, but it might be the most genuinely restful half-day I’ve spent on the water anywhere on the island.

When to go: Any weekday, any season really, though swimming is best from May to October. It works especially well as a calm counterpoint if Repulse Bay down the road turns out to be more crowded than you were in the mood for.