Star Ferry

The Star Ferry has been crossing Victoria Harbour since 1888, and the current fleet of green-and-white double-ended boats, some of them over sixty years old themselves, still runs the Tsim Sha Tsui to Central route every few minutes from early morning to close to midnight. I took it on my first morning in Hong Kong mostly out of curiosity, expecting a quaint but forgettable errand between two piers. Instead it turned into one of the best seven minutes of the entire trip, and I went back to ride it again, deliberately, at least four more times before I left.

Part of what makes it work is the angle. Riding the MTR under the harbour gets you between the two sides faster, but you see nothing. On the Star Ferry, the towers of both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon rise around you the entire crossing, close enough to feel their scale and far enough to take in the whole skyline at once — something that is almost impossible to do from land, where the buildings crowd too close for perspective. The ferries themselves lean charmingly analogue: wooden bench seating, a crew member who still throws the mooring rope by hand at each pier, ticket gates that take coins and octopus cards with equal indifference to the century separating them.

I rode it once near sunset with Lia, both of us leaning on the rail on the upper deck, the wind cutting the day’s heat for the first time since breakfast, and watched the light shift from gold to that particular blue that Hong Kong Harbour does better than anywhere I’ve been. Neither of us said much. It is a genuinely romantic seven minutes for the cost of a bus fare, which feels like it should not be allowed.

The Tsim Sha Tsui pier sits right beside the Avenue of Stars and the Clock Tower, so it is easy to combine the crossing with an evening at the harbourfront. The Central pier on the other side drops you close to IFC mall and the escalators up into the financial district, or you can just turn straight around and ride back, which is exactly what I did more than once when I had nowhere in particular to be.

When to go: Late afternoon into early evening gives you the best light for the crossing, timed to land in Tsim Sha Tsui or Central right around sunset. It runs daily and rarely gets so crowded that you can’t find a rail spot, even on weekends, since most tourists default to the MTR without realising what they’re missing.