Where to stay

Espace Elastique Too basic for a boutique hotel, too stylish for the average B&B, this is a curious ‘fish out of water’ spot run by a former theatrical designer. Rooms from £50. 57 Kat Hing Street, Tai O, Lantau, 00 852 2985 7002, espaceelastique.com.hk

Concerto Inn This small beachside hotel has a great location and provides quirky extras in the rooms, including Mars Bars and pot noodles. Rooms from £65. 28 Hung Shing Yeh Beach, Yung Shue Wan, Lamma, 00 852 2982 1668, concertoinn.com.hk

B&B Cheung Chau Clever budget-plus hotel with small, well-designed rooms and a few suites. It stocks excellent beer you can buy at reception and take up to the roof to drink. Rooms from £50. 12-14 Tung Wan Road, Cheung Chau, 00 852 2986 9990, bbcheungchau.com.hk

Travel Information

The unit of currency is the Hong Kong dollar (£1 = HK $12.40). Hong Kong is eight hours ahead of GMT and enjoys a sub-tropical climate with hot, humid summers and cool winters of low humidity. On average, temperatures reach a peak of 28°C in summer and 17°C in winter.

GETTING THERE
Virgin Atlantic (virgin-atlantic.com) flies daily from London Heathrow directly to Hong Kong.
Air China (airchina.co.uk) offers daily direct flights from London Gatwick to Hong Kong.
British Airways (britishairways.com) has direct flights daily from London Heathrow to Hong Kong.

RESOURCES
Hong Kong Tourism Board (discoverhongkong.com) has plenty of useful information on dining, accommodation, shopping and what to see and do as well as offering guidance on how to plan your trip to Hong Kong.
Ferry services regularly connect Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the Outlying Islands. Ferry operators include New World First Ferry Services (nwff.com.hk) and Hong Kong and Kowloon Ferry Holdings (hkkf.com.hk).

FURTHER READING
Love in a Fallen City: and Other Stories by Eileen Chang (Penguin Modern Classics, £12.99) is a collection of short stories, many set in Hong Kong before and during the Second World War, by one of China’s greatest writers.
A History of Hong Kong by Frank Welsh (Harper Collins, £16.99) chronicles the story of the trading centre and the often raffish characters who shaped it, from its buccaneering origins to its post-war boom years.

Where to eat

There is usually little point in booking anywhere in advance on the islands and the general rule is that customers pay cash for their meals. Prices quoted are for meals per person, without drinks, unless otherwise stated.

Fu Kee It’s hard to pick out one island seafood restaurant that outscores all the others, but the razor clams and the chicken soup with braised abalone at Fu Kee are particularly yummy. Party set menus are around HK $200 (£16) and should feed four. 9-10 First St, Sok Kwu Wan, Lamma, 00 852 2982 8516

Lei Garden This outstanding group of dim sum restaurants has branches all over the city. It can get very busy, so expect to queue, and they will sometimes run out of the odd dish, but everything is good. From £25 per head. leigarden.hk

Loaf On Sai Kung’s reputation is built around its eateries. This is its first Michelin-starred restaurant and, yes, it’s great. Be ready to get sticky fingers; it’s not a place for anyone afraid to tackle shell and bone. From £25 per head. 49 Market St, Sai Kung, 00 852 2792 9966

Kin Hing Doufu Hua This ramshackle shed produces award-winning tofu desserts, costing about £1 each. Yung Shue Wan, Tai Wan To, Lamma

Tai O Crossing Boat Restaurant As the name suggests, this restaurant overlooks the river. Stick to the excellent shrimps, grilled or fried, delicious steamed rice and meaty ribs. From £10 but eat well for £15 per head. 33 Kat Hing Street, Tai O, Lantau, 00 852 2985 8343

Sau Kee This eaterie is also sometimes known as Andy’s Seafood. The ginger fried rice with egg white is outstanding, as is a treacly minced pork with eggplant. Steamed cardinal prawns taste as good as they look – and it’s a generous portion too. From £15 per head. 43 Main St, Yung Shue Wan, Lamma, 00 852 2982 0210

Welcome Food Court Located outside the wet market, numerous stalls offer delicious noodle soups. From £2.50 per head. 150 San Hing Back Street, Cheung Chau, 00 852 2986 9969

Food Glossary

Aap

Duck

Caau

Stir fry

Cha

Tea

Daan

Egg

Dan

Braise

Daufu

Bean curd

Gai

Chicken

Haa

Shrimp

Haai

Crab

Haau

Roast or barbecue

Hou jau

Oyster sauce

Juk

Meat (pork unless specified)

Jyuu

Fish

Lunghaa

Lobster

Min

Noodles

Naicha

Hong Kong-style milky tea

Sijau

Soy sauce

Zingmaifaan

Steamed rice

Food and Travel Review

Hong Kong International Airport used to be an island, Chek Lap Kok. The name described its shape, said to resemble the red tripletail perch that was native to its seas. Look at an up-to-date map and it’s impossible to guess why. Two runway strips have been built on reclaimed land and what once resembled a fish’s head has been carved flat to build the terminal.

Chek Lap Kok is just one of the forgotten isles that make up Hong Kong’s archipelago of tropical green smudges in the South China Sea. To many visitors, Hong Kong consists of its eponymous Fragrant Harbour’ island, mainland Kowloon and the New Territories. The other 260-odd islands slip through the net. Most, it’s true, are uninhabited. One is a golf course, one a rehabilitation centre, several are country parks and a handful support fish-farming families.

Many others are inaccessible or out of bounds, although kai-to (floating mini-cabs) will land you on the beaches off Sai Kung. But some can be more easily reached and are well worth the effort. Packed ferries shuttle commuters to and from the more populous islands, such as Lamma or Cheung Chau, while Lantau, the largest, has a metro link to Central, Hong Kong’s downtown.

Nearly all of Lantau is dense jungle, and the cable car from Tung Chung, a new town on its northern coast, soars above the forest canopy on its climb to the giant bronze Buddha (a present from the People’s Republic of China) by Po Lin monastery. At its northeastern tip, the island hosts Hong Kong’s Disneyland.

These modern attractions disguise a curious past. Eight hundred years ago Lantau was a salt smuggling centre until the Imperial governor of Canton decided to halt the trafficking — and massacred the population. Salt, topped up by piracy and fishing, continued to be the islanders’ main business until the 20th century.

Tai O, a village of stilted shacks lining a tidal creek on the western side of the island, shows the scars of vanished salt pans, while Yeung Hau temple on the outskirts of the village recalls metaphysical, rather than mercantile, traditions. It has two front doors: the main entrance and, directly behind it, an inner portal reserved for dignitaries. This second door has another role too. Ghosts, according to Chinese tradition, only travel in straight lines and cannot pass through this invisible barrier protected by spells.

Many of Tai O’s wooden houses went up in flames during a catastrophic fire a decade ago. To prevent a repeat disaster, residents who could afford it have armoured the outsides of their homes with zinc cladding. After the skyscrapers and shopping malls of the city, the ramshackle constructions must seem quaint to the day trippers from Hong Kong Island who are accustomed to living in regimented tower blocks. Visitors come to eat waffle balls baked over charcoal; sample steam buns flavoured with groundnuts; snack on crisp ladycakes stuffed with candied melon paste or coconut; and enjoy sesame and jasmine jellies.

At dawn, before the tourists show up, elderly villagers are already busy. As soon as the market opens, they go to buy fish. The scent of drying seafood thickens the air, much of it emanating from Mister Seven Chung’s prawn paste shop – he matures the cloudy aubergine coulis in jars on its flat roof. What interests the old people, though, is the night’s catch. They pick out choice live specimens still swimming in plastic basins pressed into service as aquaria.

Overfishing may have shrunk the marine harvest but it hasn’t diminished the locals’ appetite for any produce linked to the sea. A hawker grills dried cuttlefish or salted roe over an open fire to sell for the price of a bus ticket. Other delicacies on display are more expensive and mystifying to the uninitiated. Hanging from the ceiling of one shop are dried swim bladders, some of which cost around £1,500 per kilo. Gweilo, Westerners in Cantonese slang, have as much chance of grasping why one food is a high-priced luxury and the other is a cheap snack as a demon spirit has of crossing the threshold at Yeung Hau temple.

Swim bladders aside, even dishes that should be familiar to the greenest gweilo can be laced with remarkable intricacies. Wan Shui Tao is an open-air restaurant that overlooks the Pearl River. It’s a place of plastic tables and chairs and, to the Hong Kong palate, rustic cuisine. Before eating, it’s good form to rinse the rice bowl under the tap. All very straightforward so far, but when the rice is served, steamed over a lotus leaf, it’s anything but simple, sprinkled with powdered shrimp and concealing hundreds of minute, silver fish fry whose tiny black caviar eyes peek out between the grains.

Eating Cantonese style, for all its mysteries, is about conspicuous consumption. The sound of noisily chewed pork cartilage rises above the din of social chatter. A party dining on tiger prawns leaves behind mounds of shells and sucked heads. The guest of honour at any meal receives the fish head as a courtesy. There’s an art to spitting out bones. And when a bowl of soup is served with noodles, chopsticks lift them from the broth, the head goes down and bites off a mouthful while they are still hot and al dente.

East of Lantau is Lamma, another island with an identity distinct from the city. Each night at 8.30pm the ferry to Lamma peels away from Central pier on Hong Kong Island. About 30 passengers on the afterdeck are returning home from a day’s work in the city. More than half are expats. Nonchalant, they treat the journey as the watery equivalent of the commute from Waterloo to Woking.

Lamma is a place of contradictions. The island has no motor vehicles, no tarmac roads, and the only way around it is on foot or by mountain bike. Yet over its unspoilt sandy beaches looms a colossal power station that lights up much of Hong Kong.

Rows of bicycles line the jetty at Yung Shue Wan in the north of Lamma where the ferry docks. Here there are seafood restaurants, cheese shops, wine merchants, two vegetarian cafés, a bar, a Thai takeaway and a kebab shop. It’s as cosmopolitan a selection as you would find in any major city. But take the footpath to Hung Shing Yeh beach, 20 minutes from the harbour, and you’ll come to Kin Hing Doufu Hua, a ramshackle shed that has a fridge and a few stools, but no walls. Open Rice, Hong Kong’s eating out guide, gave it a best dessert award for its doufu hua, which literally translates as tofu flower. Served hot or cold, it’s a slippery soy junket eaten with a ginger syrup or unrefined cane sugar. Is it the best in Hong Kong? Anyone who tries it after a steep climb on a steamy day could easily be swayed by the emotional pull of its smooth, refreshing curd.

The concrete trail is the main road across the island. It ends up on the east coast at Sok Kwu Wan, a fishing village. Visible from the waterfront, a fractured grid of rafts bobs on the surface of the bay. These are the pens, used to corral the fishermen’s catch. They double as floating homes for the families aboard.

Nostalgia brings city folk to eat in the restaurants lining the quay. However modern, however pushy Hong Kong citizens may appear, they value tradition as much as their independence. They don’t like changing the classic Chinese characters for the Mainland’s simplified form. They prefer speaking Cantonese to the official Putonghua (Mandarin) and if a fish isn’t flapping, it isn’t fresh enough to eat.

Nostalgia, however, won’t preserve all Hong Kong’s heritage and some trades, such as inshore fishing, have become sunset industries. ‘My father, grandfather and great grandfather were all fishermen,’ says our taxi-driver-pilot. ‘It was a tough life and they only made 60 or 70 cents an hour. I never fancied the job.’

Was his chosen career any easier? ‘I’ve done it most of my life and it’s OK, but my children all work in the city. They aren’t going to want to do this when I retire,’ he says as he weaves between moored ocean-going trawlers inside the seawall at Cheung Chau.

Shaped like a dog’s bone, Cheung Chau lies in the channel between Lantau and Lamma and has the vibe of a seaside town. It’s a cluttered hotchpotch of three- and four-storey houses, flat roofs covered in awnings against the sun. The local speciality is a ping on (peace) steamed bun, stuffed with sweetened lotus seed paste. A bun tower, 18 metres high, followed by a bun-snatching challenge, marks the high point of an annual Bun Festival held on the ‘eighth day of the fourth moon’, which falls in late April or early May. It celebrates Cheung Chau’s deliverance from plague in the 18th century after an image of Pak Tai, the Taoist sea deity, was brought to the island.

Mrs Kee’s fish balls, threaded on bamboo skewers, are also worth celebrating and, quite possibly, divinely inspired. Tiny, smiling and generous, she has sold them from her Kam Wing Tai shop in the town square for 40 years. The process is fascinating. Large speckled sea eels pass through a shredder that removes the skins and bones at the same time. White meat is ground smooth, shaped, poached and fried. It’s everything a fish ball should be: fresh tasting, firm but not rubbery, with a lightly caramelised surface.

‘I buy the fish straight off the boats,’ she says, ‘but it’s getting harder. In the old days they would land 20 crates of eels. Now it’s five or six. And if the wind blows, there’s nothing.’ Business can’t be that bad, though. She exports her wares to ultra-picky Japan.

Whether it’s Tai O, Cheung Chau or Yung Shue Wan, there is one time of day when any half-decent eatery is packed – breakfast. Hong Kongers treat their daily dose of dim sum as a ritual. It’s the time to tuck into steamed dumplings, congee, fried rice or a bowl of noodles.

True, the variety and execution in the smart city restaurants is more sophisticated; there’s nowhere else in the world that serves dim sum like the Lung King Heen restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, the only Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong to hold three Michelin stars. The islands may not be catering for the country’s financial elite, but their market is just as discerning.

Stroll around the wet market in Cheung Chau and the meat hanging in rows has a natural elegance. Outside, in the Welcome Food Court, the beef soup with egg noodles is faultless. The shredded brisket is melting and gelatinous, the noodles still textured, the chilli sauce sharp but tasty. In its own way, the HK $30 (£2.50) meal is as good as the food at some of Hong Kong’s more venerable institutions. It rivals, for example, the cubes of roast suckling pig served at the Lei Gardens in Satin or the giant mantis prawns at Loaf On in Sai Kung, both restaurants dripping with hard-earned accolades.

The reason so many Hong Kongers go to the islands is to get away from it all. It gives them a break from a lifestyle where the drive to succeed is unrelenting. Looking back as the ferry pulls away from the city’s shimmering skyline allows them to see just what they’ve achieved. Sinking into island life, even for a short time, lets them rediscover what they’ve lost along the way.

DON’T MISS

Yeung Hau temple Built in 1699 and confusingly also known as the Hau Wong temple, it is dedicated to Yeung Leung-jit, a 13th-century general revered for his loyalty. See if you’re lucky by rubbing the bronze divination bowl, then head for one of the island’s cafés to sample steamed buns, lady cakes, sesame jelly and dau fu fa, a tofu dessert with delicious ginger syrup. Tai O, Lantau

Hung Shing Yeh beach A popular picnic spot at weekends and almost deserted during the week, this is a great place to relax once you get used to the sight of the power station across the bay. Also worth a visit is Sok Kwu Wan, a colourful fishing village with lots of seafood restaurants on the other side of the island. Lamma

Kam Wing Tai fishball shop It may only be a tiny establishment but it is the place to go for freshly prepared deepfried fish balls and fishcakes. 106 San Hing St, Cheung Chau

Sai Kung pier A feast for the eyes with fishermen selling their catch direct from their boats and incredible seafood displays outside restaurants and food stalls. Hire a kai-to (water taxi) to take you to one of the smaller islands for a picnic or a swim. Sai Kung