Walking Hong Kong (Kowloon, really)
A singular, rewarding town that's also hard (and hot) as hell
This is a walking newsletter, so I’ll start off with a clear, definitive, and apparently controversial statement: Hong Kong is not an easy city to walk. It is a disjointed archipelago of tiny dense neighborhoods separated by water, mountains, and concrete, each a tangle of arterial expressways, block-sized towers, and brutal infrastructure. Pedestrians, so thick you must merge with the passing hordes like a fish swept into a school, sit at the bottom of the transportation hierarchy, below bloated buses and the modern city’s plague: e-bikes. The weather, hot, humid, and oppressive, doesn’t help, unless you have a fetish for sunburn, heat exhaustion and continually damp clothes.
That’s not to say you need a car in Hong Kong, because you don’t, since you can make it to any point with only your legs and an octopus card1, and by that measure it’s walkable, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy, obvious, or necessarily enjoyable task.
As local aficionados will tell you, often in scolding soliloquies, because how dare you, a supposed walking specialist, be so ignorant, that the secret to getting around Hong Kong by foot is the labyrinth of malls, walkways, sky-bridges, and markets, most air-conditioned, which is true, and something you quickly discover by necessity or by letting the pedestrian swarm pull you along. The only way to cross that eight-lane fenced-in road, the one with monstrous semis pulling shipping containers, or buses whose center of gravity seems too high for the speed it takes the curves, is to go into the Hoi Tat Estate’s mall, up to the second floor, next to the Fairwoods diner (more on those later), then across the long bridge to the adjacent mall, where you can weave your way three floors down through a series of zigzagging escalators to the food court, where the four-block-long underground passageway to where you want to go is, assuming you take the passageway branching off at three o’clock on the compass face, not eleven, six, or nine.
That’s all true, but having to go up, around, over, and maybe under cars, or having to exhaust the entirety of prepositions to describe a path is not what walkable means, at least to this sixty-year-old body. Being a pedestrian in a city shouldn’t be the equivalent of a mouse in a maze, or a Super Mario Bros-style series of levels to complete, but in Hong Kong it is, which coupled with the density, heat, noise, and general sense of barely contained clamorous mayhem, makes it a punishing city to be in, one that’s aggressive, intense, and exhausting, one you feel you’re constantly battling2.
