17 Mar 2019

We flew out from Manila to Hong Kong on a quick four hour Air Asia flight – the first impression of Hong Kong already happened in the air before we arrived!

We were seated next to a lovely girl from Hong Kong and she straight away struck up a conversation about where we should go, what we should see, what we should try to eat and she was so excited to share the inside tips of her home we couldn’t help but getting even more exited for our one week stay for Chinese New Year!

It’s always been a dream to spend Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, however we found it’s a double edged sword of sorts. Celebrating the arrival of the year of the pig 2019 has been a whirlwind of busy streets, bright events and tourists, tourists and even more tourists.

You will experience all the New Year festivities such as the bright fireworks, colourful parades, dragon costumed staff entertaining tourists across the city, red Chinese lanterns illuminating the streets, New Years’ markets blooming with beautiful flowers and bustling with locals and tourists alike.

However if you want to get a feeling for the real Hong Kong we’d advise to consider going a different time. The streets and MTR’s are much busier than normal, still bearable due to the great infrastructure, but certainly busy – however all the tourist attractions are so ridiculously swamped that you will not be able to go see them or even if you do make it, will not very much enjoy them as they will be so overcrowded.

Hong Kong’s number one tourist destination Victoria Peak (or just “The Peak”) is reachable by tram or with the less iconic transport option by bus – however the queue to the tram tickets was estimated at a staggering three hours which would only give you the ticket, you then also need to queue up for the tram itself, to which the staff could not even estimate a waiting time – and bear in mind you’d need to get down from the Peak somehow also – queuing for hours again I guess?

Even pre-booked tickets had a waiting time of two hours just to be able to collect them. Despite Hong Kong being generally very well organised, the amount of tourists was definitely too much to handle for the staff and it was a complete mess – half the people didn’t even know what they were queuing for and there was not enough info.

Trying to get a bus was equally as impossible as the queue was already so long the staff were telling us that there would not be enough buses running during the day to even take the people up that were currently waiting – absolute madness!

Unfortunately we had similar experiences at the other attractions like Big Buddha – just too busy!

With a population of around 7.5M people, Hong Kong’s tourism board estimates tourist visitor numbers during the Chinese New Year celebration at around 1M –  so it’s no surprise it’s all a little crazy. Prices for accommodation increase dramatically during this period and are often booked out, so get your reservations in early if you feel Chinese New Year in Hong Kong is a must!  

We stayed at a lovely airbnb apartment hosted by very helpful and friendly French architect Baptiste with our own kitchen! Most of you will not understand the feeling of luxury you get when you finally have a fridge available! It’s really the small things in life you miss most as a backpacker. Views were great, location was great, host was great – we really felt at home!

Hong Kong is such an interesting city with so much to offer – modern yet never lost its historical and cultural soul, great vibes, friendly locals and so many different places to discover!

We feel like we want to come back again to experience more Hong Kong vibes away from the Chinese New Year craziness and take our time exploring this amazing city!

For now though we are off to Cambodia – Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Oink Oink!