Adam Au @Executive Sports Challenge

Day one felt like a homecoming. I started in Kennedy Town, slipped past the tram terminus and the old piers, and traced the waterfront to Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park before looping back. Finished with a gelato near the new Kennedy Town Praya street sign. Typhoon signal 3 was up, the air thick with late‑summer heat, and the promenade wore that pearly, wind‑rippled light Hong Kong gets before a squall. It didn’t stop me. If anything, the weather sharpened the edges—salt in the air, gulls riding crosswinds, runners bargaining with the clouds.

I used to do this at lunch, obsessively, counting steps like beads on a string—in my worn‑and‑torn leather shoes, no less. Treadmills never stuck; a moving belt feels like a half‑truth. Pavement gives you context. Streets have memory. Out here, the old and new keep talking to each other. You feel it in Western District—in warehouses turned cafes, tramlines under glass towers, and a distant hint of the new Kai Tak Sports Park across in Kowloon, glimpsed between hoardings and skyscrapers. Scaffolding and cranes along the harbourfront sketch a future against a skyline that doesn’t sit still.

The harbour did its best impression of proximity. Kowloon felt close enough to touch—ferries stitching the distance, container ships idling, the water shifting from slate to steel to green. It’s the kind of view that shrinks your world and enlarges it at the same time. This is my home. Love it, plain and simple.

People ask why I like walking. The answer is unromantic and true: it’s the easiest, most soothing way I know to reset. One foot in front of the other, Audible in my ears, a steady drumbeat of steps that makes room for thought without demanding it. Progress measured, not rushed. Much like life: you don’t have to conquer the city to know it; you just keep moving through it.

Kwai Tsing, thrum and graft

Started at Kwai Fong Station and let the morning spill me into Kwai Chung Plaza—my favorite hangout. Covid or not, this place is always packed: snack stalls and old‑school fish balls, escalators jammed, bubble‑tea sugar haze, sneaker shops stacked to the ceiling, aunties negotiating over phone cases like futures traders. I cut through to the lobby, glowing with posters and popcorn salt, then slipped back to street level where delivery trolleys ticked across tiles like metronomes.

Kwai Tsing wears its work on the surface. You feel it in container yards shouldering the horizon, flyovers ribbing the sky, and the steady tide of shift changes. I took the footbridges, elevated walkways stitching over Castle Peak Road, a river of traffic underfoot. Rails and roads braided around me—moving parts you usually blur past from a car window. A vantage point I’d never bothered to stop and appreciate.

I kept it flat and aimed for the water—the Rambler Channel promenade—industry on one side, quiet on the other. Fishermen with patient lines. Joggers pacing the railings. The water doing its slate‑to‑green mood shift. Stonecutters Bridge pulls your eye whether you want it to or not, that elegant span threading container ships and tug wakes.

Across the channel, the towers of Tsing Yi keep watch, trucks flashing by on the viaduct like quick thoughts. The promenade isn’t perfect—poignant smells drift in places, and the nearness of the Tsuen Wan Slaughterhouse throws a stark, ironic contrast against the postcard bridge. Industry is not just backdrop here; it’s in the air.

I looped back to Kwai Tsing Theatre and a small scoop of ice cream as reward. The foyer felt like a civic heartbeat—posters for Cantonese opera next to contemporary dance, teenagers rehearsing steps in the glass, ushers comparing notes about a sold‑out weekend. I love these places: the city’s nerve endings, where logistics make room for culture and the day’s exhale happens under stage lights.

Why walk here? Same answer as always: it resets the dial. One foot, then the next; the hum of buses, the click of trolley wheels, a bridge breeze cutting through diesel heat. Audible in my ears until the street took over and I hit pause to let the ambient thrum do the talking. Progress measured, not rushed. A district usually seen from an expressway suddenly becomes legible at 5 km/h.

Third entry: Sham Shui Po, the old vs. the new

Started at Lai Chi Kok—a place that still feels personal because it is. I grew up here. Mornings meant schoolbags and bakery trays; weekends meant plastic stools, soy milk, and the clatter of dim sum lids. The blocks around the station were my first map—footbridges as shortcuts, back lanes as playgrounds, lift lobbies as echo chambers. Even now, the smell of steamed rice rolls or a whiff of engine oil pulls me straight back.

I took Castle Peak Road, that busy industrial spine where the old meets the new. Low‑rise walk‑ups shoulder next to fresh single‑tower inserts; scaffold and signage knit the gaps. Gentrification moves here step by step, but it hasn’t stripped the charm. The textures hold. Metal shutters wear hand‑painted numbers, tailors post tape‑measure hours, and above it all, new glass tries to learn the light.

I passed the Hong Kong Spinners Industrial building—a concrete witness to the garment industry’s rise, wobble, and reinvention. Brick, lintels, and long windows that once measured work by daylight. Decades of textiles in those walls; if you pause on the pavement, you can still hear the mill’s ghost rhythm under the traffic.

I cut through to the old arcades—Golden and its neighbors—time‑capsules that refuse a full handover to digital. Solder smoke and CRT ghosts in the mind’s eye; parts bins neat as apothecaries. Then onto Apliu Street—Hong Kong’s electronics heaven—buzzing like a living catalog: stalls stacked with every phone case known to humankind, radios and lenses laid out like chess pieces, cables coiled like noodles, shopkeepers calling specs in quick Cantonese.

Sham Shui Po wears the city’s working memory: secondhand stalls, pattern shops, fabric alleys, new cafes daring to soften the edges. A place where utility meets improvisation. Signboards layer like palimpsests; neon survivors blink alongside LED. You can read decades in a single block.

I drifted toward West Kowloon Centre, the weekend magnet—remittance counters, budget salons, racks of snacks and spices—where foreign workers gather for a good deal and a taste of home. Laughter in a dozen languages. Phones out, stories traded, bags of groceries slung like trophies.

Why walk here? Because this is Hong Kong without a filter. The city’s heartbeat comes through at human speed—barter and banter, repairs and reinvention. You learn what stays, what shifts, and how both can coexist on the same street.

Fourth entry: Tsim Sha Tsui → Mong Kok, along the spine

“The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together.” — William H. Whyte

Nathan Road is Hong Kong’s pulse. During Covid I watched it go hollow: neon without a crowd, taxis without fares. Now it’s back, packed, humming again.

I started at Ocean Terminal and skipped the postcard stops such as the Clock Tower and Victoria Dockside, letting the harbour sit in the periphery. I drifted toward the start of Nathan Road, step by step. I passed the promenade edge and the gate of Kowloon Park, resisting the shortcut through green. I wanted the street. Along the promenade, those shops with wry, old‑school English names still linger, selling fashion made elsewhere under imperial monikers. Alexander III sits next to Caesar, a faint echo of colonial Hong Kong.

Jordan to Yau Ma Tei is my old school run. Parts feel held in amber: the same corners, the same snack smells, the same bus‑stop choreography. Hong Kong’s connective tissue shows here with footbridges, alleys, MTR exits, and minibus bays. Everything is within reach of everything else.

I took a small detour into Tin Hau Temple, where fortune sticks rattle and soothsayers swap futures in quick Cantonese. Incense hangs low. Outside, the Yau Ma Tei Police Station stands as a landmark in its own right, Edwardian bones against LED skies. Then the Yau Ma Tei Theatre and the old cinema circuit, one of the few places still sheltering independent films.

The old bookshops nearby pulled me in. Local histories and pocket poetry, dog‑eared manuals and tabloids. The smell of paper and dust is something you can’t download. From there, Shanghai Street unfolds as an entire artery of kitchenware: woks, cleavers, steamers, and ladles, enough to open a Cantonese kitchen anywhere on earth.

I looped to the Yau Ma Tei Fruit Market, designated Grade II in 2009, spilling across Reclamation Street and Waterloo Road like a working museum. Drivers curse the choke points, yet vendors keep tempo regardless: pre‑dawn crates, noon shouts, midnight handcarts. It is busy because it has to be.

From there I set my sights on Langham Place, Mong Kok’s north star. It is the tallest in the cluster, a young‑at‑heart mall with an escalator that feels like a runway. It rises from wet‑market grit with a charming oddity, stitched into the street rather than sealed off from it.

Mong Kok remains the heartbeat of Hong Kong’s younger generation: sneakers, side quests, side hustles. Energy that does not ask permission.

Why walk this line? Because Nathan Road tells you if the city is thriving or tired. Today it felt alive: shops arguing for attention, traffic threading needles, people moving with intent.

Fifth entry: Sha Tin — bridges, bikes, and bright red incense

I began at The Wai, the brand‑new MTR megamall that now looms over Sha Tin’s lower skyline. Its dark, glassy exterior reads almost monastic against the pale concrete and pastel housing blocks around it. Inside, escalators rise like airport jetways, feeding commuters into an atrium of polished stone and curated calm. Step outside and the tone shifts: the whirr of bike chains, the thump of basketballs on painted courts, the midday shuffle of prams and school uniforms. Sha Tin is stitched together by overbridges and an underground cycleway; of all Hong Kong’s districts, this one seems to believe in bicycles not as novelty but as a viable spine. You feel it in the steady cadence of riders—delivery workers, retirees, teenagers—moving in parallel with buses and foot traffic.

I cut from the mall into older textures: Sun Yuet House and the cluster of public‑housing blocks carrying the patina of decades. Laundry lines bloom like flags. Sexagenarians claim the shaded benches with newspapers and quiet Cantonese. Near the estate sits a mushroom‑shaped cooked‑food kiosk—rounded canopy, scuffed counters, plastic stools that have weathered too many summers. It’s an anchor point that refuses to be displaced by glossy chains, a reminder that convenient stores do not replace community.

From there, Che Kung Temple pulls you almost magnetically. The approach is a gradual flood of red: pillars, banners, the shimmer of lacquer and gilt. On a hot day the incense is not just a smell but a texture, a visible veil that slow‑walks the crowd. The temple’s geometry—the symmetry of its courtyards, the way roofs stack like steps toward the sky—creates an engineered serenity even when it’s bustling. Stand in the shade, listen to temple gossip, and watch the collective choreography: bow, circle, wish, exhale.

Leaving the temple, I followed the Shing Mun River promenade. This is where Sha Tin takes a deep breath. The path widens, and the city’s soundscape thins to bicycle bells, soft conversation, and the occasional skate wheel clicking over a seam. The river is not dramatic, but it is steadfast, a corridor of light and motion that gives the district its sense of scale.

The promenade carries you to the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, a building with a dignified, almost scholastic presence—brick, symmetry, a retro‑inflected silhouette that feels intentional rather than nostalgic. Inside, the air cools and the pace lowers. For many, the magnet is the Jin Yong Gallery. Panels and manuscripts reconstruct entire moral universes: codes of honor, mountain hermitages, sect rivalries, the decisive flick of a sleeve. For those who grew up with these novels, it feels less like an exhibition than a return. As a teenager, I devoured wuxia here and learned the cadence of written Chinese; Jin Yong remains a favorite, a national treasure.

The museum’s wider galleries round out the day: Cantonese opera alongside pop culture—posters and costumes from classic films, music ephemera, television icons—ink paintings that fold mountains into a few strokes, and city relics that trace Hong Kong’s shift from handmade to high‑speed. It is a house of cultural memory that invites you to linger.

Why walk here? Because Sha Tin shows Hong Kong’s engineered grace: pragmatic and breathable, devotional and everyday. It is a district where modern retail sits within sight of public housing; where a temple keeps time with commuters; where a river gives you space to remember what the city is built upon. Bikes, bridges, and stories—held together in an easy loop that reveals more if you go a little slower.

Sixth entry: Tuen Mun — wind, rails, and a Saturday court

I started on the Tuen Mun Promenade, where the autumn breeze comes in steady bands. Almost too windy, but in the best way. The air feels rinsed. Across the water, Gold Coast sits like a sun-bleached postcard, and beyond it the airport is a faint silhouette, planes sliding in and out like punctuation against the sky. The scale here is different: horizon, harbor, sky, everything given room to breathe.

At the side of the promenade, the old Kai Fat mall keeps company with the newer MTR-run Ocean Walk. Mechanical versus old: one all polished escalators and clean lines, the other a little scuffed, a little stubborn. Outside the older strip, a café spills onto the pavement under willow trees, chairs angled toward the sea, an autumn picture in slow motion. Next to it, the Light Rail glides past, Tuen Mun’s veins, steel on steel, soft motor hum, doors chirping open and shut as it threads courtyards and crossings through weekday errands and weekend drift. The Light Rail fits Tuen Mun’s zeitgeist: built for short hops, street level, threading housing estates, running on an honour-based, gate-free system. Convenience plus speed.

I climbed to the rooftop courts near Siu Hei Court. Kids everywhere: crossover dribbles, small arguments settled with rock-paper-scissors, the universal language of playground rules. It pulled me straight back. Organized sports take up most weekends now, with booked pitches, fixed rosters, fees and fixtures, but these courts taught a different rhythm: make it, take it; losers off; call the score loud so the next team hears. One point at a time, winner stays. A Saturday well spent. It still is, for the kids learning pace and space, and for anyone on the railing, letting the noise and the wind take over.

From there I drifted toward Butterfly Beach. The path slides past housing blocks and a lattice of Light Rail stops, then opens to the water again. Butterfly is more lived in than pretty: barbecue pits sending up thin blue smoke, families staking out tables with foil trays and chatter, cyclists coasting through at a considerate clip. The sand is coarse, the sea a workable gray-green, the breakwater dotted with anglers working patient lines. Freight vessels angle across the horizon, steady and indifferent, and the wind carries salt, charcoal, and something sweet from a cooler nearby. It’s not a postcard beach; it’s a holiday beach, functional and communal, good for an unhurried hour and a slow walk home.

Why walk here? Because Tuen Mun runs on useful contrasts: sea wind and rail glide, an old mall holding ground beside a new one, improvised games alongside scheduled leagues. It moves at a human clip, with wide views and small rituals—dribbles, charcoal smoke—stitched along a shoreline you can follow without checking a map. And there’s a quiet social contract at work in the Light Rail’s honour-based, gate-free system and zonal tickets: a small act of trust that fits the district’s everyday rhythm.

North District — edge, river, in-between

North District read like a hinge. Small industry still lived here—metal workshops, packaging sheds, cold stores—tucked beside low‑rise village houses and tiled clan halls. Close to China, but the aura was unmistakably Hong Kong: green metal shutters half open, plastic stools under awnings, a cha chaan teng named after a Stephen Chow character that knew your order before you sat. Even the taxis said it out loud. They were green here—far from the usual red—and the color echoed the place itself: layered greens of hills, banyans, and the lush margins around heritage sites.

I started at the Beas River Jockey Club for a wedding. The mood shifted: clipped lawns that measured colonial geometry in the alignments. It felt like the most British corner of the district, a cool line of water and grass that calmed the edges. The whole place sat in a gap, almost slotted between a newer Hong Kong and China across the fence—border lights on one side, village dogs on the other, freight horns somewhere in between.

The trail’s history sat in the stones. Lung Yeuk Tau was Tang clan heartland—settlements from late Yuan and Ming through Qing, fortified against raids and aligned by feng shui with hills at the back and water at the feet. Walled villages kept gates and watchtowers; ancestral halls anchored lineage and ritual. Restorations came in waves—first necessity, later grants—so original gray brick sat beside careful repairs: defense, devotion, daily order.

Context made it sing. Beyond a gatehouse, a small construction site hummed. Over the next wall, new low‑rise blocks stood like a second horizon, glass and beige panels catching stray sun. The contrast worked—not heritage in a bubble, but heritage in a neighborhood. A villager swept; a courier scanned a parcel; a school group counted off in twos. A shrine faced a car park. A temple looked across to a slope of new trees. Time didn’t cancel; it layered.

On the way back I detoured through Luen Wo Market. Post‑war market‑town bones remained—arcades, signboards, stalls spilling greens, the clatter of cleavers. Once the commercial heart for villages around Fanling, its rhythm lingered: hawkers calling prices, a herbalist measuring roots on a brass scale. You could taste the district in a bowl of noodles and read its memory in shutter patina.

Needing a break, I drifted to Green Code Plaza. Local malls showed how people lived. This one was practical, not precious. A supermarket pushed crates of choy sum and mandarins to the threshold. A seamstress kept a corner by the escalator, tape like a necklace, school uniforms waiting for Monday.

You could read a neighborhood by how long people lingered. Here they lingered just enough. Not a destination mall, not a transit blur, but a ledger of needs met and errands crossed. On Sundays, helpers gathered in shaded corners, phones on speaker, harmonies rising over picnic tarps—laughter, songs from home—an unmissable Hong Kong chorus. Overhead, the AC hum matched the minibus rank outside.

Before I closed, I cut across to North District Park. A pond with fat carp nosing the surface, red footbridges, willows throwing broad shade. Elderly couples walked laps; groups shifted like a slow tide. On the courts, teenagers played volleyball, cheering points and misses alike—high‑fives, mock groans, someone filming on a phone. It felt Gen Alpha in the best way: open, unserious, claiming new‑town space as their own. The park gathered the district’s mix in one frame: tower blocks above tree lines, a soccer pitch buzzing with shouts, a pavilion where cards slapped on stone tables and a radio played the horse races every Sunday, echoing the jockey club nearby. Two worlds sharing the same longitude. Wind through trees, cut grass, a brief calm before errands resumed.

Stepping back out, the border returned in small ways: a sweep of hills that looked north, a line of lights that said there was a fence even when you couldn’t see it. North District held its balance—industry next to clan halls, heritage under high‑rises, a colonial river cutting a quiet line while trucks grumbled past. If you wanted to understand it, you walked the trail, then the market, then the mall, and ended in the park.

Why walk here: to watch history and the daily list talk to each other, and in the kids’ volleyball joy hear a future Hong Kong, already practicing.