Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a city that performs as a country — a dense, vertical, Cantonese-speaking territory of more than seven million people pressed onto a sliver of the southern Chinese coast, governed under its own administrative system and its own appetite for reinvention.

The skyline of Hong Kong Island and the Victoria Harbour crossing are the images everyone arrives with, and they hold up. But the city's quieter argument is how fast it empties out: much of the territory is undeveloped, and the country parks, the ridge walks like Dragon's Back, and the outlying islands — Lamma, Cheung Chau, the Big Buddha on Lantau — sit a short ferry or train ride from the densest part of the city.

The food is the constant. Hong Kong is one of the great eating cities, from the dim sum trolleys to the dai pai dong street kitchens, and it rewards the traveller who treats a meal as the itinerary rather than an interruption to it.

October through December and March to April are the comfortable windows — warm, dry and clear of both the summer humidity and the typhoon season.