A month after coming off the high of my Colombia trip, I had a sudden bout of boredom wash over me.
And the only remedy I could think of was travel.
The problem was that travel, at that point, was starting to rocket up in price. Flights were getting expensive, hotels were going back to normal, and the weird little window of post-COVID travel deals was starting to close.
Right when I thought travel might be out of the picture for the rest of the year, I came across a flight promo with Cathay Pacific and Hopper.
Hong Kong tourism was at an all-time low after reopening post-COVID, so to help boost tourism and the economy, they partnered with Cathay Pacific to give out thousands of free tickets.
Through the promo, I immediately signed up.
And surprisingly, I won a buy-one-get-one-free ticket.
I immediately called Brendan, told him the situation, and we booked the tickets to Hong Kong.
And because we apparently could not just go to one place like normal, emotionally regulated human beings, we also chose to take the opportunity to fly to Taiwan and Japan while we were already in Asia.
China required a visa at the time, so it wasn’t really an option for that trip.
Pretty soon, Ryan joined as well.
Before we knew it, the same trio from Cancun was back together.
The A-Team had returned.
Older, slightly more travelled, and probably still not as prepared as we should have been.
The Plan
To begin with, our round-trip tickets were to Hong Kong and back, so we booked some very tiny rooms with Wi-Fi where we could work from, sleep, and spend a few days walking around to see what the city was like.
You might be wondering why I even cared about Hong Kong.
The honest answer is that my reasons were very specific.
Jackie Chan, who I grew up watching, filmed a majority of his Chinese movies in Hong Kong. The martial art I had trained in for the previous five years, Wing Chun, was also tied to Hong Kong. Originally Foshan, China, yes, but students later moved to Hong Kong, continued the practice, and helped spread it before it reached the West.
Outside of those two things, I didn’t have a deep connection to Hong Kong food at the time. And since the main language in Hong Kong is Cantonese, I didn’t have much to fall back on linguistically either.
My Mandarin was already limited enough.
Cantonese looked at my confidence and said, “Cute.”
But hey.
Half-priced flights to Asia. Two weeks in Japan. A chance to explore another place while we were already on that side of the world.
Why not?
Arrival
After getting off our 15-hour flight, we rode the subway from the airport to the city centre.
It was amazing looking across the nighttime waters and seeing the giant, strangely shaped buildings filled with flashing colours. It was one hell of a skyline.
But more than anything, it triggered this sudden feeling in me that I was very, very far from home.
Hong Kong is not an independent country, but a Special Administrative Region of China, and that status seemed to give it this immediate melting-pot feeling. Food stalls and restaurants of every cuisine were scattered across the city centre. People of all complexions were taking selfies, walking around, eating, shopping, and moving through the city like it was one giant glowing organism.
You could tell many of them were tourists from nearby countries.
Once we got to our hotel, as always, we threw our bags into our rooms, showered up, and met downstairs to try some street food.
Because apparently, this is the sacred traveller ritual.
Land exhausted.
Pretend you’re not exhausted.
Eat something immediately.
The Streets
Outside of India, this was my first time in Asia, so I immediately assumed the street food would be amazing.
And I wasn’t wrong.
If I had to chalk up the best street food I’ve had up until writing this, I’d probably say Taiwan or Morocco were the strongest. But where Hong Kong also shined was its ambience.
Brendan and I ordered some Tsingtao and pork belly skewers from a nearby stall. They gave us a giant bottle with some glasses and about ten skewers.
The meat was fine.
The flavour was spicy.
But really, what made it great was the scene.
The sweat beading off our heads in the humid Hong Kong night. The spice building up as we washed it down with ice-cold beer. The shop owners nearby yelling in what sounded like love, but was probably a mixture of love, stress, and hate, to their coworkers in Cantonese.
The food was good.
But the street did the heavy lifting.
That’s something you learn when you travel enough. Sometimes the meal is the meal, and sometimes the meal is the street, the heat, the noise, the beer, the language you don’t understand, and the small feeling that you’ve finally stepped outside your own life for a bit.
That night, it was all of it.
Neon
After eating different types of skewers and getting adequately tipsy, we went on to explore the rest of the city centre.
It felt like walking through Times Square.
Skincare ads we couldn’t understand.
NewJeans posters everywhere.
Spas, both legitimate and not, on every block.
Hong Kong was colourful, cramped, lively, bright, loud, and slightly overwhelming.
For the first time, I started to get it.
And what made it even cooler was the fact that we had gone to Hong Kong on October 28, just days before Halloween.
Mickey Mice and roadsters made an entrance onto the street every three minutes.
My mind was boggled seeing such huge crowds of people walking through the streets. And every once in a while, there would be a high-quality Hatsune Miku costume cutting through the chaos.
This would have been frustrating as hell in Portugal or Spain.
But in Hong Kong?
For whatever reason, it was awesome.
Maybe because the city already felt designed for sensory overload. Maybe because the lights, density, ads, crowds, and costumes all blended together into one big neon fever dream.
After admiring the flashing streets, we got McDonald’s and KFC to see what was different.
For one, there were Ovaltine pies.
If you haven’t had Ovaltine, it’s a malted wheat and milk drink, and it’s basically a staple of every Asian kid’s life. This was my first time having it at McDonald’s alongside fried chicken, and it was pretty alright.
The beers probably helped.
And man, everything had a picture of NewJeans on it.
It’s interesting watching the eras of K-pop go right by you. At that point, I thought Blackpink was still the newest thing, and I was quickly reminded that my age was as old as my memory.
Daylight
The next few days in Hong Kong were also nice, although the congested nature of the night, which I had enjoyed so much, quickly became one of my least favourite parts of the day.
At night, the density felt electric.
During the day, streets filled with smog and cigarette smoke quickly turned the mystical nature of Hong Kong into a congested metro I wanted to escape.
Speaking of escape, that is exactly what we did.
Remember that skyline I mentioned when we landed? Part of the reason it was on the other side of the water is because Hong Kong is made up of multiple pieces of land. One of those pieces is an island.
So that is where we went.
As two 25-year-old guys, Brendan and I wanted to see what the nightclubs were like in Asia, so we headed over to the subway.
And by the way, can I just say that subways are so nice in Asia — and really anywhere that isn’t Toronto.
People line up in the right place. They make way for passengers to leave and enter. Everything is organized.
A miracle, basically.
The TTC could learn a thing or seven.
Halloween
Once we got to the island, we stopped to grab some Cantonese soup noodles and fish balls.
Not what I thought I ordered.
But that’s what speaking broken Mandarin and nodding too much gets you.
It was fine.
Then we hit the streets.
Honestly, Hong Kong Island felt a lot like North America or Europe in some ways. It was packed, the nightclubs had foreigners from all over, and Brendan and I bought two bottles of soju from a local convenience store for about three Canadian dollars each to drink as we walked through the crowds.
Without realizing it, we were there on Halloween night.
And so were the costumes.
It was awesome.
It felt like a cross between Comic-Con and a Halloween house party, with people dressed as anime characters, horror movie antagonists, joke costumes, and everything in between.
Everyone was drunk and taking pictures with the costumed people.
Brendan and I even took part in it.
Now, I don’t exactly remember it, but I also picked up a costume that night.
No idea what the logic was.
The night had taken control.
Anyway, we stayed out and watched the crowds go by, amazed at all the costumes and the people expressing themselves. It felt refreshing to see people enjoy the night without worrying too much about how they were being perceived.
In any case, it was fun.
A Different Breed
Over the next few days, I took to the public parks to get my steps in.
And of course, milk tea.
I found myself reminiscing on scenes from Jaden Smith’s Karate Kid movie and Jackie Chan’s The Young Master.
What really hit me was how healthy the older people in the city seemed.
They all focused on stretching, walking, and herbal teas or snacks. Even while smoking cigarettes, a man would still be bicycling, walking, stretching, or playing chess in the park.
A strange contrast.
Not perfect, obviously. Cigarettes are still cigarettes. But there was movement everywhere. Routine everywhere. People maintaining themselves in public like it was just part of life.
It made aging there feel less like a slow shutdown and more like a daily practice.
I respected that.
Back home, aging often feels hidden away. Like once someone hits a certain age, society quietly moves them into the background. But in those parks, older people were still present, still moving, still stretching, still playing, still talking.
Still part of the city.
That stuck with me.
Red Tea Café
One of the restaurants I stopped by, outside of the Kowloon restaurant where I tried shark fin soup — not that tasty, by the way — was Red Tea Café.
I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of ordering, but I saw the word “truffle” unmistakably.
Naturally, I ordered it.
I also got condensed milk and milk tea, because if I was going to make random food decisions, I was at least going to make them confidently.
While there, I met an older man who shared the meal with me while reminiscing about his younger days biking through the hills of Hong Kong and travelling for business.
He was a cool and wise gentleman who specifically reminded me to take care of myself.
And see, I say “reminiscing,” but he was still biking at the young age of 68.
Crazy.
There’s something humbling about meeting someone older who makes you realize you’ve been treating basic cardio like a Greek tragedy.
The Side Quest
On the final day, I went on a pre-scheduled side quest.
Back in Toronto, there was a shoe store I would shop at, and the store manager, Alex, was actually from Hong Kong. He was building a scalable future for his kids while working across the sea from them.
There was something about that I respected immediately. It’s one thing to work hard for yourself, but it’s another thing entirely to live away from your family, across an ocean, quietly stacking bricks for their future. That kind of sacrifice doesn’t always come with dramatic music or a standing ovation. Sometimes it just looks like a guy running a store in Toronto, thinking about his kids in Hong Kong.
So when he heard I was going there, he asked me to drop off some shoes for his daughter.
In what world could any guy ever say no to that kind of side quest?
Without hesitation, I agreed.
And honestly, it made the trip feel cooler. There’s something fun about travelling with a small mission. It gives the day a bit of structure, like suddenly you’re not just wandering around eating skewers and buying random anime figures — although, to be clear, I was also doing that. But now there was purpose. A delivery. A handoff. A little international errand.
Very Jason Bourne if Jason Bourne carried sneakers and had no idea where he was going.
The time had finally come, so I grabbed the shoes and went to a local mall near the hotel to drop them off.
The person who met me was an unassuming gentleman, about 5’6”, and a close friend of Alex.
What Alex didn’t tell me was that this man was also a multi-dan black belt in karate and a local sensei in Kowloon.
Even more important, he was an anime fan.
That’s the kind of detail that immediately changes a person’s threat level in my head. One second, he’s just a polite guy helping with a shoe drop-off. The next, he’s a martial arts sensei who probably knows how to fold me into a carry-on bag, but also might want to talk about anime.
Through our broken translation, he picked up the name of an anime, and our friendship blossomed.
That was one of those small travel moments I’ve come to love: two people who barely share a language still finding a way to connect through something oddly specific. Not politics. Not work. Not anything deep at first.
Just anime.
The universal diplomacy of nerds.
We walked through an underground and overground mall known for anime and gaming paraphernalia. I picked up some action figures and Pokémon cards. The whole place felt like a maze built specifically to test the financial discipline of grown men who still know their favourite starter Pokémon.
Unbeknownst to me, Brendan had also come to the same mall a few days earlier.
I spent the rest of the night trying a Cantonese-style buffet that felt a lot like Panda Express.
I didn’t realize that format came from Cantonese food, but I guess it makes sense.
Leaving
With that, Hong Kong slowly came to an end.
The next day, we walked over to the subway to make our way to our flight to Taiwan.
What I will say, though, is that this would not be my last time in Hong Kong.
The reason I’m not going to get into it too much is because the next time I was in Kowloon was on the return leg of the round trip. By then, I had gotten either food poisoning or a stomach virus before landing, so most of my remaining time was spent inside.
I did briefly walk through the crowds over to Pizza Hut to test my limits.
And failed.
So yeah.
Hong Kong was great.
It was humid, crowded, loud, neon, efficient, confusing, nostalgic, and strangely comforting. It gave me Jackie Chan flashbacks, Wing Chun associations, pork skewers, milk tea, Halloween chaos, a karate sensei side quest, and the feeling that Asia was about to become a very serious problem for my bank account.
Hong Kong was not the whole trip.
It was the opening act.
On to Taiwan.