The first sight of Hong Kong’s apartment towers genuinely stops you. Arriving at night, the road from the airport runs beside a wall of light — a forest of blocks stretching from the shore to the mountains, thirty or forty storeys as a rule, sixty or seventy in places. After Auckland and Sydney, the sprawling cities we’d come from earlier in the trip, the contrast is total. Tall towers exist everywhere; on this scale, and this tightly packed, almost nowhere else does.
It is hard to picture the lives shaped by that vertical world — thousands of people in a footprint smaller than a football pitch, all competing for the same shops, the same buses, the same trains, the same scraps of open space. The density is close to unreal.
We felt a small, comic version of that competition ourselves. Being Sunday, we did dim sum in Tsim Sha Tsui, walked the crowds down Nathan Road, and went deep into the Sham Shui Po markets on the hunt for Beyblades — the spinning-top battling toy the local children are gripped by, played out in fierce little contests on the pavements outside the shops. I had come with a list of exactly which one to buy for our grandson, and was beaten to it, every time, by faster and more determined ten-year-olds. Not my finest hour — and a fitting lesson, in a city where everyone is competing for the same scarce thing. We finished with a Korean meal in Lok Fu, a packed MTR back, and a walk home beneath the towers. A good day.