We took the tram from North Point, through Central, and out to Kennedy Town — the long way across the island, in no hurry. It’s a narrow, top-heavy thing, with a staircase built for much smaller feet than ours, and it lurched at every set of points. We climbed to the wooden upper deck and took the seats at the front, which is the only place to sit.
For half an hour the city stopped rushing past and simply scrolled by — close and slow, at the level of its own life. We looked straight into first-floor windows and down over the market stalls the tram noses through, warm air moving through the open sides. The closeness is the thing you don’t expect: when two trams pass, leaning from the upper deck, you could almost high-five the passenger sliding by on the other — a hand’s breadth, and gone.
What stayed with us was the incongruity of it: a slow, century-old tram still allowed to rattle through some of the most relentlessly modern streets on earth — kept, plainly, because people love it and not because it’s quick. Cycling in central Hong Kong is barely possible, and we gathered that the bolder riders simply take to the tram tracks themselves, sharing the rails with the Ding Ding. In a city that will carry you to the mainland at 300 km/h, we’d picked the slowest thing on rails, and were glad of it.
We rode it for no reason other than the ride. Sometimes that’s the whole point.
The full picture — history, the six routes, the flat fare, and the Wong Kar-wai films it drifts through: The Kennedy Town Tram