China; Friday, 10 April, 2026

If yesterday had been spent on Hong Kong Island, then today was going to be focused on Kowloon, the peninsular that’s attached to Mainland China on the opposite side of Victoria Harbour to the Island. After breakfast I headed over to the metro station and caught the East Railway all the way out to Sha Tin.

From the station it was a short walk to reach the path up to the Ten Thousand Buddha’s Monastery, my first stop of the day. From the start of the climb up to the monastery it’s pretty obvious where it gets its name from as the path is lined by a series of golden statues all in different poses and expressions, though through the climb up there are less than 500 statues, but after visiting the monastery there is no doubt to their claim to the ten thousand.

After visiting the monastery, I headed back down to Sha Tin station and made my way over to my next stop of the day the Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple. This is one of the largest temples in the city and is very impressive with its scale and the number of buildings. Equally impressive is the large garden attached to the temple that you can also wander around.

It was then a quick one stop hop on the metro to Diamond Hills and the Nan Lian Garden and the attached Chi Lin Nunnary. I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the Nan Lin Garden before heading up past the lotus ponds and into the Nunnery itself which you are welcome to look around, but there is a strict photo and video ban inside the temple buildings themselves.

Back to Diamond Hills metro station and one more stop on the metro took me to Kai Tak station where I managed to time it perfectly to catch a bus onto my next stop, the Sky Garden. Much like the Highline in New York the Kai Tak Sky Garden is a modern elevated garden on the site of a former piece of transport infrastructure. In the case of New York it’s an abandoned railway line, in Kai Tak the Garden is elevated above the site where, until 1998, jumbo jets slammed into the ground at the end of what is routinely held up as the scariest approach and landing there has ever been – it even had it’s own name, the Kai Tak Heart Attack.

With turbulent winds coming off the harbour generally preventing landings from the south it meant that planes had to fly directly towards the mountains to the north of the runway and once they’d lined up with a visual reference (the Checkerboard hill) execute a very sharp 47 degree right hand turn below 650ft above the ground passing just 140 feet above the Kowloon high-rises before finally reaching the runway. And that all had to be done manually without the assistance of autopilot or Instrument Landing Systems. Needless to say, this was one of the main reasons behind re-siting the airport to reclaimed land 30km west in the west of the New Territories.

Since the airports closure almost the whole site has been redeveloped with the Sky Garden forming the only real reference to the site’s historic past – the path has the 13/31 markings at either end in reference to the runway’s old markings. Though the site is still home to international traffic as the very southern end of the runway is now the Hong Kong Cruise Terminal.

I walked the length of the park before catching the bus from the cruise terminal back into Kowloon where I stopped for a bite to eat and then back over to the Ferry pier to catch the ferry across Victoria Harbour to Wan Chai and then the short walk back to the hotel and my bed.