Letters | Let’s face it, Hong Kong is just not that appealing to tourists
- Readers discuss whether Hong Kong should focus on tourism, the closure of Virgin Atlantic’s Hong Kong route, lunchtime rules for schoolchildren, and the debate over online learning
Early into my decade-long residency here, I concluded that Hong Kong was the opposite of the classic tourist hotspot: a nice place to live but one I wouldn’t want to visit. What do we have here that can’t be found in other places? Mountainous and verdant hiking trails, occasionally with sea views, at the end of which one can have a nice meal of southern Chinese cuisine.
That’s about it, and while it’s a pleasant enough experience, I cannot imagine that it’s sufficiently appealing to convince a large number of people to suffer hours cramped into a metal tube, especially if they must wear masks almost everywhere upon arrival and scan in and out of venues with various tracing apps on their phones. We have nice museums, restaurants and galleries but “nice” is not a commodity so rare that people would want to pay the prevailing airfare to seek out the Hong Kong variety of it when their own country almost surely offers a good substitute.
Wet markets are a fascinating destination but inimical to the Western-wannabe-foodie trope of wandering, perusing and inquiring from the shopkeepers what one can do with the exotic ingredients on offer. Hongkongers are too busy and too proud to play prop to some tourist trying to channel a latter-day Julia Child, who dreams of free and impromptu Cantonese cooking classes from benevolent strangers before returning to a rented flat to steam a grouper with ginger and spring onions and document it all on TikTok.
Run-of-the-mill holiday-making simply isn’t something that Hong Kong does well, and we shouldn’t waste our time or embarrass ourselves in trying unsuccessfully to do so.