How to Escape Hong Kong in 3 Hours
We seek out the best weekend trips away from the city.
Hong Kong: It’s fun, it’s sexy, it has banging har gao. But it’s also crowded, small, and feels oh-so-good to leave. So here’s a list of the best trips you can take at a moment’s notice. But this isn’t your grandmother’s vacation guide—this is a surgical strike, meaning:
- We’re only choosing places you can do over the weekend (sorry, Bali: a 10-hour round trip flight isn’t going to cut it).
- We’re only choosing places with semi-intelligent flight times (sorry, Hanoi: 2pm flights with a 10am Sunday return just isn’t maximizing our pho time).
- We’re only choosing places you can reach quickly from the airport (sorry, Tokyo: ain’t nobody got time for a two-hour shuttle).
So, this weekend: Buy the ticket at 5pm, hop on the Airport Express, HKID your way through immigration and bam! Three hours later you’re somewhere awesome. You just need to decide what your own kind of awesome is…
So you’re telling us that in the same time it takes to go to Macau, you can be at a place with awesome food, cheap drinks, and people who are actually nice, not Hong Kong nice (i.e. “Hi good to meet you do you have a lot of money?”). Sign us up. Taipei is a dream: It’s centrally located with great bars and restaurants. The city is easy to navigate even if your Chinese sucks worse than the old white guy they brought from New York to run your company’s office. And people are nice! If you walk up to an impossibly tall girl wearing short shorts in a club in Taipei and say “hi,” she’ll smile and say “hi” back. Couple that with cheap drinks and not running into the same people all the time and you’ll be back for more.
Do: We’re here to party, but we’re here to eat and drink too. Yeah, you can go to Din Tai Fung in Hong Kong, but the first ever branch in Taipei is so much better. Down 10 xiaolongbao and you’re set up for the night. Also check out Raw, chef André Chiang’s restaurant serving up modern Taiwanese cuisine. Taiwan’s in the midst of a culinary revolution, and Raw is part of the new guard.
Din Tai Fung, 194 Xinyi Rd. (Section 2), Xinyi, Taipei, Taiwan, (+866) 2-2321-8928.
Raw, 301 Lequn Third Rd., Zhongshan, Taipei, Taiwan, (+886) 2-8501-5800.
Get set up at Ounce, the first speakeasy in Taipei: It’s got a secret entrance and all that usual crap, but most importantly the drinks are magnifique.
Lane 63, 40 Dunhua South Rd. (Section 2) Da’an, Taipei, Taiwan, (+886) 2-2708-6885.