Home from home

25th August – 1st September 2026

There was something immediately familiar about Hong Kong, something greater than the sum of its parts: the traffic was quiet and orderly, following rules we knew and understood, there was an extortionately priced M&S on almost every corner and for the first time since entering China we were not stared and pointed at for being foreign. I was more than a little excited when we had introduced it to our itinerary to reset our 30 days visa free in China, for in addition to this familiarity it has three things I love in quite dramatic proportions: buildings, hills and sea.

Walking through Hong Kong was like being in Blade Runner: an imagination of the future from 1982 the results of which are, in hindsight, incredibly low tech. Buildings in various states of decay were propped up by bamboo scaffolding, and it took us a surprising amount of time to work how to use the metro without cash. The streets were pulsing to the synchronized heart beats of many pedestrian crossings, and above them loomed multistorey everything: shops upon shops, homes upon carparks upon cinemas. Pet shops where puppies were stacked up in cages like the people in the flats above them. Everything told me it shouldn’t work, and yet somehow, with the exception for me of the pet shops, it did.

Our first day there we walked and walked, finally settling in a bar to drink overpriced craft beer and watch a thunderstorm unfold as the beer took effect. By the next morning the storm hadn’t passed, and we decided to make our way to the Yick Cheong building: an apartment block which is the unflatering poster boy for high density living, and supposedly the most Instagramed spot in Hong Kong. I have seen it photographed many times, always without its ground floor in shot making it look infinitely taller and denser. In reality the building felt far more liveable. The ground floor was busy and lived in; full of shops and restaurants. Like pretty much everywhere in Hong Kong it was in various states of disrepair, but works were being carried out. Many of the flats overlook the neighbouring lush green mountains, something which all images seem to neglect to inform their viewer. A photograph might be able to tell a thousand words, but it was clear from this building that it didn’t necessarily make those words true.

I had planned a walk back to our hotel skirting the mountains. This started off well, perhaps a little too well. We climbed up through the trees, narrowly avoiding a young family of wild boar and the worst of the storm clouds which were still hovering above the treetops. Once we reached the top our path became more industrial and foreboding, lined with warning signs first for free roaming guard dogs and then for explosions due to us being alongside an active quarry. In amongst this there were one or too nice sections of path slowly being reclaimed by the jungle but this didn’t last long. The concrete steps which made up our route became more and more precarious before they were blocked off entirely, and we found ourselves traipsing along a busy road with very little pavement. Ben in particular wasn’t having a lot of fun – he was clearly either sick or didn’t like walking much, and as there was a bus going back to where we were staying we decided to hop on.

Whilst Ben had potentially gone down with what he had termed the exorcist bug that I’d expelled rather violently several days previously, we had bigger things to deal with: our hair. Thanks to the humidity, it seemed to be doubling in size with every hour. The addition of the humidity to the heat made stepping outside almost unbearable, and we quickly concluded that the solution was to become nocturnal for the rest of our stay and once we had determined that Ben was doing okay, seek refuge in the air-conditioning of trendy cafés, bars and finally a cinema. 

We left Hong Kong for nearby Guangzhou, bringing us back to the constant noise of China, which will never be background to either of us. It was visually completely disordered: the buildings weren’t as densely packed as Hong Kong, but the roads were. The many rivers and waterways had looked enticing on a map, but in practice were frequently just somewhere for the pillars holding up flyovers to land. It didn’t feel like a city designed for walking. To be honest many aspects of it didn’t feel designed at all. Despite this, small reminders of home snuck in unexpectedly when we took an evening stroll around Shamian Island, with its colonial colonnades and church lining a long pedestrian square, flower beds full of thriving versions of numerous houseplants we have killed over the years. 

The familiarity of Hong Kong may have evaporated, but the purpose of our visit was to be briefly reunited with our true home from home: our bikes. My first impressions of Guangzhou had been mainly confusion, and our journey to collect the bikes did little to change this. We spent about half an hour walking around the station in concentric circles searching for the China Railway Express office where our bikes were being stored. When we finally found it, the cycle back did not improve matters; we cycled down alleys where the buildings closed in above us leaving less than a metre between two facing windows, and we had to re-route numerous times as our directions attempted to take us up on flyovers where cycling was prohibited or to dead ends in industrial estates where a road supposedly should have been. We were still no wiser on the rules of the road. Everything we thought we understood was challenged; stopping at red lights appeared to be advisory only, and it seemed fairly standard practice to cycle on the wrong side of the road. Even so, it felt slightly thrilling to be cycling through the chaos of the city in the rain, safe in the knowledge that cycling in China is not something we would be making a habit of.

The next day we dropped our bikes off at the bike shop for my wheel to be rebuilt. Deep in the metropolis it was an unexpected haven for cycle tourers, stocking anything and everything we could have imagined, something which Ben took full advantage of. After a leisurely tea-fuelled chat with the owner, we attempted to explore the city on foot. Guangzhou is surrounded by number of adjacent cities which as they have grown have collided haphazardly and coalesced with one another. Even I, someone who can probably be described as a militant pedestrian, had to concede that the result was not somewhere fit for walking, and we quickly aborted our plan and headed the wrong way down what looked and felt like a motorway slip road towards the nearest bus stop. 

We had spent some time looking at what to do with our time in Guangzhou and concluded that it seems that the real reason for visiting, other than getting your bike fixed, is the food. Ben’s choice of culinary destination when we had returned drenched from collecting our bikes the previous day was McDonalds, an experience that we didn’t want to repeat for many reasons. After this it only seemed right to “accidentally” use the Michelin guide to find us somewhere else (and vegetarian) to eat, and for the first time in months I enjoyed full reign of the menu, before we wandered the streets in the pouring rain. Having taken the bus and then the metro to the city centre, the streets were far calmer and almost pleasant. We walked through a park and along streets both full of trees gnarly with roots as they did everything in their power to draw up more water. Our culinary tour of Guangzhou continued the next day when we returned to get our bikes and the owner of the shop, MJ, insisted we couldn’t leave before lunch and took us for morning tea (dim sum). It was a reminder of the warmth and kindness of the community of cyclists we would soon be returning to.

Our time off the bikes was starting to pay off. The secret desire I had harboured in our first days after the Pamir Highway for our bikes to get lost in transit was slowly being replaced with a longing to be back on them. After we finally set off from the shop, my front wheel shiny and new, the 15km ride across the city back to the station was once more the perfect distance: short enough to get us excited about cycling again and long enough to be very glad we wouldn’t be cycling in China for long. We felt a little lost saying goodbye to the bikes again as we sent them off a final time. Over the months they had become our home: a place where bits of our brain can switch off and relax with the familiarity and rhythm of it all. Whilst the bikes would be taking the direct route to Yantai where we will be reunited for the ferry to South Korea, our route to get there would once again be slightly more convoluted.