Lung Cheung Rd. Wong Tai Sin MTR. Daily 7am-5.30pm. Small donation expected. Though lying just inside Kowloon, the lavishly decorated Wong Tai Sin Temple, built in 1921, is well worth a detour on your way into the New Territories. Wong Tai Sin (“Yellow Immortal”) was a Taoist monk during the Jin Dynasty (265-420AD) who achieved enlightenment after forty years of meditation and became known for his healing powers. The temple is Hong Kong’s major Taoist shrine, and some three million people visit annually to pay their respects, wish for long life and have their fortunes told. The temple’s forecourt walls are lined with scores of fortune-tellers, who read palms, bumps, feet and faces; some speak English and many display testimonials from satisfied customers - if you want to find out your chances at the races, this is the place to ask.

The main temple building with its statue of Wong Tai Sin is often closed, but kneeling crowds perpetually pack out the front courtyard, everyone burning incense and shaking pots full of numbered bamboo strips, known as “fortune sticks”. When one falls out it’s exchanged for a piece of paper bearing the same number, which has a prediction written on it. The busiest days at the temple are around Chinese New Year, when luck is particularly sought, and at Wong Tai Sin’s festival, on the twenty-third day of the eighth lunar month (usually in September).

Behind the main building is the Good Wish Garden (Tues-Sun 9am-4pm; $2), with Chinese pavilions, carp ponds and waterfalls.

Tai Wai KCR. Use “Che Kung Miu” exit, then follow Hung Mui Kuk Rd 900m to its end at the park entrance.

Free. Lion Rock Country Park covers a wild ridge of hills just south of the town of Tai Wai, which physically splits the New Territories from Kowloon. The trail first heads up for about thirty minutes from the park entrance to Amah Rock (also known as Yearning for Husband Rock), said to be a woman who turned to stone waiting for her husband to return from fishing. Young women make the pilgrimage up here during the Maiden’s Festival, held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month (usually in August). From here, Lion Rock is a further hour: continue past a shelter at Kowloon Pass, then head left onto the MacLehose Trail. Here you bear right at another smaller shelter, and then leave the path to scramble up to two peaks formed by the lion’s “head” and “rump” - on a clear day the views over Kowloon and the harbour are superb.

Lion Rock is also a popular spot for rock climbing - the best source of information on which is www.hongkongclimbing.com, which provides practical details for a score of routes in Hong Kong, and links to local clubs and climbing centres.

Che Kung Temple KCR. Follow signs to the temple for 250m. Daily 9am-5pm. Free. The austere Che Kung Temple is worth a brief look on the way to the nearby Tsang Tai Uk village. Dedicated to the Song Dynasty

Che Kung Temple KCR. Follow signs to the village for 500m. Small donation expected. Tsang Tai Uk (literally “The Tsangs’ Mansion”) is one of the New Territories’ lesser touristed walled clan villages, built by a Hakka family in the 1870s. Though it is somewhat dilapidated, a visit here provides an insight into how many of the New Territories’ families used to live until skyscrapers and freeways began to dominate the area in the 1980s.

A triple gateway leads into the village, which includes a central courtyard, wide alleys, a network of high-ceilinged rooms and the shabby clan ancestral hall.

The most obvious traditional feature is the four watchtowers at each corner of the outer wall, whose high, rounded eaves are adorned with spikes to keep bad luck away. The community is still active, the village’s alleyways choked with bicycles, gas canisters, discarded furniture and drying washing.

Fortress-like clan villages are a Hakka speciality, as these people - concentrated today in Hong Kong and the southern Chinese provinces - were dislodged hundreds of years ago by warfare in their homelands in central China, and have never been sure of their welcome in places they subsequently settled.

Indeed, hakka translates as “guest family”, indicating their perpetual status as outsiders.

Sha Tin - Sandy Fields - is a sprawling development built either side of the Shing Mun River; Sha Tin KCR is the station for the town itself.

Home to more than half a million people, it’s a good place to experience life in a New Town, especially in shopping malls such as New Town Plaza, which offers a view of modern local life and manners: it’s solidly Chinese, with crowded shops and good-value restaurants full of local families.

Aside from the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, the town’s bestknown sight is the Sha Tin Racecourse (Racecourse KCR; open race days only; www.shatinracetrack.com), some 3km northeast. Along with Happy Valley, this is the only legal outlet for betting in Hong Kong, despite the local Chinese obsession with wagering varying amounts of their pay packet. It’s packed on race days during the season (Sept-June), with meetings held on Wednesday evenings or Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Entry is $10, or you can visit with the Hong Kong Tourist Board’s Come Horseracing Tour ($540-790 depending on the event), which gets you into VIP-only parts of the enclosure: you need to be over 18 and have been in Hong Kong for less than three weeks - take your passport to any HKTB office at least a day before the race. The biggest annual event is the Hong Kong Derby in March, a two-kilometre race for four-year-olds, which attracts an international crowd.

Man Lam Rd, Sha Tin. Signed 600m walk from Sha Tin or Che Kung Temple KCR stations. Mon & Wed-Sat 10am-6pm, Sun & public holidays 10am-7pm.

$10, Wed free. The Hong Kong Heritage Museum is the SAR’s largest museum, though it’s really of more interest for its travelling shows - which tend to showcase excellent and informative collections of Chinese art and historical artefacts - than its lacklustre permanent exhibitions. The best of these is the Cantonese Opera Heritage Hall, full of flamboyant costumes, embroidered shoes, stage props, and mock-ups of traditional stage sets. The Gallery of Chinese Art features fine Chinese ceramics, bronze, jade, lacquerware and stone sculptures; while the New Territories Heritage Hall has archeological remains dating back to 4000 BC, accounts of Hong Kong’s various Chinese ethnic groups, plus information about ancestral worship, feasts and festivals.

Sha Tin KCR. Follow signs for 800m. Daily 10am-5pm. Free. The Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery is an appealingly shabby temple dating from the 1960s, set at the peak of Po Fook Hill.

About four hundred steep steps ascend to the monastery from behind the Grand Central Plaza Shopping Centre, lined by five hundred life-sized, gilded statues of Buddhist saints. You emerge onto a terrace beside the main temple, which has an undistinguished exterior but houses around thirteen thousand small black-and-gold Buddha statues, each about a foot high and sculpted in a different posture, lining the walls to a height of thirty feet or more. The building also contains the embalmed and gilded body of a monk, the founder of the monastery.

Outside on the terrace there’s a small pagoda, along with some shoddy, brightly painted concrete statues of Chinese deities, including a lion and elephant (representing the Buddhist gods of Wisdom and Benevolence). Vegetarian lunches are also available, either off the menu or from a better value canteen selection.

Tai Po Market KCR. Tai Po, near the east coast halfway to the Chinese border, has been a market town since the seventeenth century. Though it’s developing rapidly, a few sights remain and it’s conveniently close to the countryside at Plover Cove.

For train enthusiasts, the Hong Kong Railway Museum (Shun Tak St, 800m to the right from the station via Nam Wan Rd, Wan Tau St, Heung Sze Wui St, Po Heung St, Wai Yi St and On Fu Rd ; Mon & Wed-Sun 9am-5pm; free) has a small exhibition of photographs and restored coaches dating back to 1911. More traditional sights include the beautiful Man Mo Temple (Fu Shin St, near the museum off On Fu Rd; dawn to dusk; free), a shrine to the Taoist gods of War and Literature, surrounded by interesting old shops selling dried seafood, religious paraphernalia and other Chinese wares. Towards the main altar, prayers have been written on red plastic plaques dangling inside the enormous hanging incense coils, which can burn for weeks.

North of the Lam Tsuen River the town’s Tin Hau Temple (Ting Kok Rd; free) was built around three hundred years ago and reflects Tai Po’s traditional importance as a fishing centre. It’s also one of the main venues for celebration and devotion during the annual Tin Hau festival, when the whole place is decorated with streamers, banners and little windmills: if your visit coincides you can catch Cantonese opera stage over the road.

Plover Cove Country Park occupies a rugged east coast peninsula north of Plover Cove Reservoir, whose dam wall has turned a former marine bay into one of Hong Kong’s major water sources. The access point is Tai Mei Tuk hamlet (bus #75K from Tai Po Market KCR), comprising a clutch of houses, food and drink stalls, the Bradbury Lodge Youth Hostel, and a visitors’ centre (Mon, Wed-Sun 9.30-11.30am & 1.30-4.30pm) providing hiking advice. From here you can either follow the road around the reservoir or hike cross-country for 5km to Bride’s Pool, a pretty series of forested waterfalls, popular with picnickers. Other trails from here continue downriver a few kilometres to Chung Mei, an abandoned village once populated by farmers and scallop gatherers; and 5km north to the shores of Starling Inlet, from where you can return to Tai Mei Tuk via Pat Sin Leng’s pathways.

Tai Mei Tuk is also the starting point for hikes into Pat Sin Leng Country Park - the name means “Eight Immortals Peak” and the trails through it follow a string of ridges north to Starling Inlet (around 10km) or west and then south back to Tai Po (15km). The hikes are great exercise and have fabulous coastal views, as the hilltops are bare granite, with low shrubs on upper slopes and lightly wooded lowlands. Neither requires special skills, beyond being reasonably fit - gradients are steep, so take plenty of water.

Sheung Shui KCR. Sheung Shui is only 3km from the Chinese border, and is worth a visit as an unpretentious place where you can see ordinary people going about their daily activities. The main part is Shek Wu Hui, an interconnected block of streets typifying a down-to-earth New Territories’ market town, a jumble of cheap clothes stalls, herbalists’ shops, canteens and Hakka women on their way to market laden down with goods and bags. The food market off the main San Fung Avenue is excellent but not for the squeamish; it’s stuffed with fruit and vegetables, preserved eggs and live fish, crabs and prawns, and freshly slaughtered fowl.

The other part of Sheung Shui is Po Sheung Tsuen, the original village over to the west. It’s an almost medieval raggle-taggle of buildings with dank alleys between the houses, just wide enough for one person to walk down. The houses are a strange mixture, some brandnew with bright tiling, others just corrugated iron and cheap plaster.

The eighteenth-century Liu Man Shek Tong ancestral hall (Wed & Thurs, Sat & Sun, 9am- 1pm & 2-5pm; free) is the only sight here as such, still in use by the locals and retaining its original crumbly surroundings, carved and decorated in traditional fashion.

Best visited between October and May, the Mai Po Marshes are a site of international importance for migratory waterfowl such as Dalmatian pelicans and black-faced spoonbills. One access point - for dedicated birders only - is the isolated Mai Po Nature Reserve near Mai Po village, run by the WWF (T2526 4473, a taxi from Sheung Shui KCR costs about $60), with floating hides for bird-watching.

The other place worth seeing is the Hong Kong Wetland Park near Tin Shui Wai (T3152 2666, Tin Shui Wai KCR and then Light Rail to Wetland Park), a more accessible but contrived area of reclaimed ponds looking across to highrise developments over in China, with boardwalks, hides and a comprehensive information centre.

Kwu Uk Lane, Tsuen Wan. Follow signs from Tsuen Wan MTR for 100m. Wed-Sun 9am-5pm. Free. Sam Tung Uk Museum is an eighteenth century Hakka walled village, founded by a clan from China’s Fujian province. As the New Town of Tsuen Wan went up around it in the 1980s, the villagers moved out and it became a museum, unlike Hong Kong’s several accessible Hakka villages which are still lived in today.

The name means “three beamed dwelling”, after the three-roofed halls that form the central axis, onto which new housing was added as the village grew; there’s a common room for villagers; a central hall for banquets and gatherings; and an ancestral hall painted bright red and green, which faces the main entrance. The village’s separate buildings are connected by narrow lanes - open-air corridors really - and display traditional farming implements, some beautiful blackwood furniture, and more functional chairs, tables, cooking utensils and cleaning tools (all sourced from contemporary villages in China). Outside, the gardens have been landscaped to show where there would have been a threshing ground and a fish pond, and there’s a gatehouse beyond, which would have guarded the entrance to the village.

Train to Tsuen Wan MTR, then bus #51 from the Tai Ho Rd flyover behind the station, to the junction of Route Twisk and Tai Mo Shan Rd. Looming high above Tsuen Wan, at 957m Tai Mo Shan is Hong Kong’s highest peak, contained inside Tai Mo Shan Country Park. The trail to the peak starts on Route Twisk, the road running west of the mountain. Ten minutes up adjacent Tai Mo Shan Road is a visitors’ centre (Mon, Wed-Sun 9.30am-4.30pm; T2498 9326) with details of all the local trails; there’s also accommodation if you walk further up Tai Mo Shan Road at Sze Lok Yuen Youth Hostel.

The exposed, three-hour climb along a concrete track to the peak takes in broad views south over Kowloon; at the top you’re just off the MacLehose Trail, 22km from its western end at Tuen Mun.

Kam Sheung Rd KCR. Kam Tin township is famous for its outlying walled villages, though these are not now particularly traditional. Kat Hing Wai (take exit B from the KCR, cross the small footbridge, turn left and follow Kam Sheung Rd to the intersection, turn right onto Kam Tin Rd and walk for 100m; daily 9am-5pm; $1) is the best known, with square walls and a moat, and has been inhabited for four hundred years by the Tang clan. It was infamous as a centre of resistance to the British takeover of the New Territories in 1898, for which the iron gates of the village were confiscated - they were returned in 1925 after having been found in Ireland. Today, Kat Hing Wai is somewhat commercialized, its buildings badly restored, and the main street lined with souvenir stalls and Hakka ladies posing for photos in traditional garb.

About 600m north over a canal from here on Shui Tau Road, Shui Tau Tsuen village is bigger, though new building on the outskirts has destroyed the sense of a walled settlement, and many of the old buildings are decrepit. The elegant carved roofs are still apparent, though, and a walk around the tight alleys reveals an ancestral hall and the elderly Tin Hau Temple.

Bus #91 (#91R on Sundays) from Diamond Hill MTR. Clearwater Bay is a broad inlet at the mainland’s southeastern extremity. Tai Au Mun is the only settlement, boasting two beaches, the small #1 and the much bigger #2, the latter 5km to the south and packed with weekend crowds.

From the bus stop at beach #2, follow the road uphill for 500m to where a marked path leads up onto the peninsula’s exposed ridge and runs for about 3km, providing marvellous seascapes before you descend to the venerable Tin Hau Temple on Joss House Bay. This is a major site for Hong Kong’s annual Tin Hau celebrations, but is otherwise a quiet and simple whitewashed structure, whose entrance is guarded by two stone lions: turn the balls in their mouths three times for luck.

The Sai Kung Peninsula encompasses 75 square kilometres of unpolluted headlands, coves, woodland and beaches in Hong Kong’s easternmost reaches. Some parts are very wild, but there are also marked paths and lots of quiet places for a picnic, despite the peninsula’s increasing popularity.

Sai Kung town (bus #92 from Diamond Hill MTR or Choi Hung MTR) is the main gateway, a pleasant blend of fishing port and low-key tourist retreat with a daily fish market (6-11am), some good seafood restaurants serving “bamboo fish”, and a few bars. You can catch kaidos (on-demand ferries) from the jetty here to nearby islands and beaches; the most popular trip is the short run across to Kiu Tsui Chau (Sharp Island, about $25 return), whose small main beach at Hap Mun Bay, hemmed in by green headlands, is one of the prettiest in the area, although prone to weekend crowds.

Bus #94 (daily 6.30am-9pm) runs from Sai Kung’s bus terminus to Pak Tam Chung, start of the MacLehose Trail and site of the Sai Kung Peninsula visitors’ centre (Mon, Wed-Sun 9.30am-4.30pm; T2792 7365) and nearby Sheung Yiu Folk Museum (Mon, Wed-Sun 9am-4pm; free), based around an abandoned, traditional walled village. The first stage of the MacLehose Trail runs southeast from here around the High Island Reservoir, an easy walk along a vehicle track - the manmade “water and hills” scenery is a little bland, however.

The Sai Kung Peninsula’s north coast is fairly inaccessible, though it can be seen easily enough by riding the ferry (daily 8.30am & 3pm, extra departure 10.35am Sat & Sun; $25) through the Tolo Channel to Tap Mun Chau island from Ma Liu Shui jetty (a signposted ten-minute walk from University KCR). The 75-minute ride makes for a fine trip to soak up the views: the early morning departure calls at isolated bays along Sai Kung’s northern coast.

There’s not much to do on grassy Tap Man Chau island, however, except get lunch at one of the cheap restaurants near the pier; there’s no accommodation on the island, so don’t miss the last boat back.

Chuan Hu Xiao Chi

Tai Ming Lane, Tai Po T2657 6838. Daily 11am-10pm. Just off the main square towards the Tai Po Hotel, this kitsch little restaurant with green booths, sunflower-yellow walls and wooden tables serves inexpensive, tasty Sichuan-and Shanghai-inspired dim sum.

Lung Wah

Wo Che St, Sha Tin T2691 1594. Daily 10.30am-10.30pm. This place serves greasy pigeon - a Cantonese speciality - plus bean curd and almond desserts.

The restaurant is inexpensive and traditional, with a garden full of mahjong players at outdoor tables, and gets packed at the weekend.

Tung Kee Seafood

Waterfront, Sai Kung. Their speciality is “bamboo fish”: carp, stuffed with preserved turnip and chargrilled outside on a hand-rotated bamboo pole, at around $150 a head.