Kowloon, the loud side of the harbour

If Hong Kong Island is the glass front, Kowloon is the crowded, neon-lit engine room behind it — and for many travellers it is the more memorable half. The promenade at Tsim Sha Tsui gives the postcard view straight across Victoria Harbour to the towers of Central, best after dark, when the Symphony of Lights plays across the water at 8 pm. Behind it, Nathan Road runs north in a canyon of signage past the Peninsula, the tailors, and the famously chaotic Chungking Mansions, where the curry houses on the upper floors are the real reason to go in.

Keep walking and Kowloon turns into a chain of specialist markets. Yau Ma Tei has its fruit wholesalers and the jade traders; Mong Kok stacks up the Ladies' Market, Sneaker Street, the Goldfish Market with its bagged fish hanging in rows, and the Flower Market ending at the Yuen Po bird garden, where old men bring their songbirds out in bamboo cages. Further north, Sham Shui Po sells fabric by the metre on Ki Lung Street and every component imaginable on Apliu Street, and has quietly become the city's best cheap-eats district.

There is calm here too. The Chi Lin Nunnery is a complex of Tang-style wooden halls joined without a single nail, opening onto the landscaped Nan Lian Garden; Wong Tai Sin Temple is where Hong Kongers come to shake fortune sticks. On the western waterfront, M+ and the Hong Kong Palace Museum have given West Kowloon a serious cultural district.

Eat like a local: cha chaan teng milk tea, roast goose, egg waffles from a street cart.