Tsim Sha Tsui
The tourist heart of Hong Kong, Tsim Sha Tsui, is an easy place to find your way around. The Star Ferry Terminal, for ferries to Hong Kong Island, is right on the southwestern tip of the peninsula. East of here, along the southern shore, facing Hong Kong Island, are a number of hi-tech, modern museums and galleries built on reclaimed land, while Salisbury Road, just to the north, is dominated by the magnificently traditional Peninsula Hotel. Running south to north right through the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui, and on through the rest of Kowloon, is Hong Kong's most famous street, Nathan Road, jammed with shoppers at all hours of the day and night.
The distinctive ski-slope roofline of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, which occupies the former site of the Kowloon Railway station, about 100m east of the Star Ferry Terminal, is unmissable. Inside there are concert halls, theatres and galleries, including, in an adjacent wing, the Museum of Art (daily except Thurs; HK$10, free Wed), which is definitely worth a visit. As well as calligraphy, scrolls and an intriguing selection of paintings covering the history of Hong Kong, the museum has a good Chinese antiquities section. Immediately to the east, the domed Hong Kong Space Museum (Mon & Wed–Fri 1–9pm, Sat & Sun 10am–9pm; HK$10, free Wed) houses some highly user-friendly exhibition halls on astronomy and space exploration. The highlight here, however, is the planetarium, known as the Space Theatre, which presents amazing wide-screen space shows for an additional fee (HK$32, concessions HK$16; call 2721 0226 for show times).
Immediately east of the Peninsula Hotel, running north from Salisbury Road, neon-lit Nathan Road dominates the commercial hub of Kowloon and boasts Hong Kong's most concentrated collection of electronics shops, tailors, jewellery stores and fashion boutiques. The variety of goods on offer is staggering, but the southern section of Nathan Road, known as the Golden Mile for its commercial potential, is by no means a cheap place to shop these days, and tourist rip-offs are all too common. One of the least salubrious, but most exotic, corners of Nathan Road is the gigantic Chungking Mansions, 200m north of the junction with Salisbury Road. The shopping arcades here on the two lowest floors are a steaming jungle of ethnic shops, curry houses and dark corners, which seem to stretch away into the impenetrable heart of the building, making an interesting contrast with the antiseptic air-conditioned shopping malls that fill the rest of Hong Kong. The upstairs floors are packed with guesthouses – the mainstay of Hong Kong's backpacker accommodation.
A few hundred metres north of Chungking Mansions, Kowloon Park (daily 6am–midnight) is marked at its southeastern corner by the white-domed Kowloon Mosque (not open to tourists). There's also an indoor and outdoor swimming-pool complex in the park, with Olympic-size facilities (daily 6.30am–9.30pm; tel 2724 3577).
Over on Chatham Road South, east of Nathan Road, are two hulking museums that are worth a browse. The first, the Hong Kong Science Museum at 2 Science Museum Rd (Tues–Fri 1–9pm, Sat & Sun 10am–9pm; $25, Wed free) has three floors of hands-on science exhibits especially designed for children. Just opposite is the new $390 million-Hong Kong Museum of History (daily except Tues 10am–6pm; $10, Wed free), where you can walk through four million years in a couple of hours in the ambitious permanent exhibit called "The Story of Hong Kong". The exhibition has been put together in a blaze of colour, and is supplemented by video screenings, light shows, computer interactive software and life-size reproductions of everything from patches of prehistoric jungle to a 1960s cinema screening a documentary.
