Special to The Washington Post
A few details to remember when you visit your child abroad: You'll eat a lot. You'll shop a lot (after all, Mom or Dad is paying). Your attempts to snap family photos will be treated warily. And taxis? Forget about them.
At least, that's what I learned when I recently visited my daughter in Hong Kong, where, as a junior at Syracuse University, she was taking a semester abroad to experience life as it's lived halfway around the world. My mother and I arrived in November with a duffel bag full of warm clothes for Sarah's upcoming mountain-climbing trip to Malaysia and boxes of her favorite granola bars. And for five days, she acted as our tour guide in one of the world's most crowded cities.
Having your child be your guide is an odd mixture of going native and going tourist class. Sort of like Lonely Planet meets Fodor's. You do what your child wants to do. Your desires are treated with detached amusement and, more often than not, ignored. After all, your child is the expert. For maybe the first time in her life, she's the leader, and you're the follower.
Several weeks before my mother and I arrived, my well-organized daughter e-mailed us an hour-by-hour itinerary of our trip. It gave us a wide-ranging look at Hong Kong's exuberant urban environment.
Hong Kong consists of the Kowloon Peninsula, Hong Kong Island to the south, the New Territories to the north and 235 outlying islands.
Its steep, mountainous terrain sprawls over 430 square miles, but its 7 million inhabitants are squeezed into small pockets of that land, so it has one of the densest population centers in the world, featuring a thick forest of skyscrapers, gleaming shopping malls, teeming sidewalks and narrow alleyways where laundry hangs out windows.
I booked a family suite at the Salisbury YMCA, which turned out to be the deal of the century. The 109-year-old Y in the Tsim Sha Tsui section -- the tip of Kowloon -- runs a pleasant, well-appointed hotel close to the waterfront and across the street from the luxury Peninsula Hotel, where rooms go for multiple times what we paid.
We had two generously sized (for Hong Kong) rooms, with two single beds, a fold-out sofa, a small office and a stunning view of the harbor for the absurdly low price of $195 per night.
We started our stay, of course, with dim sum, the Asian breakfast of champions, at the Lin Heung ("Fragrant Lotus") Tea House in the Central section of Hong Kong Island. Opened in the 1920s, it's one of the last of the old-style Hong Kong teahouses. Old men read newspapers in the scruffy second-floor restaurant, and local families gather there to gossip and eat.
Following Sarah's lead, we rinsed our dishware in a bowl of hot tea on the table, then pointed as the waitresses rumbled by with their wheeled carts laden with baskets and tin pots. Massive steaming pork buns, lotus-leaf-wrapped rice with minced meat, and shrimp balls were among the rustic-tasting delicacies that soon covered our table.
Afterward, it was on to a more tourist-focused location: Victoria Peak, which rises 1,810 feet above sea level on Hong Kong Island. We rode to the top on a tram (actually a funicular railway). Sarah had been up before but had taken the city bus to save money.
However you get there, the view from the summit, with the city's skyscrapers and the distant mountains of Kowloon, is worth the heart-stopping climb. We dodged the forgettable souvenir stands and Madame Tussauds and hiked along the Peak Circle Walk, a wooded 2.2-mile paved trail that offers soaring vistas along the way.
Over the next several days, we traveled on the city's extensive mass-transit system, the MTR. Sarah had us buy an Octopus card that is good not only on the MTR but also at stores around town. Aboveground, skinny double-decker buses ply a multitude of routes, and Hong Kong Harbor is crisscrossed by the century-old Star Ferry system.
We never waited anywhere for more than a few minutes.
We managed two day trips, one to Stanley Beach and the other to the Big Buddha. To get to Stanley, we caught a bus that climbed up and over Central Hong Kong Island, offering magnificent vistas of the southeastern part. Then we descended into the town of Stanley, where we immersed ourselves in the densely packed Stanley Market, emerging with calligraphy, T-shirts and artwork at modest prices.
The Big Buddha, known formally as the Tian Tan Buddha, is set on Lantau Island, to the east of Hong Kong Island.
At nearly 112 feet, it's one of the largest outdoor bronze statues of a seated Buddha in the world. It's reachable via gondola lift, a long, twisting road, or an equally long and twisting hiking trail. Less than 20 years old, the Buddha is no ancient relic, but it's still a magnificent sight to see as you toil up almost 300 steps, seemingly right into its lap.
At the base sits the Po Lin Monastery. You've got to give those monks credit: They know how to generate revenue. We counted seven souvenir stores, a 7-Eleven and a Starbucks. Sarah discovered that the giant Bodhi tree (under which Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was said to have achieved enlightenment) was actually plastic.
Sarah showed us her dorm, a worn hotel in the Yau Ma Tei section in Kowloon, known for its crowded local street life, inexpensive hotels -- and mafia presence. Mafia aside, it was a treat to see my suburb-raised daughter smoothly shoulder her way through the densely packed sidewalks and deftly bargain at the Ladies Market, the night market along Tung Choi Street.
On our last night, we headed through Soho in the Central district by way of the city's famous outdoor Mid-Levels escalator.
It's actually a half-mile-long stretch of mostly covered, elevated escalators and walkways that rise as high as three stories in places. I had some of the best vegetarian curry I've ever eaten, and we browsed some of the district's boutiques and antiques stores.
My mother and I were even allowed to take a few family photos.
