Some trips are about ticking boxes. This one was about stitching together three places we’d wanted to see for a long time — two of them brand new to us, and one that keeps pulling us back no matter how many times we visit. Over ten days in March, our family of four flew Sydney → Hong Kong → Macau → Tokyo, and came home with the kind of memories that only really land once you’ve had a few days to sit with them.

Here’s how it unfolded.

First Impressions: Hong Kong

This was our first time in Hong Kong, and I wasn’t quite prepared for how vertical the city is. You look up and the buildings just keep going. You look down and there’s a wet market, a dim sum shop, a luxury boutique and a hardware store crammed into the same block. It’s chaotic in the best way.

We based ourselves in Hung Hom, on the Kowloon side, in a hotel facing Victoria Harbour. The views from our room genuinely stopped me mid-sentence the first time I opened the curtains — container ships gliding across the water, the Hong Kong Island skyline catching the late afternoon light, the Star Ferry crossing back and forth like clockwork. If you’ve ever seen those postcard shots of Hong Kong at dusk, they don’t exaggerate. It really does look like that.

Hung Hom itself is quiet — more of a residential and commercial pocket than a tourist strip — and after a couple of days we worked out that Tsim Sha Tsui, a few stops down, was where the real evening energy lived. Luckily the hotel ran an hourly shuttle bus into TST, which saved us the taxi roulette and became our unofficial lifeline into the louder, brighter parts of Kowloon.

The highlight of the Hong Kong leg for me was the cable car ride up to the Tian Tan Big Buddha on Lantau Island. We splashed out on the Crystal+ cabins — the ones with the glass floor — and I’m glad we did. Gliding up over the hills and out towards the statue, with the harbour receding behind you and the Buddha slowly emerging through the mist ahead, is one of those experiences that genuinely earns the word “breathtaking.” The kids went quiet, which is rare.

A few other scattered Hong Kong impressions:

• The food is as good as everyone says. Every meal was either excellent or an adventure.
• Taxis are cheap but the drivers don’t always know Hung Hom as well as you’d expect.
• Nothing quite prepares you for Hong Kong at night the first time you see it from the harbour.

A Day in Macau

We gave ourselves a day trip to Macau, catching the TurboJET ferry across from Hong Kong — about an hour each way on the water. I’d booked us into Deluxe Class thinking it’d be worth it for four people. In hindsight, on a crossing that short, standard would have been perfectly fine. Lesson learned, and probably a useful tip for anyone else weighing it up.

Macau itself is strange and wonderful. You step off the ferry and suddenly you’re in this collision of Portuguese colonial architecture, Cantonese street life, and the kind of casino glamour that looks like Vegas grew up in Asia. Cobblestone lanes open onto baroque church facades, which open onto massive gold-tiled resort complexes. Nothing about it should work together, and yet it absolutely does.

We only had about seven hours on the ground, which is where I’d change things if we did it again. Some of the places we wanted to see were already closing by the time we reached them, and we spent a bit too much of the day working out how to get from A to B (including an expensive impulse decision involving a tout at the ferry terminal — another lesson). Macau deserves a full day, and probably an overnight if you can swing it. There’s more there than a half-day detour can really do justice to.

Still — the Ruins of St. Paul’s, the back lanes of the old town, a proper Portuguese egg tart eaten standing up in the street — I’m glad we went. It’s unlike anywhere else we’ve been.

Then There’s Japan

Here’s where I have to stop pretending to be objective.

I’ve been to Japan before. This was my second trip, and the question I keep asking myself — and that my family now politely rolls their eyes at whenever I bring it up — is why does this country keep pulling me back?

I think the honest answer is: everything just works, and nobody makes a big deal about it.

The shuttle bus from our hotel to Maihama Station ran so precisely you could set your watch by it. The trains arrive to the second. Staff greet you with a warmth that feels genuine rather than rehearsed. Vending machines on street corners dispense hot coffee that’s actually good. You can drop your wallet and reasonably expect to get it back. There’s a quiet, collective agreement that things should be done properly, and that agreement permeates everything from a 7-Eleven sandwich to a train station bathroom.

For someone who spends a lot of his working life trying to make complicated systems run reliably, Japan feels a bit like visiting a country that has already figured out what I’m still working on.

We stayed at the Hilton Tokyo Bay, out near the Disney resort at Maihama. The hotel itself was busy and family-heavy — lots of small kids in Mickey ears, which was charming for about a day — but the room was spacious by Tokyo standards, and the location gave us a painless shuttle into central Tokyo whenever we wanted the city proper.

And when we did head in — into Shinjuku, Ginza, Shibuya — the thing that struck me all over again was the sheer density of experience. You can walk ten minutes in any direction in central Tokyo and pass:

• a 400-year-old shrine tucked between glass towers
• a basement jazz bar the size of a walk-in wardrobe
• a seven-storey electronics shop
• a tiny ramen counter with six seats and a queue down the street
• a department store food hall that will quietly ruin every food hall you visit afterwards

There’s something about the way Tokyo layers the ancient and the futuristic without apology. A Shinto shrine doesn’t feel out of place next to a neon-lit pachinko parlour, and a convenience store doesn’t feel like an intrusion on a quiet residential street. Everything coexists.

The subway deserves its own paragraph. For first-timers, the Tokyo rail map looks like someone spilled spaghetti onto a circuit board. But once you crack it — once you realise it’s just a series of colour-coded promises that will all be kept — it becomes the single most empowering tool in the city. Nothing in Tokyo is truly far away if you understand the trains, and the trains always understand you. I stand by what I told the kids halfway through the trip: if you can conquer the Tokyo subway, you can conquer anything.

But beyond the logistics and the food and the neon, what draws me back to Japan most is harder to name. It’s something to do with the way people take pride in small things. The taxi driver with the white gloves and the spotless doilied seats. The chef who’s been making the same dish for thirty years and is still trying to make it better. The shopkeeper who wraps your purchase like it’s a gift. There’s a quiet dignity to it all that I find myself missing the moment I leave.

Looking Back

If you’d asked me at the start of the trip which leg I was most excited about, I’d have said Japan without hesitation. If you ask me now, I’d still say Japan — but I’d add that Hong Kong surprised me more than I expected, and Macau has earned a proper return visit somewhere down the line.

A few things I’d do differently next time:

• Give Hong Kong and Macau more breathing room. Another day or two across both would have made a real difference.
• Stay in Tsim Sha Tsui or central Hong Kong rather than Hung Hom, unless the harbour views are the whole point of the stay.
• Treat Macau as an overnight, not a day trip. There’s more there than seven hours allows.
• If the trip ends in Japan, fly directly home from Tokyo. Routing back through Hong Kong at the tail end of an already long trip is tiring in a way you don’t really feel until you’re doing it.

But these are tweaks, not regrets. The kids will remember the Big Buddha emerging through the cloud. They’ll remember the neon of Shibuya crossing. They’ll remember the Portuguese egg tarts and the bullet-train-smooth punctuality of a Japanese shuttle bus. And I’ll remember, once again, walking out of a Tokyo station into the evening air and feeling that particular combination of calm and wonder that only this country seems to deliver.

Japan, I’ll be back. I always am.