Star Ferry

The deck shifts under your feet, and a low engine hum rises through the wooden boards. Salt air moves across your face, mixed with diesel and the smell of the sea. Ahead, across a wide channel of green water, the towers of the far shore wait. A horn sounds. The boat pulls away from the pier.

You are crossing Victoria Harbour aboard the Star Ferry. This service has carried people between Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon side for well over a century. The boats are painted green and white, with a shape that lets them load from either end without turning around. Each one carries a name that ends in the word Star.

The crossing is short, about ten minutes from shore to shore. Yet in those ten minutes the whole harbor opens around you. Towers rise on both sides. Cargo ships and small craft cross your path. The water churns pale green behind the boat, and the wind grows stronger out in the open middle of the channel.

The service began in 1888, started by a merchant who wanted a reliable way across the water. Within ten years it had taken the name Star Ferry. For most of the long decades that followed, this was the main link between the island and the mainland. Before bridges and harbor tunnels, nearly everyone who crossed did so on these boats.

Climb to the upper deck if you can. The view is wider there, and the breeze is cleaner. From the rail you can see the line of towers on the island side climb up toward the green hill behind them, with Victoria Peak rising above the whole scene. On the Kowloon side the waterfront promenade stretches along the water.

The boats themselves are worn smooth by use. The seats have backs that swing, so passengers can flip them to face whichever way the boat is traveling. The crew still handle thick ropes by hand to tie up at each pier. There is little that is modern here. The ferry works almost the way it always has.

The fare has always been low, kept within reach of ordinary people. That low price once carried real weight. In 1966, when the company asked to raise the fare by a small amount, the anger it stirred spilled into days of protest across Kowloon. People understood the ferry as theirs, a service that belonged to the whole city.

Watch the water as you cross. Victoria Harbour is one of the busy deep-water harbors of the world, and traffic moves constantly across it. You may pass a red-sailed tourist junk, a low barge heavy with containers, or a fast catamaran heading out to other islands. The Star Ferry threads its steady path through all of it.

The piers have moved over the years as the shoreline itself has changed. Hong Kong has reclaimed land from the harbor for a very long time, pushing the water back and narrowing the channel. The pier you board from today may stand where open sea once was. The crossing grows a little shorter with each new stretch of made ground.

There is a reason many people call this one of the better travel experiences anywhere for its price. For the cost of a small coin, you get a moving view of one of the great harbor cities, seen from the water that made it. No tall building gives you quite the same angle as the deck of this slow boat.

Try to cross once in daylight and once after dark if your time allows. By day you see the full sweep of the towers and the hill. At night the same towers turn to colored light, doubled in the black water, and the boat seems to move through a field of reflections. Each crossing feels like a different city.

As the far pier draws near, the engine note drops and the boat eases sideways toward the dock. The crew loop their ropes over the bollards, the gangway clatters down, and the crowd shifts toward the exit. You have crossed the same water that countless others crossed before you, on a boat that has been in no particular hurry for more than a hundred years.