Right in the middle of central Hong Kong, just a few minutes' walk from the skyscrapers, you'll find the well-kept and mostly quite placid Hong Kong Zoo. People who live on the other side walk through on the way to work in the morning, and during the day a few nannies can be found pushing their charges around in strollers. But an awful lot of the time everyone else in Hong Kong is too busy making money, so it's just you and the animals.

Particularly worth seeing are the howler monkeys. If they're in the right mood, they'll be easy to find, because you can hear them from anywhere in the zoo. The show they put on is like something out of the Muppet Show, only louder and funnier.

Getting there

The closest MTR station is Central, about 500m away. Pedestrian signs point the way to the zoo.