Cheung Chau

It runs three days around the eighth of the fourth lunar month. Bamboo towers hung with buns stand before the temple. At midnight climbers race up to snatch the buns down. By day a parade carries children through the lanes on supports hidden in costume.

While the festival runs, everything on the island starts from this temple. The building dates to 1783 and is quiet on every other day. A fisherman hauled the rusted iron sword in the glass case up from the sea, and the temple dates it to the Song.

Five minutes on foot across the village from the pier gets you there. It faces the other way from the harbour the ferries use and the water is nothing like it, fine-grained and shelving gently, which is why families with small children settle on this side.

Bring a torch of your own. Inside it is entirely dark. The crack in the rock carries a story about a 19th-century pirate hiding treasure, though in fact it ends after a few metres and is tight enough to brush both shoulders. Steps run to the entrance.

A granite path runs out along the headland with a low balustrade on either side. The circuit takes 30 minutes, and the boulders beside it have been given names such as a human head or a loaf, each with its own sign.

Built in 1973, it is far younger than the island's other shrines. A flight of steps leads up to it, and inside a figure of Kwan Yu faces the southern sea through the openings. Hardly anyone else is up here.

Without the shelter built over it you would walk straight past. Spirals and geometric shapes are cut shallowly into the face, and it is taken to be Bronze Age work. It is set in the slope beside the beach.

There are no cars. Along this strip in front of the pier only bicycles and handcarts move, with shrunken fire engines and ambulances the single exception. Shops and restaurants take one side of it and the moorings take the other.

The name still stands in raised letters across the front wall. The cinema was built in the 1930s, closed in the 1990s and has been empty since, fenced off so that nobody gets inside. The angular ornament on the facade belongs to its decade.

Hong Kong's first Olympic gold came in windsurfing and this is the water the sailor trained on, so a centre at the far end hires out boards and teaches beginners in the steady wind.

A little northern cove, its sand so full of white coral fragments that people call it Coral Beach. Reaching it means walking from the ferry through the northern village, and with no shops near, you pack your own food. Clear water brings some out with snorkels.

A small sandy beach tucked below the path to Cheung Po Tsai Cave at the southwest end of the island. Foreign residents nicknamed it Italian Beach, and the name stuck. Rocks break the swell, leaving gentle water, and it sees far fewer people than Tung Wan.