Hong Kong has the world’s fourth highest population density and an estimated 7.5 million people are crammed into narrow strips of land between the sea and the green hills that make up the rest of its topography. In places Hong Kong  melds with the mountainsides. Builders can’t generally go along, so they go up. You become accustomed to climbing stairs everywhere you go in Hong Kong, or you cram into tiny lifts. It’s not very accessible at all, as our brave friend Sarah, with a recent ski injury, discovered while staying with us this week.

Even where I live, in the leafy suburb of Discovery Bay, Lantau, where we are lucky enough to have a house in one of the most expensive rental property markets in the world, housing is for the most part in high rise towers. There are steps everywhere.  The house we’re renting is a terraced townhouse over 7 flights of 9 stairs on a road that’s 86 steps up from the beach. Yes, I do count them every time I ascend. For some reason the concrete steps outside seem more onerous that the wooden stairs inside our house but perhaps the men delivering my roof terrace furniture last Friday would not agree.

Here, even our villages go up:

And if you’ve had enough of steps, you can even get a personal funicular up to your apartment block, romantically named Poggibonsi.

We have vertical shopping malls like Horizon Plaza at South Horizons, with just a couple of shops on each floor. Be careful to take a printed store guide with you, and make sure you know which floors your lift stops at or you’ll do what I did once and take a lift to the 26th floor and then have to walk all the way down, stopping at each floor until I found the shop I was looking for.

We go upstairs to cross roads, upstairs to the gym, upstairs to church:

Sometimes there’s a little help going up hill, as on this escalator from Central to the Tai Kwan arts centre and Hollywood Road. I love looking into all the little nail bars and beauty salons on the way up.

But watch your step on the way down! This is not the place for stilettos.

Help is at hand when you go up the Peak

The view from the top is beyond compare:

The dead are sent on their way to the afterlife up hundreds of steep steps. Yes I climbed them all at this fascinating cemetery in Tsuen Wan.

But when you do climb up to the top on a clear day, you can have a breathtaking view like this:

However, in order take flight, you start from the flattest of islands, reclaimed from the sea.