Hong Kong's Skyline, Then Bali's Rice Terraces and Beaches

From vertical city to island calm

Our September 2018 trip paired two places that couldn’t feel more different from each other: Hong Kong’s dense, vertical cityscape, followed by Bali’s split personality between beach-resort Nusa Dua and cultural, rice-terrace-covered Ubud. It’s a genuinely striking contrast to build into one trip, and it’s exactly why we’ve come to like combining a big Asian city with an Indonesian island stretch — the two halves make each other feel more distinct by comparison.

Hong Kong: harbor views and vertical density

We stayed at the Royal Plaza Hotel in Hong Kong, using it as a base for a city that manages to be both intensely dense and genuinely easy to get around. The Star Ferry crossing the harbor is a classic, inexpensive way to see the skyline from the water, and it’s still one of the best ways to appreciate just how much has been built onto a fairly narrow strip of land between the hills and the sea. Victoria Peak gives the higher, wider view of the same skyline, looking down over the harbor and both sides of the city. What struck us most is how walkable and transit-friendly Hong Kong is despite its density — the MTR system makes it simple to move between neighborhoods that feel like entirely different cities within the same metro area.

We also spent time simply moving between neighborhoods at street level — the older, more local streets away from the main harbor stand in real contrast to the glass-and-steel core, and that contrast within Hong Kong itself was almost a preview of the bigger contrast waiting for us once we landed in Bali.

Bali, part one: Nusa Dua’s resort ease

From Hong Kong we flew to Bali, starting in Nusa Dua at The Laguna, A Luxury Collection Resort & Spa. Nusa Dua is Bali’s gated resort enclave, a stretch of southern coastline built specifically around upscale beach properties, and it functioned exactly as that kind of base is meant to — calm, manicured, and beach-focused, a deliberate contrast to the density we’d just left behind in Hong Kong.

Bali, part two: Ubud’s rice terraces and temples

We then moved inland to Ubud, staying at Natya Resort Ubud. Ubud is Bali’s cultural and artistic center, surrounded by rice terraces cut into the hillsides and dotted with Hindu temples, and it draws a very different crowd from the beach resorts — travelers there for yoga retreats, art markets, and the slower, more spiritually-minded side of the island. The shift from Nusa Dua’s beach-club atmosphere to Ubud’s temple-and-terrace scenery was almost as sharp a contrast within Bali as the flight from Hong Kong had been arriving into it. Mornings in Ubud had a different quality entirely from anything on the coast — mist over the rice paddies, temple bells somewhere in the distance, a pace built around the rhythms of the surrounding countryside rather than a beach schedule.

Two halves, two paces

What we took from this trip is how much a single itinerary can hold if you let the stops be genuinely different rather than variations on a theme. Hong Kong gave us density, harbor views, and round-the-clock city energy. Nusa Dua gave us the beach-resort decompression. Ubud gave us rice paddies, temples, and a noticeably slower pace than either of the other two stops. None of the three tried to be the others, and the trip was better for it.

Practical notes

Nusa Dua and Ubud are a meaningful drive apart — Bali’s roads are often slower than distances on a map suggest, so it’s worth planning real transfer time between the beach and the interior rather than treating them as a quick hop. Hong Kong, by contrast, needs almost no advance transit planning at all given how comprehensive its public transport is; a rechargeable transit card and a rough sense of which neighborhoods you want to see is generally enough.

[Editor’s note: add what this trip actually meant to you both — the Hong Kong skyline at night, the Ubud rice terraces, whatever stood out most — and swap in your own photos when ready.]