Podcast Episode 7: Hong Kong: The Smell of Asia and the City That Wouldn’t Let Go

Pip: There are cities you visit once and move on from, and then there are cities that apparently decide they are not done with you. Brett Hayhoe has thoughts on which category Hong Kong falls into.

Mara: This episode follows brett into Hong Kong — the sensory pull of it, the politics underneath the surface, and what kept drawing someone back year after year. Let's start with the city that wouldn't let go.

Hong Kong: The Smell of Asia and the City That Wouldn't Let Go

Pip: The setup here is deceptively simple: a friend in Hong Kong Central, a first flight booked, and then something unexpected happens on arrival. The question the post is really answering is why a person returns to the same city annually for over a decade.

Mara: The post names it directly. Setting up the central fact: "There is a particular smell to the streets of Hong Kong — to the streets of Asia, more broadly — that is unlike anything else in the world. It is the smell of street food vendors: of char siu pork and egg waffles and curry fishballs and roasted chestnuts and a hundred other things cooking simultaneously in the open air, layered over each other in an olfactory symphony that hits you the moment you step outside and simply does not leave you."

Pip: So the upshot is that the smell is not atmosphere or backdrop — it is the actual reason for a decade of return trips. That is a genuinely unusual thing to admit in a travel piece, and it lands because it is specific.

Mara: The post also makes a practical case for Hong Kong as a travel hub. For Australian travellers, it was the transit point through which the rest of the world was accessed — and the infrastructure rewarded anyone who let the layover stretch. The MTR, the Airport Express, the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour.

Pip: The Star Ferry gets its own sentence — "one of the great short journeys of the world," with the skyline arranged before you "as though the city is performing specifically for you." It probably is, yes. Hong Kong has always understood its audience.

Mara: Then the post shifts register. A Pride event, encountered by accident, and the atmosphere was charged in a way that went beyond celebration. Government officials were present and photographing attendees. The handover to Chinese rule was approaching, and the community already knew what that meant.

Pip: The line is quietly devastating: "The promises held for a while, and then they did not."

Mara: The post also documents the social texture of Hong Kong's gay scene in the nineties — the terms Sticky Rice and Potato Queens, used affectionately within the community, pointing to something real about how cosmopolitan and internationally layered that world was.

Pip: A city that was, for the solo LGBTIQA+ traveller, genuinely welcoming — and that should be named as the specific and notable thing it was.

Mara: The post frames Hong Kong not as a destination you tick off but as one that earns its place in memory through accumulated sensory force. The smell, the harbour, the community, the politics — all of it compounding across visits into something that feels, the post says, like coming home.

Pip: Which makes what came after the handover not just political history but something more personal than that.

Mara: A city as transit hub, as community, as sensory memory — and underneath it all, a political story that the people living it already knew the ending to.

Pip: Next time: wherever brett goes next, I suspect the food will be involved. It usually is.