Hong Kong

• Lissom with mother - Chiva Som, Thailand
• Perfect harmony - Chiva Som, Thailand
• Battle of the Beaches - Thailand
• Bliss on the beach - Koh Samui
• Freshly Squeezed - Thailand
• Kaleidascope - Bangkok
• Why Our travels with Banana - Bali
• Beautiful Bali looks back to the future - Bali
• Off the Bhutan track - Bhutan
• The Temples of Another Time - Cambodia
• Temple of Secret Smiles - Cambodia
• Celebrity check-in - Langkawi
• My Perfect Moment - Pangkor Laut
• Fantasy Island - Pangkor Laut
• Feast for all the senses - Bali
• On Honeymoon Island, strictly alone at last - Phuket
• Our Ho Chi Honeymoon - Vietnam
• Victory for Vietnam - Vietnam
• You like! You try! - Vietnam
• Why I'll always miss Saigon - Vietnam
• Hanoi's New Dawn - Hanoi
• Saigon Surprise - Ho Chi Minh
• I spy in Shanghai - China
• Shanghai Chic - China
• The Great Makeover - China
• Far East in a Flash - China & Japan
• Cherie blossom special - Japan
• Why they call Hong Kong toy town - Hong Kong
• Mysteries of the secret gardens - Kyoto
• The Geisha Game - Kyoto
• Hong Conquerer! - Hong Kong

LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS' credit cards: the tax-free destination of Hong Kong is having a shopping festival.

I’m a toy fan and since every toy was made in Hong Kong, I figured an adult could have a fantastic time shopping under false pretences.

‘It’s for a friend’s baby!’ I insist to cashiers in Harrods’ toy department. ‘It’s for ages eight and above, sharp edges,’ caution the cashiers. ‘Yeah, well, they can learn the hard way,’ I snap.

Of course, it’s not just toys. Hong Kong is still a frenetic, exciting old world trading post, cluttered with faded red and gold Chinese signs and shop fronts spilling over with ancient Chinese medicine and boxes of swallow spit.

On all sides, people offered us tinny jewellery, unfurled suit fabrics and held out business cards for tailors who copy designer clothes for, er, buttons

Seven million residents

Hong Kong is a tiny splatter of islands off the south-coast of China, the most famous of which is Hong Kong Island. On the mainland is fellow commercial district Kowloon. Seven million mostly Chinese residents cram into 420 square miles. Skyscrapers cling to the harbour like party guests trying not to fall in the pool.

Although we have handed Hong Kong back to China, familiar names are everywhere. Streets are called Devon and Cornwall and our hotel, the Hyatt Regency on the Kowloon peninsula, was doing a pie-and-pint special. The Hyatt was a fantastic base for shopping, smack in the middle of the Tsim Sha Tsui retail district.

Its Art Deco Chinese restaurant had the best drunken shrimp and mushroom tofu I’ve ever tasted and our suite came with a key to a private club with complimentary cocktails and smoked salmon sandwiches.

Hyatt executive Ainslie Cheung did everything to help us, even finding tailors who made perfect copies of my favourite discontinued shirt for half what it cost me in 1987.

This was a memorable experience. In a tiny store down an alley I gave an Indian gentleman a picture I’d torn from a magazine. He whipped out rolls of chambray and dialled Chief Tailor on his mobile. In charged Chief Tailor, whose flying fingers had pinned me before I even realised he’d started.

Just 24 hours later, I was having a second fitting and soon had perfectly cut and lined dresses. Hong Kong tailors even take you to lunch and travel to Britain if you want suits for your relatives later.

There were many science and history museums nearby but I was on a more important cultural mission. Stores sold genuine black pearl earrings for £25 and Christian Dior ties for £40.

I bought silk mix sheets for £12 and dragon kimonos for £20. Kiosks offered while-you-wait calligraphy and pear juice.

To find the best stuff, it helps to have a Chinese speaker. Our guide Raymond, a very funny young man, had been an endearingly feeble teenage triad ‘because they got into snooker parlours for free’.

Shimmering walls of neon

From Tsim Sha Tsui we caught the green and white Star ferry that has chugged across the harbour for more than 100 years and stepped out into Hong Kong Island, a city with shimmering walls of neon.

Bizarre bootleg goodies dangled around us – Louis Vuitton purses and yellow fur Winnie the Pooh toilet roll caddies. I hit the jackpot: a box of what looked like rubber models of an eyeball, a rat and something that would get your dog fined.

Suddenly the stallkeeper grabbed the rat and smashed it against the wall. It went completely flat and then slowly reformed like a horror film special effect. ‘Venting balls!’ he proudly announced and at $20HK for five, venting balls became my favourite toy, er, executive stress relief aid.

I found a cache of antique clockwork toys in a shop barely 4ft wide. And in the fashion shops of Causeway Bay I found shoes I’d never seen before in fluorescent leather.

Every child should see the Mail Sino Centre toy mall before he grows up. We spiralled through this fantasyland of play things, pressing our faces against the windows, the tiny eyes of a thousand action superheroes and monsters staring back.

I bought an Emoticon, a creature somewhere between a baby seal and Caspar, the friendly ghost.

We stopped for swallow’s nest mango sundae, a perfectly nice sorbet with bird spit congealing all over it. Still, it’s probably given me powers I’m not yet aware of. From there we finished with a martini in Aqua, an uber-glam bar on the 29th floor of One Peking Road.

Next day, I took my tired muscles to Kowloon Park and its tai chi classes.

The park is a former barracks with bird garden, sculptures and hundreds of people standing on one leg like flamingos. Tai chi master William Ng, a serious older man, taught in a disco orange tai chi suit and a personal microphone with echo. It was like a communist Hi-de Hi.

The quest for gifts continued at Toys R Us. Power Rangers murdered each other alongside a slatternly Barbie, who clearly gets tanked and mauls Ken’s best friend when he’s out getting his chest waxed.

Gadget obsessions

Even lunch is gadget-obsessed here. At Café Mi in Festival Walk shopping centre, the maitre d’ gives you a smartcard, you cruise the various food counters swiping it, then before you know it an entire meal arrives at your table without you ever talking to a waiter.

You can eat your way round the world here: we started with sushi in WasabiSabi, Times Square, where you enter through cylinders of rippling light. Then lunch at Café Kool’s buffet in the Kowloon Shangri-La.

I should have realised it was going to be something special when the carpets said TUESDAY. That’s a coincidence, I thought, until it hit me that tomorrow they would say WEDNESDAY.

In Café Kool, tandoori ovens, woks, steamers and griddles poured out soups, noodles, potted lobster, fresh pasta and curries. A patisserie lined up mini gateaux and there was a sashimi bar with limitless oysters.

On our last day, we found the world’s greatest toy shop, in the Causeway Bay Commercial Building on Sugar Street.

High up in this unprepossessing mall was an Aladdin’s cave of strange, collectible and unique toys. Collectors come from across the world to trace, say, a complete set of poseable characters from The Blair Witch Project. Or the ultra-hip retro robot collection, from £3.

We didn’t have time for Happy Valley Racecourse, the oceanarium or sunbathing on the beach near Stanley Market, let alone the ex-pat drinking holes of Lang Kwai Fong.

I’ll be back when Disneyland Hong Kong opens soon and I’lI bring all the children I know.