When you watch television travel shows about Hong Kong, have you noticed how they always make the place out to be nothing more than a huge metropolis full of tiny side streets, neon lights and about six kajillion people? Have you ever stopped to wonder if there could possibly be anything else to Hong Kong? Well, assuming that you haven't just skipped over the rest of this book and started reading here, you might have realised by now that the region is actually pretty much covered in mountains, fields, and small rural villages. Yes, there happens to be a hulking great city here, but then there are also quite a few hulking great cities in the UK but that doesn't stop anyone going out into the country and wandering around for hours without ever meeting another person, does it? Sometimes, it makes me quite mad to think that presenters of travel shows actually think that their viewers just want to see the city and have no interest in any culture or scenery of any description. And Hong Kong has both of those in abundance.

When I first arrived here in 1997, the first thing I did was book myself onto a tour of the New Territories. Covering the region from the edge of the city up to the border with China, the New Territories actually cover the vast majority of the regions collectively known as Hong Kong - and many of the residents have never even set foot in the city. If you want to see rural China without making the effort to do anything obvious like actually going there, then you could do far worse than visit the New Territories - and it isn't even hard to do so. The KCR, Hong Hong's overground rail network, joins up with the MTR and takes passengers right out to even some of the smallest villages. While riding the KCR, it isn't at all unusual to see a farmer get on covered in mud and dragging his equipment behind him, only to get off at the next stop and wade out into a paddyfield.

On our way out of town on a winding country road around a mountain, about as far from the busy city streets as you could imagine, we stopped at a lookout and were left by our driver for ten minutes to take in the scenery. Despite what TV presenters had led me to believe, the city of Hong Kong was suddenly nowhere to be seen - instead, laid out before me were rolling hills, mountains shrouded in mist and fields in which locals in straw cooli hats were tending the crops. I sat on a handy bench by the side of the road with a young Australian woman who was also on the tour - Suzanne - and from the conversation we had about how surprised we were at what we were seeing, it was clear that the UK isn't the only place where people are fooled by the popular media into thinking that Hong Kong is the city and nothing more.

On the way into the New Territories, we stopped off at Chuk Lam Sim Monastery. Roughly translating as the Monastery of the Bamboo Forest, Chuk Lam Sim is impressive to say the least, and yet seems to be far less visited by tourists than some of the more well known temples. Entrance to the complex involves passing through a huge and traditionally lavish arched gateway into the front courtyard, from where a steep flight of steps with two landings leads up to the first of two main buildings. Around these steps makeshift alters had been set up and, all the time we were in the complex, locals were constantly turning up to place incense onto them or light candles and fall to their knees in prayer. Our little group made our way up the steps in silence, not wanting to disturb anybody, and headed through the towering wooden doorways adorned with statues and carvings into the first of the two main buildings.

There are always at least two buildings. This is something I've noticed at every temple or monastery I've been lucky enough to visit on my travels. It's almost as though just having one massively impressive temple filled with fifteen foot high gold statues and covered in gold leaf just isn't good enough - there's always room for just one more beyond, usually with even bigger and more colourful statues and two layers of gold leaf! In the corners of the first building, four giant statues of the Buddha seemed to be presented with different skin tones, presumably to represent the different nations of the world coming together as one, and the temple complex beyond was dominated by a large central courtyard in which a raging fire was burning. Locals were crowding around the fire, placing what appeared to be handfuls of incense into the flames, causing them to spit and momentarily burn brighter. You can observe this spectacle wherever you go in Hong Kong - wherever there is a large enough public place or the entrance to even the smallest temple, there will be fires burning and locals stopping to pray and offer incense sticks - I'm sure any one of them would be happy to explain the significance of the incense sticks to me, but somehow I've never felt quite right about approaching somebody who is obviously involved in a highly spiritual ritual, just to say "Excuse me, but what exactly are you doing?"

Steps led up from both sides of the courtyard to the main temple, and as we made our way inside it was obvious that the interior was pretty much the same as the one back at Po Lin Monastery. Around the walls, giant statues were protected from prying hands by glass screens, and in the middle of the room prayer mats were laid out and locals were sitting in neat rows, deep in meditation in front of gold likenesses of the Buddha. As at Po Lin, it didn't seem right to hang around and disturb anybody, so we stayed for just long enough to take in the scale of the room and be dazzled by the amount of gold and bright colours on every surface, and then we made our way back to the coach. Unfortunately, as I have mentioned before, photography is always frowned upon inside the temples and so I was unable to capture anything on film - this is probably why, when you search the internet, it is usually far easier to find pictures of temple exteriors than interiors. When you do find an interior shot, it has most often been taken surrupticiously from underneath a coat and is both out of focus and at a strange angle.

Back on board the coach, we veered off just before we reached the small border town of Sha Tau Kok. Besides having a name which sounds strangely like a device used to play Badminton, Sha Tau Kok has the curious distinction of literally being right on the Chinese border - so much so that one side of the high street is in China and the other in Hong Kong. This means that the only people allowed to go there are residents of the town or those holding a Chinese Visa - which is a little bit depressing, as visitors have to stop outside and look at the town from afar rather than being able to go there and see what it's like to live right on the border. Sha Tau Kok actually has a museum, which must win the prize for being the only museum in the world that you have to get a Visa to visit. On the other hand, the residents of the town must have felt quite smug before Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese - after all, with one side of the road under the control of a communist dictatorship, and the other a British colony with all the rights that go with it, they could pretty much take the piss out of Chinese law as much as they wanted - if anyone came to arrest them for speaking out of turn, all they had to do was nip across the road and blow raspberries at the Chinese police who couldn't follow them without a British Visa. Now, of course, everything has changed and the Chinese authorities can jump back and forth across the border as much as they want. I'm sure was a little more to it than that, but it's an amusing image all the same.

(Continued tomorrow)

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.