When I look back on it, our visit to the New Territories was filled with non-visits - places that we would like to have seen but couldn't. Besides not being allowed to visit Sha Tau Kok, we were also denied the chance to explore the small town of Tai Mo Shan. At a hight of over 900 metres above sea level, Tai Mo Shan is the main community centred on the mountain of the same name, which is the highest in Hong Kong. The name Tai Mo Shan translates into English as "the Misty Mountain", and it's easy to see why - the reason that we were unable to visit the town on our coach was not, this time, anything to do with Chinese politics, but instead simply because the entire area was currently shrouded in mist and our driver didn't fancy the idea of trying to navigate the coach around the narrow twisting roads high up in the mountains without any forward vision. Plunging hundreds of metres down a mountain was not on our itinerary, so we gave Tai Mo Shan a miss and started to place bets amongst ourselves as to whether or not we would actually be allowed to see anything during the tour.

We travelled for some distance along the Route Twisk, named after the initial letters of the towns at either end - Tsuen Wan and Shek Kong. The official explanation for the name is that somebody misread a planning document which proposed a road between the two towns and referred to it as the "TW/SK route" - and the slash in the middle was read by somebody, after a long exhausting day at the office, as an "I". Why local governments always feel the need to give an official explanation for these things is quite beyond me - without one, I would've simply assumed that somebody in the Hong Kong department of roads was slightly less boring than the rest and had actually managed to come up with a cool name. But, god forbid anybody in local government should develop a sense of humour. Actually, all joking aside, Route Twisk was originally built for military use and was intended to provide a fast escape route for British troops in case of invasion - at various intervals along the road, special chambers were built where dynamite could be placed to destroy the road and prevent the enemy army from using it. It wasn't until the early 60s that the road was handed over for public use, at which point I would rather hope that they removed all the dynamite they may have stockpiled.

We stopped at Luen Wo which, at the time of my visit, was a thriving market town very much in the Chinese tradition. The centre of the town square was covered with a large tarpaulin, and underneath were an assortment of small stalls selling anything and everything. Animals were everywhere, both climbing all over the food at the market stalls and locked up in cages from where they were being sold. It was really quite disturbing to see so many caged animals, most of them far too big for the cages they were held in, waiting to be bought by anybody who could afford a few coins. Although many of the animals were being sold as pets, quite a large proportion were clearly there for the slaughter - chickens clucked around in cages waiting for somebody to point at them with a gleam in his eye, and then they would be quickly killed and handed over to their new owner to take home for tea. Both suzanne and I felt quite physically sick as we walked around the market, although Suzanne didn't initially realise exactly what was going on and wanted to walk around looking at all the animals until I pointed out that most of them were destined for somebody's plate. Just the smell of the place was enough to make me want to vomit. Luckily, there was a confectionary stall right next to the coach which sold more sweets than I had ever seen, so we bought up most of the stock and returned to the coach to spend our time at Luen Wo stuffing our faces and talking about how disgusting the place was. Since my visit, Luen Wo market has been closed down and replaced by an indoor market - although, having not been back since my initial visit, and having no wish to do so, I cannot say whether the sales ethics have actually changed in any way.

Before heading for our final stop of the day at the Sha Tin Racecourse, our driver and guide wanted to take us to a small fishing village called Luk Keng, where he was brought up. Luk Keng is a bit of a contradiction. On the one hand, it is clearly very little more than a ghost town, the population having dropped to not much more than a handful of people - but at the same time, somebody seems to have decided to try and make a little tourist destination out of the place and there is now a small square with a cafe and a handful of shops on the outskirts of town in which visitors can have lunch and pretend for a moment that they aren't in the middle of nowhere. Once you get out of the bus on the main street of Luk Keng, however, any pretence that it isn't a ghost town vanishes pretty quickly. On one side of the road, fields stretch into infinity, and on the other there is nothing more than a small row of concrete blocks which clearly serve as houses and look as though they are going to fall down at any second. The houses all have tiny balconies from which to look out at the spectacular mountain scenery, but we really did get the impression that setting foot on any of them would cause the whole structure to collapse instantly. I'm guessing that home insurance is hard to come by out here.

Our guide took great pleasure in showing us where he used to live, much to the surprise of the family crammed into the small house when he flung the front door open and led us inside. I think it was generally assumed that the couple who greeted us in the living room were his parents rather than just some strangers who had moved in since they left, but whoever they were, they seemed more than happy to let us look around. The guide was particularly eager to tell us that the toilet was right behind the front door and that it didn't come with its own door, so every time anyone wanted to make use of the facilities they had to open the front door and use it to block the view. I don't think there was a single person among us who didn't wonder why it hadn't ever occurred to them to just grab a lump of wood from somewhere and knock up an extra door.

The day ended at Sha Tin racecourse, where a traditional eight course Chinese meal had been laid on for us. Now, before you fall over, I should point out that the Chinese have a slight tendency to exaggerate when it comes to the number of courses at a meal, so if anybody is imagining that we all sat down to stuff our faces for about seven hours then you might be disappointed. In the west, a "course" tends to be something which takes at least a reasonable amount of time to eat - the shortest parts of a western meal, the starter and the dessert, still require a few minutes of your time. In china, meals seem to be far more about ramming in as many small things as are available into as many courses as possible, and then boasting to everyone about what a banquet you've laid on: "What, you went to a posh restaurant last night and only had fifteen courses? My wife cooks me seventeen in her sleep!"

We all sat at round tables in the members enclosure, feeling somewhat privileged to be allowed into such an area, and were served a constant stream of things which were no easier to identify than if they had been brought to the table covered in wrapping paper. No sooner had we swallowed one item, than the next was being brought up on a tray and offloaded into the middle of the table ready for us to help ourselves. I'm not sure whether we should all be ashamed or not, but I have to say that, by the end of the meal, there was still a small pile of food sitting in the middle of each table staring up at us - sometimes quite literally. The Chinese are nothing with their food if not imaginative. Egg, beans and chips, it was not!

The residents of Hong Kong have something of an obsession with horse racing. I don't simply mean that they like to have a flutter on the horses, as my grandmother always used to say whenever she felt like really confusing me - no, people in Hong Kong take their horse racing very seriously indeed. There are two major racecourses in the region - the most famous being the large stadium at Happy Valley, and the other being the more recent but no less important course over at Sha Tin, where we were ending our day. Happy Valley was built in 1845 and Sha Tin as recently as 1978. Sha Tin is the larger of the two, although it is still less well known to non-residents than Happy Valley - despite the fact that it has enjoyed something of a recent rise to fame after the decision was made to hold the equestrian events for the 2008 Olympic Games at the venue. The fact that the Olympics were being held in Beijing, over 1200 miles away, didn't seem to bother anyone. I just hope somebody thought to provide accommodation for the Olympic jockeys locally, otherwise that would be one hell of a commute from the Olympic village in Beijing!

The Hong Kong Jockey Club owns the monopoly on equestrian gambling in the region, as well as bets placed on other major sports such as Soccer. For this reason, they are the single biggest earner for the new Chinese administration and probably feed more money into the communist government than the rest of Hong Kong's economy combined - ironic when you consider that the Hong Kong Jockey Club is a non-profit organisation and was also able to count the Queen of England as its patron until the handover, one person who would almost certainly not have been happy to see so much easy money feeding the economy of the communist world.

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.