A trip to Hong Kong Island is never complete without at least one visit to a local street market, of which the best balance between ethnic and tourist are to be found by going on the MTR to Mong Kok or Sham Shui Po where the stall holders are happy to bargain with you as most of the prices are hugely inflated to start with. The best and most extensive market on the island for tourists is at Stanley, and this is where you can get hold of all those local handicrafts you're dying to pore over - A fairly long bus ride on Route 260 from Central takes you right into Stanley and drops you off practically on the doorstep of the market, ensuring however that you have to walk past a couple of little coffee shops on the way which will try to entice you in for refreshments. Stanley market is far more than just tacky souvenirs - I managed to pick up an incredibly detailed oil-on-fabric painting of boats on the harbour, complete with reflections in the water, which now takes pride of place on my wall, and I actually got to watch the artist putting the finishing touches to it. This is one of those tourist markets where local artists are happy to paint and frame your name in Chinese rainbow caligraphy, or make you a personal wax seal stamp (locally called a chop) for your mail. As long as you can spare a few dollars, Stanley is the place to go for all your personalised gifts. You can also get hopelessly lost - when I returned to Hong Kong with a friend in 2000, we went up some steps in one of the shops and came out onto a second level which I hadn't known was there, where all the shops seemed to be interconnected in a maze of merchandise!

If you're looking for more authentic local markets, then you're spoilt for choice - there are so many to choose from that you could spend all week wandering around them and still not come close to seeing everything. There are bird markets, fish markets, flower markets, clothes markets, fruit markets, the ladies market, the list goes on. There are markets selling nothing but Jade, markets selling nothing but candles or incense or Chinese medicines. Whatever you want, it's here. Just grab a guidebook and you'll be pleasantly surprised what you can find littering the tiny side streets, especially after dusk when the Temple Street night market opens and you find yourself surrounded by stall holders selling watches and men's clothing. In a grubby corner of Mong Kok, you'll find the Bird market, a fascinating but slightly worrying part of town where lonely old men come to buy and sell caged birds of every variety from mynahs to budgies, or just to show off their birds to each other (and not in the sense you're thinking, either!). Here, if you're not going deaf at the sound of a million shrill tweets from every direction, you're jumping a mile in the air because a small snake has escaped from the live bird food stalls and slithered up your trouser leg! Not being a huge fan of seeing animals caged up, the bird market doesn't exactly float my boat, and the same goes for the Goldfish market at which you will find nothing but endless varieties of fish hanging from tiny plastic bags as though they are at a fairground and with a life expectancy of about 5 minutes - unfortunately, the Chinese believe that goldfish add to the fung shui of a property so this isn't likely to stop anytime soon. At the Jade market in Yau Ma Tei, accessible from the MTR, you can bargain for Jade, Amber and Lapis carved into every shape imaginable until you realise just how much you're being ripped off compared to the locals. You could spend a week exploring the markets of Hong Kong and never see anything else...

The only down side to shopping in Hong Kong is that there is so much more space allocated to the interior of shopping centres than there is to the entrances. Builders here seem to work until they've created a shopping complex the size of a small town and then slap a tiny door onto one corner of it almost as an afterthought - you can literally walk around for hours looking for a way into a concrete monstrosity several blocks in size before finally discovering that you have to go down into an MTR station and then up a narrow flight of stairs over which a single hanging sign reads: "Shoe repairs - this way."

The average Hong Kong shopping mall tends to be built upward rather than outward - a building which appears, at first glance, to be a small corner market can stretch upward ten or twenty stories into the sky with each floor being the size of a small city and packed with hundreds of tiny cubical shops along its many maze-like corridors. On my first day in Hong Kong, I was taken to one of the computer markets and ended up feeling exactly the same way as I did when my parents took me to Hamley's toy shop in London as a child. Walking through the entrance, a single escalator immediately took me up to the first floor where every conceivable space was occupied by glass fronted shops the size of the average cupboard, each one selling computer components - sound cards, memory chips, motherboards, you name it. Up to the next floor, and we were surrounded by cupboard sized shops selling computer games. Up again, and it was business software. Up again, and all the shops were full of printers... and so on, until I felt sure that I must've been far into the atmosphere. Similar markets exist on virtually every corner, selling everything from clothing to fruit and vegetables. Hong Kong really is a shoppers paradise, just as long as you can find your way into the malls in the first place!

Unfortunately, not all of the shops in Hong Kong choose to take much notice of international copyright law. One of the things which often gets mentioned about the city is the fact that many places quite openly sell pirated computer software, something which constantly manages to get right up the noses of the software giants. This has always been a major problem, because as a communist country where the idea of an individual owning any rights to anything is a novel concept, China doesn't have any copyright laws as such and is not in a position to tell anybody off for making copies. It has been alleged that the Hong Kong police occasionally turn up at a well known pirate store as a token gesture, the owner hands over a large quantity of cash and they go away again. Recently it seems that the US government has finally thrown its dummy out of the pram and had something of a hissy fit with the Chinese stance on piracy - and whatever they've done, it seems to have worked as the local papers have been reporting a heavy downturn in the sale of pirated software in the region over the last couple of years.

My own experience of the situation doesn't quite tie up with the official line that piracy is going away, however. When I first came to Hong Kong, I remember wandering into the Golden Computer Centre in Sham Shui Po expecting to find just another large computer market, and being totally blown away by what I found instead. Just inside the door, I was greeted by an English speaking man who had obviously been stationed there to look for tourists and give them the low down. Downstairs in the basement, he told me, I would find all the pirated computer software, while upstairs I would find ripped-off games for all the current games consoles. Wandering the corridors of the Golden Computer Centre, I simply couldn't believe what I was seeing - every small cubical shop was jam packed with pirated software. It was all laid out like a record store, with empty CD cases all stacked up in rows so that customers could flip through everything on offer. Everything was on sale for the equivalent of 3 UK pounds each or 3 for 10 pounds. It was just insane. Nothing was kept on the premesis - customers who wanted something had to tell the guy at the counter who sent a boy to collect it from a nearby secret location. It seems that pirated CDs were being mass produced in China and being transported into Hong Kong via illicit routes around the coast, bypassing customs procedures.

I wanted to see if things had changed as much as I had been told after the clampdown by the authorities. This time, when I entered the Golden Computer Centre, the man who greeted me explained that the basement contained PC software shops and the first floor contained games for games consoles. He then lowered his voice to a whisper and mentioned that if I wanted the "special" department then I should walk down the street for two blocks, go up a flight of dirty steps between a bakery and a Chinese Medicine Centre, and into a room where a queue of people would be lining up to ask a dodgy looking guy at a desk for copies of just about anything! I followed the directions he gave me and, although I wasn't about to partake myself (as a software designer, wouldn't that be just a bit hypocritical?), I observed the man at the desk sending a runner off to the secret location to collect orders as they were placed. As I walked back to the computer centre afterwards, I looked back and saw everybody leaving - which I took to mean that the police were on their way and the location would soon be casually moving somewhere else.

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.