After a day wandering around the intensely urban heart of Hong Kong Island, you'll be ready to hop on the Lamma ferry. A short ride from the Star Ferry Pier, Lamma Island is gloriously car-free place with great hiking trails, beaches and small enough be an ideal day trip from the city. The lack of motorized traffic is tonic for the overtaxed urban soul. The island's 13.6 kilometers are home to around 5,000 people and at least twice as many cats. At Yung Shue Wan, a picturesque small town, you disembark from the ferry (from Central and Sok Kwu Wan which connects to Aberdeen). The seafood restaurants clustering the ferry piers all look and feel very similar--open-air seating, tanks out front full of crabs and fish and lobsters for the picking, and friendly laid-back staff. Try the seafood at “the Lamma Hilton,” an open-air restaurant overlooking a small harbor. Sadly, the prices remain Hong-Kong high, but it was worth the splurge. There's a small touristy street running through town--but you get the definite vibe that Yung Shue Wan and Lamma Island are there for the people who live there That's part of what makes Lamma great--you don't get crowds coming to see any particular famous sight, and the place has that great small-island vibe through-and-through. Ascending the hillside behind Yung Shue Wan, you pass a slew of charmingly low-rent-looking island pads, that feed the escapist fantasies of enjoying the quiet island life with one of the world's greatest cities only a short ferry ride away. Soon you reach a network trails that running through charming wooded neighborhoods, along beaches and steep hillsides, into the bush, through jungly and rocky "neighborhoods" You can wander the “streets” of Lamma for a few hours; eventually you’ll end up near the water. The only thing that doesn't fit in is the looming smokestack of the power plant situated on the coast down from a pleasant beach; an odd sight when you’re strolling along the surf line or turn off the main path into the organic vegetable-and-herb garden Herboland, complete with healthy snacks and teas. You can spend the better part of a day on the trail, ending up toward dusk in another small fishing town, Sok Kwu Wan, full of island cats. As dusk falls and lights began to glint across the waters from Hong Kong Island, board the ferry and chug back from whence you came.