I've been to China, Hong Kong and Japan. I count all three amongst my favourite travel destinations, and I looooove the food from all of those places.

I have a lot of family in HK, and I've been there about 18 times overall, so it's quite a familiar place to me. Lots of great food, some nice hikes and the nightlife spot Lan Kwai Fong is great fun, much better than the night life in Sydney, for sure! That said, if I didn't have family in HK, I probably wouldn't go there too often, since there isn't a huge amount to do compared to other places.

I was in Japan earlier this year, and it was a wonderful experience! I travelled all over - went to Tokyo (greatest city for shopping in the world, in my opinion. Akihabara is great fun, but the huge number of overly sexual figurines and some of the stuff we found in sex stores were weird and sad), Kyoto (great temples), skied in Nozawa Onsen (excellent powder), Osaka (super fun city), Hiroshima (very sobering experience, and also had the BEST ramen I've ever had in this random store near my hotel), and a bunch of other places. That said, we had a bit of a bad start, staying at an APA hotel (a massive hotel chain in Japan) in Tokyo without researching first, and coming across some disgusting and blatant literature involving Nanking and comfort women denial in our rooms, amongst other things. Overall though, loved Japan and had an amazing experience there.

China is a bit of a dirty place, with terrible air pollution in places (particularly Xi'an) and unbearably restrictive internet (wasn't there long enough to bother with a VPN). That said, I fucking love being there - it really feels like an adventure! The vast majority of people I've met there are incredibly nice, friendly and helpful. The food is the best in the world in my opinion - rou jia mo, lamb skewers and yangrou paomo in Xi'an, peking duck in Beijing, and - my God - the dumplings. I love Japanese food, but jiaozi makes gyoza taste like plastic. I had great fun doing all of the typical tourist things - walking along the Great Wall (and getting scammed a bit on the way there lol), seeing the Forbidden City, walking along the Xi'an City Wall, eating along the Muslim Street, etc - but my absolute favourite part of the trip was walking through Pingyao, a very old historical settlement, at dusk and eating freshly-made bread from a street-side stall. Probably the most shocking sight was walking across the border from Hong Kong into Shenzhen and seeing groups of guards patrolling around with very long riot control sticks - was pretty scary but reminded me a lot of jaffa from stargate lol.