Hong Kong Trails and Tours - with Sabrina Christensen your Expert Guide
An Experienced Private Tour Guide for Custom City and Hiking Tours of Hong Kong
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Me Jamie, your host, I am English and I have lived in Hong Kong since January 2nd 1972 - I know the place.
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Sabrina -
Expert Guide
An Experienced Private Tour Guide for Custom City and Hiking Tours of Hong Kong
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Sabrina Christensen | Awesome Private Tour Guide | Hong Kong
Foreword by Jamie
Sabrina Christensen of Hong Kong Trails and Tours
13th January 2026 is a date I will not forget in a hurry. It was my birthday, and it was the day Sabrina first wrote to me as a newly minted private tour guide. That is not a small thing. The hardest part of this work is not the walking and it is not the talking. It is the first year of almost zero visibility in the marketplace. Guests cannot book a person they have never heard of, and the platforms do not hand a new operator a queue of polite enquiries just because she has a great bio and a decent pair of shoes. I have watched that first stretch chew people up. Sabrina did not wait to be discovered. She wrote, she asked sensible questions, and she got on with it.
I have always got on with her, even though I have not known her for years the way I have known some of the other operators in this town. We have met many times since that first email. She is the owner. She is the guide. There is no Guide Team sitting behind a booking form. When a guest books Sabrina, the guest gets Sabrina. That sounds simple. In Hong Kong tourism it is not simple at all. Plenty of companies grow a guide team that works for them, farm the work out, and hope the standard holds. She made the other choice and she has been successful with it. Part of that success is temperament. She is driven, but she has a quiet way about her. Clients like her. Other guides like her. She just seems to get on with people, including the awkward ones, the tired cruise passengers, and the parents who need the pace slowed down without being made to feel they have spoilt the plan,
Oh, and guess what, she aims to be the very best tour guide in Hong Kong!
Her own website is valid and it is being rebuilt as I write this, slowly, which is the honest way to do it. Treat what is on the page today as the current shop window, not as carved stone. The woman behind it is not changing.
What follows is a proper look at Hong Kong Trails and Tours. I want guests who land here to understand who she is, how she works, what she is genuinely strong at, and how to reach her without going the long way round through an OTA like Viator.
Who Sabrina is, and why the company works
Sabrina came to Hong Kong from South India and has made this city her home for 17 + years. She is a Hong Kong citizen. She lives here with her English husband and two adult children. That last detail matters more than people think. A guide who has raised a family in this place has already done the unglamorous work of learning how the city actually functions on a Tuesday morning, not just how it photographs on a summer Saturday.
She is a licensed tour guide and she is First Aid and CPR certified. Those two lines are not decoration. On a city walk they are useful. On a hiking tour they are the difference between a professional outing and a hopeful ramble. On 26th June 2026, on Lantau Peak, they stopped being lines on a page.(more on that later)
She still carries an outsider's curiosity, which I happen to like. People who grew up on these streets sometimes stop seeing them. Sabrina notices the small stuff and she is happy to explain it without turning the explanation into a lecture. She also does not pretend to be something she is not. After nearly two decades here she speaks basic Cantonese. She does not wave that about as fluency. Guests from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and the wider Tamil and Hindi speaking world often relax the minute they realise they can talk in a language that feels like home. That is a real advantage in a city where most private tours still run only in English and the major European languages..
The languages, because they change who books her
This is worth its own heading. A lot of Hong Kong tour sites list languages as if they were badges. Sabrina's list is a working toolkit.
Fluent English
Fluent Tamil
Comfortable Hindi, plus a few other South Indian languages
Basic Cantonese for the daily grain of the city
English is the language of most of her international guests, and she uses it cleanly. Tamil is the piece that sets the company apart. Hong Kong sees a steady flow of visitors from South India and the Tamil diaspora. They are often families, often more than one generation travelling together, and they are not always well served by a guide who can only work in English and then mime the menu. Being able to brief a grandmother in Tamil while the children listen in English is not a marketing line. It is how a tour stays kind.
Hindi widens that net. Basic Cantonese does the unshowy work of taxis, cooked food stalls, village shops and the odd official who has decided not to switch languages that morning. I have lived here since 2nd January 1972 and I still watch visitors assume that English will carry them everywhere. It often does in Central. It does not always do so on a trail head in the New Territories, or at a cooked food stall when the only menu is on the wall in Chinese. Tai O Fishing Village is a different case. Pretty much the operators who run the boats speak good English, and the people who drive the boats understand you quite well. They have the English because most of the people who go on the boats are English speaking tourists. It makes perfect sense.
Hiking is not a sideline
If you spend any time with Sabrina the conversation turns to trails. That is not a hobby she bolted onto a city tour business. It is the centre of gravity.
She has completed more than 670 hikes. Many of those are in Hong Kong. A good number are not. The personal list is not the usual weekend warrior collection.
Mount Kilimanjaro
Everest Base Camp
Annapurna Base Camp
Tiger's Nest in Bhutan
Mount Kinabalu
Mount Toubkal
Pico Ruivo
The circumambulation of Mount Kailash
And as of 17th September 2026 she was standing at the trail head for Mont Blanc. She sent me the photograph the same day. That is not a brochure line. That is a woman who was in Hong Kong building a tour company one week and on a French and Italian mountain the next.
That sort of mileage changes how a person handles a private tour with paying guests. She understands pacing. She reads weather instead of hoping the sky will behave. She knows when a group is proud and tired at the same time, which is a dangerous mix on some Hong Kong trails. She knows when to turn back. She knows when a guest simply needs a longer sit down and a cold drink rather than another pep talk about the view.
Hong Kong's countryside is one of the facts visitors still underestimate. Within a short hop of some of the densest urban districts on earth you get coastal high ground, forested paths, sea views and quiet villages. She has walked most of those routes more than once. Dragon's Back is the name people arrive with, and she can do that tour very well. She can also take people to quieter ground on Lamma Island, in the New Territories, and on the green corridors that climb from Central toward Victoria Peak. The point is not to collect famous names. The point is to match the path to the legs in front of her.
Families with children, older walkers and first time visitors are all welcome. Children under 18 join free when travelling with their parents. That is a practical line, not a gimmick, and families notice it.
26th June 2026, Lantau Peak and the Lightning Stike
First Aid on a certificate is one thing. Using it on a mountain in a thunderstorm is another.
On 26th June 2026 Sabrina was out with a hiking group, not a private tour, on Lantau Peak. That is Lantau’s highest ground, 934 metres, with the Big Buddha sitting below on the Ngong Ping side. A thunderstorm came through. The Observatory had already put up a thunderstorm warning, then amber rain, then the red rain signal around noon. Lightning was frequent and ugly.
This is how she related it to me. One of the group, a man of 59, was struck. He was lying next to one of the large metal poles on that summit. On high ground in a live storm that is about the worst place a person can be. Another bolt was not a remote idea. It was the next likely thing. There were already other people in a small shed, not from her group. They refused to help. She crawled back out, pulled him away from the pole, got him inside, and called 999.
She was pretty shaken up by the entire affair. I would have been too. Most people freeze. Some people shut the door. She moved, and then she had to live with what she had just seen.
Hong Kong Free Press reported the incident the same day and used photographs she took on the mountain. The group was 9 people from a local hiking meetup. Police said the man was conscious. He was taken to hospital. He survived. He is not back to full health.
I will not dress that up into a miracle story. I will say this. Lightning on an exposed Hong Kong summit is not a scare line for tourists. People die of it. A second strike, with a metal pole a few feet away, is how they die. Getting a struck man off that pole, under a roof, and onto the emergency line, while other walkers sit tight, is exactly why a hiking guide should be First Aid and CPR certified, and why I care that she is.
It was not one of her paid tours. That matters. She was simply out on the hill with other walkers, and the habit was still there.
City tours with the same flexible habit
The trails still matter most to her, but Hong Kong Trails and Tours is not only a hiking shop. She runs private city and island tours with the same habit of listening first.
The usual map is there if guests want it. Victoria Peak. Central's mix of old and new. Kowloon's waterfront and markets. Lantau with the Big Buddha and the Tai O Fishing Village. Full combinations of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Layover guests and cruise passengers with a tight clock. None of that is unusual. What is unusual is that she does not march people through a checklist because the checklist exists on the website.
Some visitors want colonial architecture and the story of how the city was built. Some want wet markets, temples, street snacks and time to stand still with a camera. Some want a private car. Some want public transport, including the MTR (Subway), the Street Tram and the Star Ferry, because that is how the place actually moves. She will do any of those, or a mixture, and she will change the plan when the weather or the energy in the group changes. I have always thought that last skill is the one you cannot fake. Scripts do not help you when a typhoon signal is lurking, or when an 80 year old guest has had enough steps before lunch.
What Hong Kong Trails and Tours actually sell
Her site lists a clear set of building blocks. As I said, that site is being updated in stages, so treat the figures as the current published starting points rather than a locked menu. Prices are shown in US$, which I happen to think is the right call for this market. I have put the Hong Kong dollar beside them with an exchange rate of about 7.8.
Hong Kong Island walking or highlights tours, about 3 hours, from US$330 / about HK$2,574
Kowloon peninsula or Kowloon walking tours, about 3 hours, from US$330 / about HK$2,574
Dragon's Back hike, about 6 hours, from US$480 / about HK$3,744
Lantau Island tours, including Big Buddha and the Tai O Fishing Village, about 8 hours on the fuller walking version, from US$580 / about HK$4,524
Combined Hong Kong Island and Kowloon tours, about 8 hours, from US$580 / about HK$4,524
Custom city, hiking, layover, cruise and multi day arrangements built around the group
She will collect guests at a hotel, the airport or the cruise terminal. Door to door is part of the method. She is also happy to work with a private car when the itinerary and the guests call for it. No meeting point treasure hunt unless that is what someone actually wants.
How the tours actually feel, according to the people who took them
Tripadvisor has her sitting around 4.9 from a still small but consistent set of reviews, recently in the high teens. That number will grow rapidly. What matters more than the average is the repeating language.
Guests talk about a bespoke stretch of tours built for a mother. They talk about last minute cover when another guide fell ill. They talk about vegetarian lunch arranged without fuss. They talk about parents being looked after. They talk about a 6 hour airport pickup that flexed when the weather and the luggage got in the way. They use words like kind, patient, energetic, easy company, family. That last one comes up more than once. It is not a word you get if you only perform enthusiasm for the first hour.
Other guides like her as well. That is a quieter test and I pay attention to it. Hong Kong is a small industry once you get off the Big Bus circuit. Word moves. A person who is difficult to work with does not stay well liked for very long.
Charisma, and why founders still matter
The great private tour companies in this city are still, almost without exception, the lengthened shadow of one person. Sabrina is no different. She is driven. She wants the work. She will graft. The difference is the volume control. She does not come in hot. She does not dominate the conversation. She just gets on with the guests in front of her, including the ones who arrived tired, sceptical, or quietly worried that a hiking tour would show them up.
I want to labour the single guide point because it is the whole business model. She has stayed a single guide on purpose. There is no Guide Team to dilute the tour. That choice limits volume. It also protects the thing guests are actually paying for, which is the person.
I have referred quite a number of tours her way when my own diary was full, or when the request leaned toward hiking, or when two bookings landed on the same afternoon. The reports that come back have been consistent. Knowledgeable. Warm. Unflustered when the plan had to move. That is the job.
Book the website, not the marketplace
Like every serious operator I know, Sabrina would far rather you booked on hongkongtrailsandtours.com than through Viator, Get Your Guide, Klook or the Tripadvisor checkout. I will keep saying this until I am bored of hearing myself.
An OTA is a shop window. It is not a relationship. The platform takes a heavy cut, often 20% to 30% and sometimes more. The listing is written to please a search algorithm. The cancellation rules belong to the platform. The guide often cannot have a proper conversation about fitness, heat, knees, children, temples, or whether the group would be happier in a private car than on a long MTR (Subway) pull before the booking is locked. Direct contact lets her ask those questions and build the tour around the answers. It also means more of the fee stays with the person who is actually walking beside you.
I am not going to pretend that Viator for example is evil. They are shops with a shop's incentives. If you already found her here, write to her here. Use the website, the email, or WhatsApp. Do not take a second lap through a third party catalogue unless you have no other choice.
Full contact details
Hong Kong Trails and Tours
Guide and owner: Sabrina Christensen
Website: hongkongtrailsandtours.com
Email: Sabrina@hongkongtrailsandtours.com
WhatsApp: +852 5702 5758
Languages: English, Tamil, Hindi and other South Indian languages, basic Cantonese
Tripadvisor: Hong Kong Trails and Tours, currently around 4.9
Write to her with dates, ages, fitness, and whether you want city, hiking, Lantau, a layover, or a cruise terminal pickup. The more she knows before the morning starts, the better the tour. If a figure or a tour name on the site has moved while she rebuilds the pages, she will tell you. That is another reason to write to her directly
A few thoughts from the side of the road
Hong Kong is full of people who can point at a building and recite a date. It is much thinner on the ground when you want someone who will walk the high ground with you, keep an eye on the heat, switch into Tamil when a parent needs it, and still have the patience for a city afternoon if that is what the group turns out to want.
The Mont Blanc photograph from 17th September 2026 is one thing I keep coming back to. Most new operators spend their first year staring at an empty inbox. She spent hers walking, writing, taking the bookings that came, updating her website and then she got on a plane and stood at the start of another mountain. The other thing is 26th June. Certificates are easy. Crawling back out of a shed while the sky is still live is not.
Sabrina has built Hong Kong Trails and Tours without a Guide Team and without making a noise about herself. That is why I send people to her. If the request is hiking, or a family who need looking after, or a guest who will be happier with a guide who can work in Tamil and English on the same morning, she is the right call. Write to her direct. Tell her what the legs can do and what the day is for. Then put the phone away and go.
So there you go
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Go here for the Hong Kong Michelin Restaurant Guide which includes the Bib Gourmand Category
I do not do Food Tours in Hong Kong but I know people that do!
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The information above can be shown to restaurant managers in Hong Kong if you are intolerant to gluten and nuts,
I do not do food tours as mentioned above, I have very specific reasons and part of it is that I do not speak Cantonese or write Chinese, I am from Yorkshire in England and I lack the language gene and it is not through lack of trying and yes a lot of restaurants do not have English menu’s or staff who speak conversational English.
.. and yet I have eaten at close to 1,400 restaurants in Hong Kong since January 2nd 1972, my wife was born in Hong Kong and we have been together over 40 years and her first language is Cantonese and a lot of her family are Chinese or half Chinese so I have never had much of an issue!
This does not translate to doing food tours though, yes, I could do them, no problem there but they would never ever be as good as the food tours done by my friends (see the 3 links above) most of their awesome guides are locally born Hong Kong Chinese and obviously food culture is part of their DNA, it is impossible for me to compete with that!
So please feel free to contact them for food tours
I do not do Hiking Tours in Hong Kong but I know someone that does!
I do not do Hiking Tours, never have and never will even though I used to go Hiking a lot when I was a lot younger, The Hong Kong Government is promoting hiking tours so I urge you to contact my friend Sabrina at Hong Kong Trails and Tours, she is a long time Hong Kong resident and and a very experienced hiker with close to 700 Hikes in 15+ years under her belt, please click on the link below
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