In Look, There's Nobody in Causeway Bay!, I wrote about an overheard phone call on a tram in late May—the moment that sparked my first voiceover on Instagram. But even after that night, I didn't immediately switch to voicing all my reels.

The reason was practical: it took too much time. With moving postcards, all I had to do was assemble pretty footage to music. A voiceover required writing a script first, recording takes, laying the soundtrack beneath the voice so it resolved cleanly on a good note, and then adding subtitles and figuring out where each phrase should break. Besides, I didn't feel I had a story to tell every single time.

What finally got me writing scripts one after another was a summer plan that fell apart, and a day out in Pok Fu Lam.

The Summer Plan That Fell Through

The school term wrapped up at the end of May. For the students, summer vacation had begun. For me, it simply meant no classes, no work, and no income.

With three empty months ahead, I had to figure out what to do with my time.

Back during my gap year, I had toyed with the idea of getting a tour guide licence. I love Hong Kong so much. Whether I was leading the Saturday walks I host or taking visiting friends around, I was always in my element, talking about the city with endless enthusiasm. Turning that passion into a business sounded promising. The catch was that guiding foreign tourists legally requires a licence, which meant taking a prerequisite training course. And the course was expensive—steep even for someone with a full-time job.

On top of that, everything I heard about the licensing exam sounded dreadful. It was notoriously bureaucratic, crammed with petty, rote-memorization questions straight out of a high school entrance exam. Someone also told me that even with a licence, you still had to take clients through traditional travel agencies and had no freedom to design your own routes. All those restrictions made me hesitate, and I almost backed away from the idea.

Then a friend who already had her licence encouraged me. She had passed the exam, so she knew how the system actually worked. The exam was bureaucratic, she admitted, but once you passed it, you were free to do whatever you wanted and run your own routes. She also pointed out that the government offered subsidies, and that running private tours paid well enough to earn the tuition back in just a few trips.

Convinced, I signed up and paid the tuition for a 3-month course starting in late June.

Then, in early June—the very week my voiced reels were beginning to show promise—an email landed in my inbox: the course was canceled due to low enrollment, with no date set for when it might run again.

Just like that, my summer study plan evaporated.

What was I supposed to do now? Travel abroad for a Gap Year Part 2? Even on a shoestring budget, traveling was an extra expense, and summer flights were expensive, so I decided to stay in Hong Kong.

By then, I had already started experimenting with voiceovers, so I was actually glad to have a new project step in to fill the void. That summer, apart from hiking and yoga classes, I spent almost every waking hour at home—writing scripts, recording voiceovers, editing footage, and posting reels. Day after day.

From Pok Fu Lam to Aberdeen

That summer, I was organizing a series of walks for the Saturday group I host, aiming to cover the perimeter of Hong Kong Island in sections. One weekend, our route took us from Pok Fu Lam to Aberdeen: first Bethanie Chapel, the old Dairy Farm, and Pok Fu Lam Village, then down to Waterfall Bay, along the seaside promenade lined with Buddha statues, chatting with local uncles swimming offshore, and finally into Aberdeen.

It was such a wonderful day. So many stops along the route were places I had never seen before, and I was sure most people in Hong Kong hadn't visited them either. That sparked an idea: I would make a whole series on Instagram. A dedicated reel for each stop, followed by a comprehensive "Pok Fu Lam Walking Guide" sharing my route, practical timing, and personal experience.

The first reel in the series was Bethanie Chapel. I wrote the script and recorded the voiceover in my own conversational way, without any hook (mostly because I had no idea I was supposed to have one back then). It performed better than my silent postcards, but compared to my two earlier viral hits, it barely registered. Next came the old Dairy Farm. I researched its history, tried to share the backstory, and added cute animations to keep it from feeling too dry. In the end, neither video took off; both stalled around 2,000 views.

A Script That Read Like a Textbook

The third stop was Pok Fu Lam Village.

The moment I stepped into the village, I fell in love with the scene: the dim alleyways, the scattered vegetable stalls, the villagers strolling around... Time seemed to have set there, like jelly. The footage I captured had a cinematic warmth, as if a natural filter had settled over the whole scene. Eager to turn my notes from that day into a script, I handed them to Perplexity, the AI tool I was using at the time.

Here is how its draft opened:

"When I first saw Pok Fu Lam Village from the bus, I was surprised to see this village tucked under the hillside, right next to a high-rise estate. Pokfulam is one of the oldest villages on Hong Kong Island, with around 200 years of history. It was originally a farming and fishing community, and the name refers to the valley and hills around it…"

The whole thing read like a dry history textbook. Just reading it aloud into the microphone, I was bored to death. That deep boredom was my wake-up call: I couldn't possibly put out a video like this.

I took an ax to the script. I rewrote it again and again, adjusting the visual pacing to match. In the end, it stopped being a history lecture and became a story grounded in what I actually felt:

"Walking through this alleyway, I feel like I'm traveling back in time. This is Pok Fu Lam Village, one of the last villages on Hong Kong Island…"

The history was still there, but reframed around the people: the village's deep ties to the nearby Dairy Farm, the slow decline after the pastures closed, and how the remaining villagers refused to let their heritage disappear, fighting to preserve their home. The rest of the script went to the details I had noticed with my own eyes: the mosaic wall marking the old workers' club, the QR codes you could scan to hear the story told by the villagers, people gathered around tables wrapping rice dumplings for the Dragon Boat Festival, chatting while working, like in the old village times.

A Unicorn

Four months after posting, it has reached 31,000 views and brought in 571 followers.

I call this video a "unicorn." Rare, and truly special.

In the world of short-form video, where everyone is chasing instant gratification, 30 seconds is considered long, and a full minute feels like an eternity. My moving postcards had an average watch time of about 3 seconds, and most of my voiced reels didn't reach 10 seconds. But this Pok Fu Lam Village reel was nearly 2 minutes long, each clip was quite long, without fast cuts, and the content was serious historical background rather than light entertainment. Yet its average watch time reached 26 seconds—more than double most of my reels.

On top of that, people weren't just watching; many of them followed me. Out of every 1,000 viewers, about 18 decided to follow my account—the highest conversion rate of all my reels. A subsequent video of mine went viral with over 250,000 views, yet its conversion rate was only 8 followers per 1,000, less than half of what this village reel achieved.

It never exploded overnight. It started with 4,000 views on day one and kept steadily ticking upward. Reels made for quick entertainment are forgotten after two days and stop gaining views, but this unicorn ran a marathon, picking up steady views week after week, even now.

What moved me most was the comment section. Many former residents, or people who had ties to the village, shared their personal memories of Pok Fu Lam under my video. Reading those comments brought genuine warmth; it meant the video had struck an emotional chord deep enough to make strangers want to open up.

I later analyzed the video's script and performance with Gemini (I had just switched over from Perplexity, a transition I wrote about in Then What's the Point of AI?). It pointed out that the quiet nostalgia and the story of a community banding together to hold on resonated deeply with viewers. I think it was many things coming together: the spirit of the place, the villagers' story, the angle I took in my voiceover, the way I structured the story, and the breathing rhythm between the visuals and the music. Together, they gave the audience something genuine to feel.

Being a Tour Guide in My Own Way

The remaining single-stop videos in the Pok Fu Lam series had mixed results—some did well, others were unremarkable.

Once the individual stops were published, I began working on the "Pok Fu Lam Walking Guide." This time, I did something I had never done before: I deliberately structured the video from the ground up. I opened with 3 distinct shots and headlines to set the premise, followed by a bold title card, and then a fast-paced teaser montage of the day's highlights so viewers knew exactly what was ahead before diving into each stop. On top of that, I illustrated a walking map so people could easily follow the route themselves.

That video marked a major leap in how I edited: an intentional hook, clear pacing, a genuine itinerary, and a map to ground the journey.

Within 24 hours, the walking guide surpassed 20,000 views. It has now accumulated nearly 100,000 views, making it one of my most successful—and personally satisfying—creations.

It brought back memories of writing my old travel blog. Back then, I used to break an itinerary down into individual attractions, writing a deep-dive post for each, before pulling everything together into an overarching guide that showed readers how to connect the dots.

My Instagram reels are essentially doing the exact same thing. The format has evolved—faster, visual, and brought to life with my own voice—to meet a new medium, but the heart of it hasn't changed.

I went on to apply this framework to other neighborhoods across Hong Kong, with varying degrees of success. That summer became an endless cycle of writing, recording, editing, and publishing. Every day, I sat down with Gemini to review the analytics: why one video took off while another fell flat, and how to refine the next one. Through that daily grind, I began to genuinely understand content strategy, as well as the strengths and limitations of AI.

My official tour guide course had fallen through that summer, but deep down, I felt I was already doing the work. I had simply found my own digital way to be a tour guide—taking more than a million viewers, from the other side of the screen, on a journey through the Hong Kong I love.