Hong Kong and Macau - Suggestions for a two night excursion from Hong Kong

I plan to be in Hong Kong for five nights in June. I'm looking for suggestions for a two night excursion. I've been to Macau and Bangkok so perhaps something different this time. Preferably something a little upscale but not too expensive. Not a family outing, just me and a friend.

Last year we went to Yangshuo (PRC) before going on to HKG. Fly to Guilin (c. 1 -1.5 hrs) and the arrange a car through your hotel. It's a land of karsts, with amazing scenery, lush valleys, jagged limestone mountains. They are pretty used to westerners though, so there are good restaurants with english menus etc, so as a first introduction to China, it's pretty benign.

You would need to arrange a China visa though, but if you want something different, it might fit the bill. Absence of western chains, but there are some nice hotels (not 5 star, but comfortable) around the place - we used the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat - great staff, out of town location (but easy enough to get in and out using fixed price taxis).

Taipei. Lots of cheap flights. No visa needed for Americans for short stay.

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3)

Taipei +1, or Kaoshiung.

It's just a place so enjoyable that I have no problem emigrate to there.

Guangzhou (Canton) but this requires a Chinese visa.

I plan to be in Hong Kong for five nights in June. I'm looking for suggestions for a two night excursion. I've been to Macau and Bangkok so perhaps something different this time. Preferably something a little upscale but not too expensive. Not a family outing, just me and a friend.

1. Taipei
2. Shanghai

Thanks for all the recomendations. I've got some research to do.

SG