I decided that it was time for Richard to visit Tai O to see the village on stilts and hopefully catch a glimpse of Pink Dolphins. I had been to Tai O some months ago with my year 6 class. It is a great time of the year for a visit as the weather was perfect, warm but not hot with big clear blue skies.
Tai O is better known as the Venice of Hong Kong as it is a rare example of a Chinese stilt – house community situated on the far northwestern coast edge of Lantau Island. It is home to the Tanka people, a community of fisher folk who have built their homes on stilts above the tidal flats for generations because they do not feel safe on land. It took us a couple of hours to get there; bus to central, then the ferry to Mui Wo and finally a bus to Tai O, but it was well worth it.
We began by strolling through the markets filled with stalls selling pungent shrimp paste, dried fish and handicrafts. Fish of all sizes from shark to squid hang drying wherever you seem to look and there are baskets of what looks like lime peel soaking up the sun as well. What they do with this I am not sure, but at the moment it seems like a popular thing to dry.
We had a look through an exhibition of local antiquities organized by the Tai O Rural Committee which has a good collection of relics, photographs and other memorabilia of a time when Tai O was a thriving port. Over the fairly recently built bridge that has replaced the rope drawn sampan that ferried people across to the other side, we wandered over the canal and glimpsed our first stilt houses. More markets filled the streets, offering free samples of food to draw in the hungry hordes. We headed to a restaurant for lunch of delicious salt and pepper squid (my favourite) and rice.
After lunch we decided to leave the busy market place and head further along the lanes to see what life was like living there. We passed the Kwan Tai Temple and numerous small shrines and then hit the canal.
We discovered a whole host of other restaurants including a funky café on the edge of the town’s main canal. It turned out to be a great place to sit and absorb activity on the canal including birds fishing for their dinner. The owner brought out books of the history of Tai O , full of great photos for us to browse through so that we got a better sense of what the place would once have been like.
Once our lunch and coffee had settled, we decided to go on a 25 minute boat ride up the canal to get a look at the stilt houses from the water, and then we headed out to sea to do a bit of dolphin spotting.
Chinese White Dolphins, often called pink dolphins, can be seen frolicking off the coast close to Tai O and a marine park north of Tai O has been developed to help protect them. When I went with my class we spent over an hour out watching them and saw loads and loads, swimming in family groups, breaching the water, generally having a great time playing. On Friday we were only out in the ocean for a very short time, but in that time did manage to see a couple of dolphins having a good old frolicking. Well worth the HK$20 that we paid. The photos below are from the first trip we did, as I knew I already had some good photos so did not bother taking any more, just enjoyed the view.
All too soon it was time to head home. On the way out we briefly visited the Tai O Culture Workshop which was opened by a local woman in the ground floor of her family home and contains loads of implements used by generations of fisherfolk. We decided to catch a bus to Tung Chung and then the MTR to Central and a bus home. Tai O turned out to be a fabulous place to explore and we decided that it would be worth coming back again, next time for an overnight stay as we found a great looking little B&B in fact we have booked a stay there for my birthday. 
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