A Taste of Tai O (大澳)

Today's trip:

Destination

The fishing town of Tai O on Lantau Island.

Transport

Bus/MTR to Tung Chung, and then a #11 bus to Tai O. The #11 bus costs $11, and takes roughly 45-60 minutes depending on roadworks.

Do, Did, Done

This was just one of the free activities that the Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) has to offer, and it was only for 2 hours, so I decided to have a taster, and see what the Tai O fishing town was like.

I saw sights that were the complete opposite of the city. The town is pretty poor, with the main income being from fishing, shops and small restaurants, not a lot to choose from careerwise. Also, with only 2,000-odd people living there, a majority of them being of retirement age, they are not exactly raking it in. Once they finish school, young people now tend to leave for the cities, where there are more jobs with higher income.

People here tend to live in clusters of interconnected stilt houses (棚屋), there is no proper sewage system here, so everything is dumped into the river, and the current takes it away. Inside it's hard to tell where houses are sectioned off, as there are no obvious borderlines, the people here tend to have closer almost family-like relationships with their neighbours. In order to make life easier for themselves, people have no qualms about crossing in other people's territories. However, with such a small population of people living close together, news, gossip.... or talking bad about someone, can spread like a forest fire. Before you know it, everyone knows that your mum's coming over for tea, someone just proposed to who, or Milly was b*tching about Molly, so it's best to keep your mouth shut unless you want the whole 'world' to know.

Even though generations and generations of these people have been living here for over a thousand years, the HK government don't recognise the land as belonging to the people living there. Why? They don't have any documents. For most of these people, when they were young, education was beyond what they could afford and free education hadn't been introduced then, so most of them don't know how to read or write, so land ownership papers and the like were pretty much ignored. So according to the whims of the HK government, this town can be replaced with, for example, a holiday resort, or it will be left as a tourist attraction.

I will be coming back here again, as we only explored the town during the tour, and not the surrounding areas.

Other Notes

There were 9 other people on the tour... all members of the HKTB!! All working in the department that especially deal with overseas visitors! They were trying out the tour for the tourism board. Really nice people, they took me to the Shaolin Wushu Culture Centre after the tour... and what a coincidence... one of them has a son who is attending Creative Kindergartens! Not my branch, but I know the English teacher working there, what a small world it is! It's highly unlikely, but I hope we meet again!

More pics of Tai O on the left.