A trip to Tai O, Lantau Island

(Sunday, 24 April)

Tai O - Stilt dwellings still inhabited by the local Tanka boat people

Okay, lets start with a tourist guide synopsis - Tai O is a small village on the far western side of a large, verdant and mountainous island to the north-west of Hong Kong, called Lantau. It’s the historical location of the Tanka boat people, fisher-folk who live in stilted houses that stand on the shallow waters of the bay, and who still make their living drying fish on hooks from the front of their modest dwellings or on traditional straw mats. It’s on these mats that their famous shrimp paste is also sun-dried.

I make the trip with Mian - it’s her only day off and she wants to do something away from the frantic bustle of HK life. I could do with getting out of the city too! 

We take the ferry from pier 6 in Central; it’s a pleasant forty minute trip which takes in great views of HK harbour and its familiar skyline as it gradually retreats into the smog haze. This is also one of the busiest shipping lanes, and the views are interrupted by the to and fro of countless freighters and cargo vessels, sometimes less than a few hundred feet away.

Once we reach Lantau’s ferry pier, Tai O is reached by a half hour bus ride past some fabulous and mainly deserted beaches (where are my swimming trunks?).

Shrimp paste drying in the sun.

Today is Sunday so the small coastal village is crowded with sight-seers who are packed close to the bus drop off point - no MTR station here…yet. But walk several hundred yards and you’re pretty much on your own in a labyrinthine network of stilted walkways and makeshift floating dwellings, boats and mats of drying fish. There’s also the shrimp paste! The mats look very photogenic with their delicately coloured pink shrimp carpet - but the smell; it’s pungent and overpowering! The nearby batteries of blue vats house fermenting gallons of shrimp, which will in turn be dried, so you might be able to begin to imagine how rank the odour is. Mian says it’s too much for her and she will wait for me up the path while I get some photos. Some people are just light-weights I guess…

We go on a “dolphin” cruise, ostensibly to catch a glimpse of the Pearl River estuary ‘white’ dolphins (so say the posters and tourist guides), which are in fact bubble-gum pink. Well I’d love to see a pink dolphin as much as the next tourist, but sadly their numbers have declined to such an extent (due to untreated sewage, boat pollution and net fishing) that such sightings are rare these days. I’m afraid that the kids on the boat are going to be disappointed. Mian explains to me that the boatman is saying to them “don’t even blink, or you’ll miss them”. Flying pigs will also wing their way past the boat any second (thus speaks the age hardened cynic!). 

What you do see as you round the headland is the huge and all too real expansion, taking place to the north - the continuing airport development. Tai O looks very fragile indeed in the face of this.

It is nonetheless a great place to draw, and perhaps its attraction is, like so much of what I’ve been attracted to in HK, a bittersweet thing. Whether it can survive the juggernaut of expansion is debatable. Last time I was in HK there was no MTR link to Lantau. Now it is no longer an island. The MTR now extends by bridge to Tung Chong where a cable car ride will take you to one of the largest statues of Buddha in the world - a journey previously only possible by ferry and bus. Lantau is also home to the HK international Airport and a Disneyworld theme park, all connected by the MTR. It’s an easily commutable journey to Central HK, and those who can afford it want to live here, away from the noise and claustrophobia of the intense urban existence there; and the high-rises are going up, oh how they are going up. 

It’s probably safe to say that the extreme west of the island is safe from building development, but its not safe from being just something to be consumed by the visitors, captured on their cell phones and shared on social media - and then forgotten. And it won’t be long before some entrepreneurial son of a Tanka fisherman figures out that its easier to set up a factory in China to dry and bottle shrimp paste than it is to spread it out onto straw mats in the sun.