Tai O

A sleepy little village built on stilts.

Back at the beginning of October 2017 Jenn and I took the girls out for the day to visit the village of Tai O.  Located on Lantau's western shore, Tai O is a sleepy little fishing village much of which is built on stilts.

We walked through the market and up and down the "streets", more planks of wood connecting the various homes and establishments built over the water.  Looking for a specific address can be rather confusing as the "streets", planks of wood twist and turn in directions unknown until you happen upon the corner or they just dead end without notice.  What appears to take you in the direction you thought you needed to go ends up on the wrong side of a small gully or "boat parking" area.

We were looking for the Triple Lanterns Café and with an adventurous spirit and determination we did manage to find it.  It sits on the main waterway in Tai O and has a great view of the canal with tables outside on the patio.  It is also a great place to watch the sunset.  We sat a spell and enjoyed some bites and drinks and just watched life go by, which by the way is sometimes more difficult when your kids are with you.  They just didn't seem to appreciate the slower pace of a lazy day like Jenn and I were attempting to do.

Now if you are ever considering a day trip from Hong Kong to Tai O consider this.  Getting there is super easy; either the bus will take you or you can catch a cab without much trouble at Mui Wo, which is where we landed after disembarking from the ferry.  The trouble lies with heading back.  The line ups for the bus are super long and it can take near an hour to finally get on depending on the time of day.  So we opted for the taxi line; no better and it took about as long or longer to finally get a taxi.  The only taxis that were available were the ones dropping people off and as you can imagine there aren't that many people (namely tourist) arriving at the end of the day.  We eventually made it back to Mui Wo and caught a ferry back to Hong Kong island.

All in all a fantastic touristic day was had and no children were starved in the making of this memory.  If you want to see the unedited footage of Amélie's lunch dilemmas follow the link.