On The Tea Trail In Sri Lanka

Ascending into the high tea country.  Note tanker cars behind the engine and rows of tea plants below.

     Our train was a combination passenger and freight hauler.  That meant that it stopped at various stations on the long slog up from the coast, and generally stayed stopped for a while to unload not just people, but boxes, baggage, and more.  

     This was an opportunity for some of us to pop off and explore the station and a little of the towns along the way.  Maybe grab a bag of salted peanuts from a vendor, gab it up onlookers.

   After a while you got the rhythm of it -- one shriek of the station master's whistle and you better get moving back trainward.  A second shriek and you'd better be in proximity. Then a few blasts of the engineer's air horn and it was lurching forward -- sometimes with a few of us reaching out and leaping up the steps.

Scenery along the way, with more tea plants at bottom.

Just where is Sri Lanka?  A fur piece, as they say.

     Train travel in Sri Lanka is ridiculously inexpensive.  That five hours up from the coast cost 180 Rupees (about $1.25 U.S.)  A leg through the mountains later on, through some of the grandest scenery I've ever seen, was an astounding 60 Rupees (45 cents U.S.)!  Also for about five hours.

     True, this was for third-class passage; often jammed in between others in bench seats, in other words.  But what the heck -- all the better to mingle with the locals.
   

   

A typical station in the hill country.  Note station master in white uniform at center.

       

 
      The Sinhalese (people of Sri Lanka) take pride in their trains and their train stations.  Both are charmingly decrepit, with most left over from when the British colonized the island.  In general I reveled in the entire railroad experience there. I even liked the "chuck-chuck-chuck..." sound of the old engines.

      Who cares if they labored along?   I came to see the countryside and meet the people, not wiz from A to B.  

     A nice touch were the station masters.  They would turn out in crisp, white uniforms to welcome the trains and supervise the unloading of passengers and freight.  I would flip them a salute when I walked past and generally they would smile and flip one back.  Great fun and in keeping with the amiable nature of the Sinhalese people.

   

Women tea pickers near Nuwara Eliya, about 6,500 feet elevation.

    

     In keeping with my travel goals this time -- to explore the tea culture of Sri Lanka -- I visited not one but three tea plantations.  Two in the high country and one in the low, near the coast.  I picked tea, talked tea, sampled a dozen different types, toured factories, etc.

     Many of the pickers are Tamil women, who originate from India, with dots or caste marks on their foreheads.  Many do not wear shoes and have cracked leathery feet, reminiscent of a pair of hiking shoes stashed and forgotten about somewhere.  Displayed in one plantation house (lodge) are pictures of the cobra snakes some of them killed while working the fields.

    I was impressed with the can-do practicality of these women.  Despite the rigors of their labor, often in the blazing sun, many have managed to maintain an impressive femininity.  I was saddened, though, by how little they are paid.  In fact, Sri Lanka is the first of the twenty-some countries I've visited where crippling poverty really got to me.

     But that, as they say, is another story.  

Tea blow-drying at the Handunugoda Tea Factory.

Your humble correspondent at work sampling teas.

Our guide at Handunugoda explaining a tea plant.

Hibiscus, to be harvested and blended with regular tea for Hibiscus Tea

         

     As Sheldon would say on the Big Bang Theory, "Now here's a fun fact":  Almost all the teas purchased in the U.S. and elsewhere derive from the same tea plant, Camellia sinensis.  After its tea is shredded at the factory, it's sorted by size and this gives you the pekoe, the orange pekoe, the broken orange pekoe, etc...the different sizes of the shredded leaves determine this.  Not different species of tea plants.   

     Another fun fact:  Tea bushes are picked about fifty times a year.  Otherwise they'd be six feet tall!  They are, after all, a type of shrubbery.

     And another:  The"orange" in orange pekoe tea does not refer to color.  It comes from the House of Orange, associated with the Dutch tea traders of the 1800s.

     At any rate, enough of that.  Back to the tea trail, or the end of it, I should say.  After a sweaty day of hiking the fields, there's only one fitting thing to do...

A cup of Sapphire Oolong at the plantation house.

   [PART TWO TO FOLLOW NEXT MONDAY, DEC. 5th]