I forgot to mention a good story from last Wednesday Oct 4th. On that day we were on our way from Amaya Lake and I woke up with a little bout of conjunctivitis. Not sore but definitely has a bloodshot right eye. I’ve had it before (last time visiting Catherine in Mexico) and it’s really a quick fix once you get the eye drop meds happening. I went to the front desk to see if they had a doctor and yes they did. However it wasn’t a doctor for western medicine only for Ayurvedic (herbal) treatments. When we met up with Sura, his brilliant solution was to talk to his neighbour, who happens to be a doctor and he phoned ahead to a pharmacy on our way to our next location. When we got to the pharmacy, the owner didn’t charge because he was honoured to have been asked directly by the doctor to dispense this prescription.
The first night’s sleep was great. It’s cooler here in the hills, so the hotel doesn’t have air conditioning units. All the sheets in our various hotels have been duvets, so if you’re hot, you can’t just throw off the blanket and just use a cover sheet. I wondered if having the curtains open would bring too much light into the room in the morning and wake me up, but it wasn’t an issue this morning.
Today we are about to learn all about tea. We have to head for breakfast first to fuel up. It’s an uphill hike to the restaurant so we get a small workout before breakfast walking up a combination of path and stairs. The breakfast view is lovely. I have an omelet, Judith is into the pastries. There is a cat that comes to our table and Judith is quick to feed it some of my bacon. I do point out the “Don’t feed the animals” sign but either she’s not letting that deter her or thinks that it doesn’t apply to domestic critters.
Breakfast view
The cat. She’s an older female. The staff told us she doesn’t visit the tables where Sri Lankans sit. Only foreigners.
We finish breakfast and return to our room to get ready to head out. The path going down to our room is so steep I feel the urge to run to catch up with my downhill motion. We come back up the path again to meet up with Sura and head out. There are two things on our agenda today: To learn about Sri Lanka’s tea history and for me to hike Little Adam’s Peak.
We drive to the Dambatenne Tea Plantation in the Haputale Mountains. It’s located in a mountainous region; there are many switchbacks and roadside waterfalls along our way. We passed a grove of trees with lots of beehives. These hives show up as dark masses usually shaped as semi-circles attached to branches. The beehives are harvested for their honey.
Grove of trees with lots of beehives. You might need to zoom in a bit to see some of the hives.
We drive through many fields of tea plantations. They are very lush with many shades of green overlapping each other. I marvel at how steep these hills are and how difficult they would be to access the tea. Many other civilizations have built terraces on steep hills to grow their produce and I wonder why it wasn’t done here. After acres and acres of tea bushes, we finally reach the end of the road. The rest of the way is via TukTuk as the road is too narrow for any full sized vehicles. Here we are squeezed into back seat of our TukTuk. It’s really difficult to get a good picture while the vehicle is underway…
Our bumpy picture.
We are here to visit some monument called Lipton’s Seat. It is a lookout with about a 270 degree view where Sir Thomas Lipton had his home and could survey his fields. Today there is a bronze statue of Lipton and a gathering area to view the same scenery that Lipton saw. It’s foggy though and we can’t see too far. We end up taking a picture sitting beside Sir Thomas and give up on the fog shrouded view.
We then retreat to have some tea and snacks on an upper viewing deck. It’s a tasty combination of Sri Lankan pastries and roti. Judith is a fan of the pancakes that are rolled with coconut and cane sugar. I’m a fan too, but since I can eat a wider range of Sri Lankan food, the pancakes are just one of many things I can eat, whereas this is one of about 2 things Judith can eat without upsetting her stomach.
There are rotis, deep fried mashed vegetables (reminded me of spicy falafel), rolled pancakes with sugar and shredded coconut and a bowl of a spicy chilli sauce for the roti and vegetable balls.
We’re up having our lunch/snack for about an hour. By this time the fog has lifted a bit in our immediate area and I can take a picture of Lipton’s Seat. Lipton was a self made entrepreneur who already had a grocery chain of 300 stores by the time he was 40 years old. On a stop off in Sri Lanka (then British Ceylon) on his way to Australia, he discovered an opportunity to enter the tea trade. At the time, tea, which had previously been an upper class beverage was being adopted by lower classes. But quality was inconsistent and in Ceylon, Lipton saw an opportunity to develop pre-measured portions, maintain a consistent quality and bypass the traditional tea brokers and wholesale distribution channels. He bought up plantations, built a factory and began selling low cost tea to the working class market through his stores.
Outcrop where Lipton’s statue is located. He had his house built here so he could oversee his tea operations.
We finish and take the TukTuk down to where our van is parked. The driver stops and shows us a tea flower.
And everywhere you looked there were tea bushes everywhere. Trees are planted on the steep hills in the tea plantation fields as their roots help stabilize the hill.
The van is parked at the tea factory where we will have our tour. Dambatenne Tea Factory was built by Thomas Lipton in 1890 and was his first factory. Some of the machinery being used dates back to the Lipton era. I had a general knowledge that tea leaves are dried and then ground to be put into tea bags. But in touring I learn that there is so much more to the process. We put on face masks and shoe covers. When we enter into the factory floor, it’s dusty and I’m thankful for the face masks.
Huge air heaters and fans blow the leaves overtop a long (40 feet?) chicken wire grid to dry out the leaves. Once dried they go down one of 4 chutes in the floor into one of the huge roller cylinder barrels capable of holding holding 350 kg of tea where they are cut into smaller pieces.
Output from the rollers.
The tea in the barrels are taken out and the tea is sifted on a large sized sifters. Stems ame unwanted materials are separated out and used for compost. The remaining tea leaves are further ground and sifted out into grind sizes.
Some of the tea goes through further stages of grinding and drying until a final sort is achieved. The final product is bagged into 45kg bags and then put on pallets ready for shipping.
Warehouse of bags waiting shipping. I saw bags labeled PEKOE, BOPF (Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings), BOP (Broken Orange Pekoe).
Tea Grades
The final bit of the tour was learning how to be a tea taster. It’s a weird technique quickly slurping a spoonful of cold tea so that it fills your entire mouth, especially the sides of your tongue, but that’s how it’s done. I was surprised by how that technique allows the tea to reach the bitter taste regions of the tongue and just how intense that tasted. The tour ended here and we picked out small packages of tea to buy.
It’s pouring at this point so I don’t get to pick any tea. It felt like the same amount as our atmospheric river we had a couple of years ago.
We end up finishing for the day. The original plan was for me to hike up Little Adam’s Peak, but I’m not keen with the amount of rain coming down. We end up coming back to our hotel. Our original plan was to go down to Ella for dinner but with all that rain, we end up eating some bananas and Hawaiian Brand cookies that we had purchased for the train ride the day before for our dinner…. Not exactly nutritious but it fit the bill.
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