It's hard to encapsulate most parts of our Sri Lanka trip into blog posts. But one that unified much of it, and one of the main reasons we considered Sri Lanka in the first place, was tea.





We spent almost all of our time in the central Hill Country, so we were never very far from tea plantations, and much of the surrounding countryside looked like the picture below. In fact, one of our guest houses' surroundings even looked like this: they grew their own tea, and we had it at breakfast!



Hillsides, some incredibly steep, were all covered in little tea bushes and the occasional shade tree, sometimes full of tea pickers. The picture of tea pickers at work is one of the "classic" pictures associated with this area of Asia (a quick google search for "tea pluckers Sri Lanka" will turn up many examples), but we didn't take any. This is largely because, in a vacation that was permeated with an awareness of how comparatively rich and fortunate we are, it seemed inappropriate to enjoy the picturesqueness of a task that was clearly hard, hot, and underpaid, at the safe distance of a photograph.

Once, passing some pickers on a hike through a tea plantation, they urged us to take a photo, so we did so, only to be immediately asked for money in return. This seemed at once perfectly fair (they certainly needed the money) and uncomfortably futile (a few extra dollars on one day was unlikely to help them much in the long term), and we passed up such opportunities in the future.



This tension cropped up also in the two tea factories we visited. One clearly didn't have a lot of tourists, but the other was full of white people taking tours. Both places, of course, were full of Sri Lankans (mostly Tamils, though from a different Tamil ethnic group from the LTTE) working hard at repetitive and sometimes extremely hot jobs. Of course, there are plenty of white people who work hard at factories in somewhat similar conditions, but the pay is better, and the power structure is less unfortunately defined (Tamils work, Sinhalese supervise, white people come and enjoy the scenery).

Nevertheless, it was fascinating to tour the factories, and at least somewhat satisfying to know that money spent there was going to the factory (however they chose to distribute it), without a significant portion going to the fancy companies in the US and elsewhere that inevitably sell tea at a markup as a "specialty product." We saw tea being dried on long mesh trays...



...rolled and crushed (no pictures), fermented...



...heated at high temperatures (again, no pictures), and sorted in all sorts of ways into grades and types, by color, flower and stem content, size, etc.




We also enjoyed many wonderful cups of tea.



And we appreciated getting to know some of the characteristics of tea grown in Sri Lanka at different altitudes: high grows slowly and is more aromatic, less dark and rich; low grows very quickly and is (perhaps overly) hearty and claims to be particularly useful when you have bad water; and middle is, as you'd expect, a combination. We brought back nearly 2 kg of tea, from all of the major tea-growing regions of Sri Lanka, as well as some more specialty teas: Earl Grey, green, and even a very expensive "Gold Tips" variety that only uses the bud of the plant. (We tried that this morning, and it is stupendous.)

Anyone near Bloomington in the next year or so is welcome to stop by for a cup!