Tea delivered to our room at 7 am, as requested, a very civilised way to start the day. Breakfast is at 8am, to be followed by a guided tour of the tea operations at our plantation (owned by Dilmah).
Breakfast on the verandah
Breakfast was excellent, and our guide arrived at 9.15am to take us to the tea processing plant (only about a 10 minute drive from our bungalow).
Our transport is a 4WD set up safari style with rows of seats in the back
We had a bit of an altercation with the milkman on the one lane access road, but eventually manage to let him past.
The road to the factory wound through the plantation
After a brief introduction, and a quick overview of the operation of the plantation, we go out to the field to get the art of tea plucking explained.
Our guide educating us on the art of tea picking
A tea picker is on hand to demonstrate the process
Now for some tea facts. As most of us already knew, the tea shrub is part of the camellia family, camellia sinensis. If the bush goes unpruned, it will grow into a tree up to 60 foot tall, so all bushes are heavily pruned about every 4 years.
The pickers only pick the primary shoots on each bush, and then only 2 leaves and a bud. They return to the same bushes every 5-7 days when the next lot of shoots have developed, and pick those. The process continues all year round. There is no picking season.
Around 18 pickers per acre are required to harvest the shoots, and they are all women. The plantation provides accommodation, scholling and medical facilities for the families that work on their plantation. The men do the heavy work, prunig preparing the soil and maintenance of machinery etc.
The pickers have to pick 16kg minimum of shoots each day, around 4 baskets. Anything above that they get paid a bonus.
It is then back to the factory to have a tour through the tea making process.
We start on the top floor where the leaves are withered, by blowing warm air through a thick bed of leaves to reduce the moisture content.
The leaves are then roughly inspected before dropping through a chute to the next floor down, for processing through a series of stages to break the leaf down into smaller particles, grade the particles and then ferment them for around 3 hours.
The pickers only pick the primary shoots on each bush, and then only 2 leaves and a bud. They return to the same bushes every 5-7 days when the next lot of shoots have developed, and pick those. The process continues all year round. There is no picking season.
Around 18 pickers per acre are required to harvest the shoots, and they are all women. The plantation provides accommodation, scholling and medical facilities for the families that work on their plantation. The men do the heavy work, prunig preparing the soil and maintenance of machinery etc.
The pickers have to pick 16kg minimum of shoots each day, around 4 baskets. Anything above that they get paid a bonus.
It is then back to the factory to have a tour through the tea making process.
We start on the top floor where the leaves are withered, by blowing warm air through a thick bed of leaves to reduce the moisture content.
The leaves are then roughly inspected before dropping through a chute to the next floor down, for processing through a series of stages to break the leaf down into smaller particles, grade the particles and then ferment them for around 3 hours.
Rolling the leaf
Chopping in a gentle macerator
Fermenting
There are a few other grading operations in between the stages above, but once the leaf is fermented, it goes through a drier and the a series of sieves to end up with graded finished tea. The tea is packed in 50 kg bags and sent to Colombo to a government controlled auction. All tea is sold this way, so a grower literally has to buy their own tea back to sell it under their label.
The machinery is very old and the there is not a lot of activity at the time we visit. We are told they are waiting for the first lot of picked leaves to arrive for the day. What we are seeing is the tail end of processing yesterdays harvest.
We are shuffled back to the visitors room upstairs where we were first briefed for a tea tasting and opportunity to buy some tea, before being transported back to our bungalow.
It is 11.45am, a bit early for lunch, so Carole, John and I decide to go for one of the recommended walks through the plantation. The map says it is 6km and should take around 1.5 hrs. It is pretty hot, so we lather on the sun screen and head off.
The early part of the walk takes us through areas where the plantation workers live.
Clotheslines are cheap
There is a creche for you kids, of which there are many
There is a Hindu Temple
There are a number of shops
and quite a large school
There is also dispensary near the school.
Our Estate is the Osborne Estate
We passed one of the locals collecting firewood
In Sri Lanka, Tuk tuk's are everywhere, in the towns, on country roads, highways and even tea plantations. At one stage of our walk we got lost and ended up on a road walking away from the trail. Fortunately the map they gave us had GPS co-ordinates for various points along the way, so we recognised our error and backtracked.
The scenery is stunning. We soon approach the area where the pickers are working today.
We have walked a long way, it is getting very hot, and the bungalow is still nowhere to be seen. We are still on the other side of the hill from the lake and finally we come around a corner and can see the lake and our bungalow in the distance (quite a distance!)
We eventually arrived back at the bungalow at 2.15pm, about 2 hours after we had set out. We reckon we covered about 7.5km, over rugged and hilly paved, but mostly unpaved roads that wound there way through the plantation.
Lunch was served at about 2.30pm, after a badly needed cold beer. Once again it was a 3 course meal with a glass of wine.
Feeling back to normal, we gravitated to the pool and floated around there and did a few laps. It was just what we needed to cool down and relax.
Dinner tonight was a Sri Lankan feast.
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