World cruise 32M

From Margaret
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Tea Time – Sri Lanka's Favorite Beverage

A longish, but interesting, bus ride took us through Colombo and out into the countryside. In Colombo, our guide figured that we had to make a photo-stop at a building that is a smaller copy of the U.S. Capital building.


As I walked back to the bus from my "photo-stop" I jumped nearly out of my skin as the corner of my eye catches a cobra waving his head and striking at the top of his basket. His handler who obviously wants to pose for pictures seemed to be goading the behaviors and laughed at my startled reaction. Sorry, no pictures – snakes aren't my first choice of things to look at.

Once in the countryside, we made our way to the Rayigam Estate, a 1000+ acre tea and rubber plantation. Their "driveway" or access road into the plantation was one lane wide and obviously heavily used (given the number of potholes). We drove through a section of rubber trees that were past their prime and were being cut down and replanted. Replanting hadn't yet started, but one could see where trees had been removed. Later we found out that the wood from these spent rubber trees are the fuel for the tea processing plant.

The tea plantings are simply beautiful. The young leaves are harvested every two weeks except in February (I think that was the month) because it is too hot for the plants to produce well. All tea is harvested by women. The reason given is that women have smaller, more sensitive hands and can pick the top 4 leaves on each twig without damaging the rest of the plant.

Tea processing is something else again. I had no idea that the tea I so much enjoy has to go through so much to get from plant to cup. First there are the drying racks. The freshly picked tea leaves are spread on wire racks about 4 feet wide and 30 or 40 feet long. Warm air (heated by burning the spent rubber trees) is pumped through the leaves from the bottom up. The water in the tea leaves has to be pretty much removed. I think that they said that the leaves need to be dried to no more than 35% moisture levels before the next step.

From the drying racks the tea is pushed down canvas tubes into what I would call a chopping machine. I missed what the technical name is. They make a fair amount of noise. As the tea is chopped or ground it falls down into bins below the chopping/grinding surface. The workers pick these up and dump them on to the first of the sieving screens. These jiggle the leaves so that anything small enough falls through onto the mats under the screen. Whatever remains on the screens is too large and is sent back for more chopping/grinding.

The sieved tea is sent up a conveyor belt for further drying. From this drying machine it goes through several more sieves and screens for both size and color. Each size and color is put into its own container and labeled. The tea in these boxes is packed into labeled sacks and sent to buyers. Eventually it is packaged in the small packages that we buy. The entire process is really interesting.

We finished our trip at the home of the plantation owner. He and his wife served us tea and cake. The tea was lovely and thankfully the teacups were large enough to almost be a mug. Their house was an exquisite tropical mansion built in the late 18 or early 1900s by the Scotsman who first set up the plantation. When the Sri Lankan government "nationalized," or at least brought the tea industry under close government supervision, most of the European plantation owners sold out. Our host, whom I think was Sri Lankan, had bought this particular plantation from the original Scottish owner.

It was wonderful.