After Kandy, we headed into the mountains, which is always a relief when you’re sweating in the tropics. As soon as we started climbing the switchback roads, we found ourselves in tea plantation country.
In Sri Lanka, aka Ceylon, tea is still hand-picked by Indian Tamil people whom the British brought in to work for their tea plantations. Today, descendants of those original Indians continue the back-breaking work in rain and shine.
The higher the elevation of the tea, the better the quality. The women out picking tea leaves seem happy to be photographed, perhaps to break up the monotony of their days. Tea leaves are picked every 10-12 days, so finding pickers to photograph can be tricky.
I visited a tea factory where they convert green leaf into finished black tea. Interestingly, the factories only operate at night to keep the tea cool during processing. On a factory tour, they can only show you the machinery, which isn’t that exciting to photograph without the tea. They also cut and sort tea into different grades and sizes that affect the tea’s strength, then sell it wholesale to tea retailers. Tea retailers then mix the grades to create their own blends.
The tea plantations had trees sporadically planted throughout the tea-growing fields to provide partial shade as the sun moved, protecting the leaves from burning due to prolonged sun exposure.
