Monday, December 2, 2019; Colombo, Sri Lanka
We woke as the ship was slipping into the harbor at Colombo. Our berth is a commercial pier with no facilities, other than a series of temporary tents set up for vendors on the dock. There is a very modern looking tower piercing the skyline of Colombo. It is called the Lotus tower, and it is currently the tallest free standing structure in SE Asia at over 300m in height. It is currently only being used as a communications antenna complex because it’s offices and other spaces are not ready for occupancy. Opening our balcony revealed 80 degree temperature with 80% humidity and overcast skies.
The excursion we booked took us to a Tea Plantation and factory. We didn’t realize when we booked the excursion that the Tea Plantation and factory were nearly a 3 hour drive from the Port of Colombo, but we were transported in slightly run down, but functional tourist buses with air conditioning. Driving through the Port of Colombo and surrounding city reveals it to be very crowded and messy with heavy traffic. There are lots of heavy trucks mixed in with tiny flimsy Tuk-Tuks (3 wheelers used as taxis and personal transportation) and everything else from KIA’s to Mercedes Coupe’s. Subcompact SUV’s seem to be the most popular vehicles amongst the working middle class. There are also vehicle brands here we have never seen elsewhere, including TATA and Mahindra, which are made in India. Toyotas and Hondas are plentiful, but there aren’t many American cars to speak of.
There is a tremendous amount of construction going on. Interestingly enough, a new superhighway is under construction, apparently financed by China. The surface streets around the Port are in terrible shape with pot holes big enough to swallow a Tuk-Tuk if the drivers aren’t careful.
There are plenty of stray dogs in the streets, and plenty of people in an eclectic mix of costumes ranging from jeans and torn t-shirts to sari’s and bare feet. Actually, the preferred foot ware throughout the island seems to be bare feet or flip flops. People even ride motorcycles with helmets, but bare feet. Around the Port, there are shanty towns of improvised housing and piles of trash that look like all the freeway underpasses and medians in downtown Seattle and San Francisco.
As our bus worked it’s way through the traffic from the Port to the outskirts of town, the traffic, mess and disorder diminished and as we got onto a spanking new looking toll expressway, it was like we were transported away from a Metropolitan slum and into a more interesting and pleasant rural tropical environment. It was interesting to see colorful laundry hung on the chain link fences along the expressway where it was adjacent to residences.
There are plenty of banana plantations and rice paddies evident as we worked our way down south along the coast of Sri Lanka. We stopped at a very modern rest stop equipped with solar panels and a variety of shops in an air conditioned mini mall. Undoubtedly also financed by the Chinese.
We eventually left the expressway, and the worked our way up the hillsides through a couple of smaller villages with roadside shops and lots of people and animals wandering about in dangerous proximity to wildly zig zagging buses, trucks, Tuk-Tuks and motorcycles. The roads are generally very crooked, shoulderless, and they do drive on the left side of the road here, to add to our terror. When we got to the Tea Plantation and Factory, the driveway was at an acute angle to the road, which curved around a nearly blind corner. Our bus had to execute a 6 point turn while blocking traffic in both directions to get into the driveway.
True to their word, it took 3 hours to get to the Tea Plantation, but once we got onto the expressway, after the first several miles, the scenery really didn’t change much, so we were able to nap much of the way.
Our tour of the plantation involved walking up a driveway with a factory guide pointing out all the various plants that covered the large site. There are rows and rows of tea bushes, which are actually Camilla bushes. There are taller skinny trees planted to provide some shade, and also because of their ability to fix nitrogen in the soil- part of their strategy to maintain an organic operation. There were also a variety of other trees like Jackfruit and citrus trees, and bergamot bushes. They like to market how ecologically friendly their organic operation is and what a diverse ecosystem they have. There are workers weeding by hand, and picking tea leaves by hand on steep hillsides. They all appear to be women.
The most interesting thing we learned was that all their different types of tea all come from the same plant, but which parts are picked and how the leaves are processed determine which will be black tea, green tea, orange pekoe tea and others. For example, at the tip of new growth on the bush, there is a still rolled leaf at the base of a 3 leaf cluster. These are processed into green tea. If you pick the branch further down and process a five leaf cluster, you can make all the other black tea varieties.
We then walked through the factory to see a very labor intensive process of sorting, withering, rolling, fermenting, and drying the leaves and stems to yield their final products. Again, inside the factory, all the employees appear to be women. There also seemed to be a high ratio of supervisory to subservient employees- up to one supervisor per two employees.
One of the factory rooms was where the tea leaves are withered in long trays running the length of the building. One tray was full of leaves that had been adequately withered and ready for the next stage in processing. This required moving them from the withering trays into a chute to the rolling process part of the factory downstairs. This was done by two tiny women carrying large woven baskets on their heads like giant sombreros and one woman who would scoop the leaves into the baskets and then help lift the baskets onto the heads of the carriers. The carriers would then walked down the row between the trays to the dumping station at the end of the building, and then return for another load. A third younger woman appeared to be simply supervising the whole enterprise. Everyone in the tour group (probably 200 people total in 4 buses) wanted to take pictures of the carriers with the baskets on their heads, and they obliged by pausing and smiling.
After all the tourists had filed out of the wilting room, Janet went back and pulled out a bag of Princess chocolates that our room steward puts on our pillows every night. We save them and Janet likes to give them to children she runs into on our tours. She put a pile of them on a table at the end of the withering tray. With remarkable speed, the gal that was the leaf scooper had swooped down and scooped up all the chocolates for herself, with no apparent intention to share with her colleagues. The two carriers then approached with their palms out held. Fortunately, Janet still had some left in her bag to give to each of them, and eventually even the supervisor, who seemed to be torn about how to manage this situation, came over with her hand out for chocolate. They seemed to be quite excited for the treat.
The factory is not air conditioned, so by the time the tour was over, we were all sweating pretty good from the heat and humidity. But the room where the final products were being sorted for packaging was filled with crates of delicious smelling teas.
We finished the tour with a tea tasting, and then a sort of self service low tea where they served some butter and cheese sandwiches, chocolate cake and ginger snaps with a mug of tea. It seemed like they weren’t really set up to handle the size of our groups from the cruise ship because they frequently ran out of cups and mugs. We were a little concerned that some guy around back might just be hosing them off and returning them to the tables without properly washing them because the whole set up seemed a bit improvised, but we’ll see if we end up with food poisoning.
We got back into the bus for our long return trip. We stopped again at the rest stop for a bathroom break and could feel a few sprinkles from the sky. By the time we were back on the road, we ran into some serious rainfall. They have two monsoon seasons on Sri Lanka, and November to January is one of them. We were told that we were very fortunate because the last tour group that had arrived 2 days earlier on a cruise ship had heavy rain fall the entire day. By the time we got to the ship, the rain had stopped and the sun was back out.
We returned just in time for afternoon Trivia, which we finished our usual one point off the win. We then got showered up and had dinner. We met a Chinese woman dining alone next to us. Her husband is a professor of Mathematics at SUNY. It turns out he is the same age as Ben, but is scheduled for a prostate biopsy in a few weeks. Ben reassured her not to be too alarmed because it is far from certain that her husband will end up with cancer, and even if that is the case, early diagnosis can lead to cure in most cases. We never ascertained just why she wasn’t traveling with her husband- perhaps they take separate vacations all the time.
We wound up our evening with a Movie Themes trivia, and finished pretty strong, but still were beat by another team by 1 point. That’s why we’re the Bridesmaids, I guess.
Our clocks go forward another half hour at bedtime tonight, putting us on Bangladeshi time. We’ll have another 3 sea days before arriving at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. We actually look forward to sea days now after a busy day of excursions at port.
