Up Into Tea Country

see all photos »

Exhausted, dripping wet, and ecstatic from the Hindu festival (featuring, you'll recall, elephants, roaring music, and sweaty, entranced crowds), we slithered into our car and began the long drive into the hills.

The Western Ghats, to be exact, a chain of north-south mountains running parallel to the coast about 70 miles inland. Seventy miles---that's at least a three hour-drive in India. Don't do it if you're in a hurry.

On the mountainside, we saw women in colorful saris picking the leaves...

It isn't easy to average less than 25 miles per hour for that long. You need horrendous roads, very slow mountain traffic (ancient trucks loaded way too high, beflowered cars loaded with too many religious pilgrims), and the occasional gang of domestic animals sauntering across, or sitting down in, your path.

The road crept higher and higher, and we crept along with it. The road clung precariously to a mountainside that dared anyone to trust it. This is a scary time to be confronted by downhill drivers who believe in fate more than their brakes.

Almost four hours later we were 3,000 feet high, exhausted, and deposited at the Paradisa Plantation Retreat (http://www.ParadisaRetreat.com). It's a gorgeous place with a dozen hand-crafted cabins in the woods, featuring home-grown organic food and luxurious service.

We'd come to see the plantations, and had already passed hundreds of them. We'd climbed up past thousands of rubber trees, each wearing a little cup around its waist that collected dripping sap. Then we saw pepper trees, each with hundreds of tendrils that ended in a dozen peppercorns. We saw trees growing cardamom, nutmeg, vanilla beans, and a dozen other spices that medieval Arabs and Renaissance Europeans had risked their lives to discover, trade for, and own.

But we were after the least exotic of them all---tea.

The Duke of Wellington helped secure this area for the British after he beat Napoleon, and the Brits planted tea like their empire depended on it. They made India---from Darjeeling and Assam to Kerala and Ceylon---tea country.

So the next day we woke up early and drove even further into the hills. We passed some three or 4 million tea bushes on the mountainside, and saw women in colorful saris picking the leaves, placing them into the burlap sacks they carried.

We finally entered the Connemara Tea Plantation. We toured the noisy, old-fashioned factory of pulleys and conveyer belts, and saw the non-descript green leaves crushed, dried, treated, and sorted into the stuff that starts half of humanity's day.

We even spoke with the factory's manager. His main problem is competition from China, who's exporting much cheaper tea into India. The government can't protect Indian tea-makers with import tariffs because India wants to keep exporting products into China, and doesn't want China to tax the Indian goods. For better or worse, there's your globalization.

When I was very young, every kid's first world geography lesson featured Holland's wooden shoes, Switzerland's cheese--and India's tea.

Yesterday, a half-century later, I saw where that boyhood tea actually comes from.