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Tea time in Sri Lanka
Tea is thought to have been discovered by the Chinese emperor Sheng Nung 5,000 years ago when some leaves fell into a cup of water. It began as a medicine and grew into a social beverage.
Sri Lanka now produces over 280-million kilograms of tea every year from six tea districts. The industry employs 30, 000 workers. Harvested all year, Sri Lankan tea is exported to over 50 countries.
The best place to taste tea and get a taste of Sri Lanka is up in the tea fields of Nuwara Eliya, a four-hour drive from the capital Colombo. En route you see white-shirted schoolchildren, women under parasols and roadside orange coconut stalls. You pass waterfalls like St Clair and Devon, the elephant orphanage and bathing site at Pinnawala and the Kelani Ganga river, where Sir David Lean filmed Bridge Over The River Kwai.
You see arrack toddy collectors shinning up coconut trees. You are watched by Toque monkeys and brown-capped babblers. You cross rivers and see river monitors and enormous black bats hanging from trees. You smell wild tobacco and the Princess of the Night flowers.
You drive under conical buna-bunya trees. Your senses overload. And then you climb 1,800 metres above sea level up country into the tea plantations, where the pluckers work the steep terraces picking the top two leaves of every bush for about a rand a day. You learn from your driver that the shrubs are picked every 20 days.
Then you suddenly arrive at the mock Tudor-style Scots club, now called the St Andrews Hotel.
And an old man in a claret waiter’s jacket asks you to guess how old his balls are.
The snooker table of Nuwara Elija’s “Mansion in the Mist” is 118 years old and its ivory balls only slightly younger.
The snooker room used to be a dance hall. Here tea and coffee planters worked and played.
Scotsman James Taylor first planted tea in the area in 1867.
Some of the early equipment is still to be seen. Kandy, the lakeside second city, has a tea museum, but Nawara is one big museum of tea and colonialism. During World War II it was used for R&R for servicemen.
St. Andrews is one of the most atmospheric hotels imaginable. It stands for what Sri Lanka (Sanskrit for “resplendent land”) stood for before the tsunami and the on-off Tamil civil war affected people’s opinions and put them off this wonderful country. Sinhalese hospitality is as warm in the hill stations as it is down on the beaches.
The cooking is good everywhere. As well as milk rice with scraped jaggery, lentil dhaal and string hoppers (noodles), the menu in the Old Course Restaurant of the St. Andrews Hotel includes steak and kidney pie. Hot water bottles are left in your bed.
Down the road is a racecourse and a golf club with fireplaces in the men’s locker room. The 5,550-yard par 70 Nuwara Elija Golf Club is a great test of golf.
Green fees are only R140. Traditions are preserved despite independence being granted 60 years ago. The British influence remains. Golf is part of Sri Lanka’s new tourism drive.
You can get seaplane connections between all the courses. After Royal Calcutta, Royal Colombo is the oldest golf club outside the UK.
Kandy has the more modern but no less scenic Victoria Golf and Country Club. In 2008 Nuwara will host the annual Sri Lankan Airlines Golf Classic, which is open to all. Travelling from course to course is as good a way as any to see the old Ceylon and the new Sri Lanka.
South Sri Lanka was decimated by the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, when over 100,000 people lost their lives. At Peralya two carriages remain of the Queen of the Sea train swamped by the tidal wave that killed a thousand people on their way back from market.
The Japanese government donated a giant memorial statue. Sri Lanka is rebuilding itself.
You sense this with the Mount Pedro range behind you and a china tea set in front of you on the lawn of the St Andrews. Everyone is a tea connoisseur and wants to talk about “the leaf that cheers the globe”.
You sense this with the Mount Pedro range behind you and a china tea set in front of you on the lawn of the St Andrews. Everyone is a tea connoisseur and wants to talk about “the leaf that cheers the globe”.
Tea factories give tastings, and hotels will provide impromptu lessons to educate your palette.
“Sri Lankan tea liquor is the cleanest in the world regarding pesticide residuals,” said a tea guru proudly. “But of course the best tea is brewed in a gold pot.”
A foreigner chortles. His teacher looks at him with concern, suspecting the worst. “You aren’t a tea bag man, are you?” he asks with disgust.
You are a philistine if you don’t go to Sri Lanka.
For more information visit: Tourism Board www.srilankatourism.org , Hilton Colombo: www.colombohilton.com or Lighthouse Hotel and Spa: www.jebwings.com
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