Nuwara Eliya: The La Bookellie Tea Plantation
 

No trip to Sri Lanka is truly complete without a trip to Nuwara Eliya, the central highlands and home of the tea plantations. A favorite of ours is the Labookellie Tea Plantation, and we never leave the island without a year's supply of their exquisite tea. The trip to Labookellie and Nuwara Eliya is about four hours or more from Kandy, on narrow and twisting roads. It is about as harrowing as a ride down the Galle Road, but in a different way; here your worries are altitude and gravity rather than maniac drivers (although you may encounter of few of those as well)  As you wind your way into the mountains, you will begin to spot the terraced grooves in the greenery that indicate tea fields (photo above left). Soon we arrived at the gates to the Labookellie Tea Factory (shown in the photo to the right) a remarkably compact compound of corrugated buildings; in contrast to the sprawling hillside fields, the manufacturing process is essentially completed in two buildings. The company offers a very informative tour of the plant, which begins with showing samples of the different grades of tea produced, ranging from regular to tea that is so fine it would pass through the openings in an ordinary tea ball to larger cut teas.  In addition to the fineness of the cut, there is the matter of quality and taste. At Labookellie it appears that the quality of the tea is the degree to which the best tea leaves are cut with lesser varieties. In fact, one reason for visiting the factory is that the purest tea is only sold there; by the time it reaches Colombo it is already cut with lesser quality leaves. And there is a similar meritocracy to the export of tea. The finest teas get shipped to those countries who are the keenest tea drinkers, while the countries who are predominantly coffee drinkers (especially the strong cardamom-based coffees of the Middle East) are shipped the lesser quality teas; the Sri Lankans clearly believe such strong coffee consumption irreparably damages the taste buds, and they point to the sweepings at the bottom of the bins of tea as the sort of leaves they sell to those nations that don't appreciate the quality of their product! Making tea appears to be a fairly arduous process of fermentation and drying, and visitors are treated to a tour of the process. Judging from the age of the machinery, it is apparent that the technique for making tea has not changed appreciably in years. The first stop is the drying and fermentation stations where the tea is initially processed. The photo in the middle left shows the main tea processing building, while the photo  in the middle right  captures the first step in tea manufacturing, withering the freshly-picked leaves and sending them on for fermentation. The next step in the process is the rolling and fermentation station, shown in the photo to the lower left. At this point the fermented morass of leaves is rolled flat and broken into the bits that you see in your loose-leaf tea or tea bags. Next, the rolled tea is send to the grading room, where the finished product is graded by quality and sent in batches for the final bagging and boxing. The grading room is shown in the photo at the bottom right. And the end result? Just about the richest and most drinkable tea to fill a pot!

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