time for tea

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There are several advertising hoardings around advertising the Tea Research centre. Anyone who knows me knows that this would be my ideal employer- I can quite see myself researching tea, and imagine it would embrace such serious themes as cooling properties (very important) and ability to retain flavour and consistency when impacted by an external force (a biscuit, say). I don't think tea has quite the hold here as it does in places like Darjeeling and Assam, but there are tea plantations and factories, one of which is open to the public.

It's about 4km from Kausani. I had to take off my shoes at the door (more rain- not good!!) and a tiny little man, in a mixture of Hindi and broken English, showed me around the plant.

First I saw the big drums, where the leaves are subjected to cold and hot air. The reason why they do this was more Hindi than English, so afraid I'm not really any the wiser, but the drums were huge, big troughs, running the length of the aircraft carrier type shed, so it all looked very impressive.

Next, the little man pulled up a trapdoor in the floor and pointed down what appeared to be a large chute, with a sort of collecting bin at the bottom. Being the imaginative sort (and no, that's not a euphemism for 'chicken'), I'm always concerned about the things I might fall down, fall off of, trip over...basically, much of life is spent in the anticipation of things that could cause a hasty, untimely and ultimately gory death, so peering down this chute, while the little man propped the trap door open with his foot, wasn't my favourite experience of the holiday. As I was concentrating on trying to keep back from the edge, I missed some of the explanation again, but as a lot of it seemed to be in Hindi (or the bits I could hear over the roaring of the machines) I probably wouldn't've made a great deal of sense out of it anyway.

Next we had a look at the rolling machine, where the leaves are squashed and rolled, before being graded, sifted, packed etc.

Before leaving, he took me into the tasting room, a shabby little room with a bed made up in one corner. All around were little plastic storage jars with yellow lids- the sort of thing you'd get at Tescos, to store your pasta in- with different types of tea in each one. He took lids of a few of them, to let me have a whiff- I couldn't detect a vast difference, tho' pretended I could. He was telling me that, depending on grade, their tea sells from between 100 rupees per kilo (79 rupees is the approximate equivalent of 1 GBP) to 36000 rupees per kilo. I was buying a coulpe of boxes as presents, and no prizes for guessing which end of the scale I stopped at!!

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Comments

[Mum]

Just my cup of tea!
I thought you had signed up to learn Hindi at work! Shouldn't you be fluent by now? I think you fell down a grain chute ( or were saved just in time - not sure,long time ago) when you went on a junior school trip - so this fear is probably not unfounded. Glad you are packing so much in to your fortnight - sorry it hasn't quite come up to Sikkim standards. So you won't be wanting me to buy you a house in Kausani then? Thanks for all the text messages too !