Of Tea, Goats and Elephants

I went with the Indian breakfast which is local to Kerela. It was a garbanzo bean curry with a rice sort of thing that reminded me of the stuff idly is made of. There was also a fruit basket that had passion fruit, but a type different from what I had in Brazil- I like the Brazilian better. Also toast and local arabica filtered coffee.

The coffee tasted wonderful today (not so much tomorrow - see tomorrow’s post). I ate outside and it was lovely to feel a bit cold at breakfast! Here are some pictures of the ”hotel” and environs.

We set out at 9 for an interesting day of sight seeing. We picked up my guide, Hadlee, in front of the old train station right at the center of Munnar at the confluence of the three rivers (this is the meaning of the word munnar). It is an old town made up of about 55,000 people who live in multi-colored houses through the town and up the hillside. Later when asked, Hadlee said the biggest issue is waste management - people tend to just throw garbage out their windows which is unsightly to say the least. In addition, as the roads are surfaced and widened more tourists can access the town which puts pressure on the local environment. Before tea, the town focus was on spice and hunting. The indigenous people are the Mudhuvans which mean “back people” (vs on head) known by this name because they carry all their belongings on their back. Until very recently there were tribes of these people who were totally cut off. At their request, not long ago roads were built to connect them with the outside world. They wanted to benefit from the advantages of modernisation - I hope they don’t regret it in the future.

Hadlee is an interesting character. He’s from Munnar, 35 and is married with a daughter of about 8. His English is very good and is a guide all of his time. Just before Covid he developed an app to help with identification of frogs and snakes which helped him get through the last 2 years. He is a gentle sole who really knows his nature and he’s easy on the eye.

So Hadlee was my guide for the day and we started at the Eravikulum National Park which is a reserve for, amongst other things, the Nilgiri Tahr goat which is coming back from near extinction due to over hunting. Now their numbers have recovered to about 800 at the last census. Hadlee also participates in the counting.

The deal at this national park is that you park your car and take a group bus to the top of a windy road, increasing altitude by probably 600 meters, where you disembark and walk along to see the goats. As you drive along, besides seeing beautiful views of the valley, you also see the Anamudi hill which, at 2695 meters, is the highest in southern India. If you look at it just right you can see an elephant’s head. (You have to use your imagination)

Hadlee has good eyes, and also knows what to look for, so he was able to see the goats even as we were driving up. After disembarking, we took a moment to look around at the view and the birds. Among others we saw white bulbuls and hill swallows.

We started walking up the path and at the first switchback could see several herds of the goats. They are easy to see once you know what to look for.

We continued walking up the path and saw a small cobra lily.

A bit further we watched the flight of a common kestral, and caught sight of a Nilgiri Laughing thrush with its white eyebrow.

I guess there were two highlights of this part of the day. The first were catching sight of some goat babies that were about 2 to 3 weeks old. They even came down onto the road area near the embarkation point to come down….something they probably won’t do again due to all the attention they got. The next was a male that came and walked along the walkway - same thing with him - he got so much attention I bet he won’t do that again for awhile.

An interesting thing about their ears. They have have hairy folds to filter out noise. The hair is light brown and the interior of their ear is black so it looks like they have black lines inside their ears. I didn’t get a picture, so you’ll have to imagine this.

May the end of the walk was a small museum where you can see an elephant’s tooth and a cast of a tiger print.

As we came down I had a Machu Picchu moment, realizing that this was much the same situation as when our bus rolled over. We got down without a mishap, thank goodness, but i found myself doing some breathing exercises along the way as a roll over would have been quite a disaster - down the shear edge. Hadlee shared they had a bus crash about 6 years prior when the bus breaks failed in the parking lot, killing 2 in the parking lot and hurting bus passengers as the bus crashed into a nearby river area.

From here we crossed the big Mattupetty Dam and went on to the Tea Museum. Outside the main building you could see a sun dial that actually kept time well and a small bird house which was part of an effort to save the English Sparrows which are now endangered.

They are under pressure for several reasons. Three of them are: fewer places to next as buildings don’t offer the space under the eves as they used to, petrol fumes from cars and there is no more rice spillage as plastic rice bags are now used.

The history of the foreign entry to the area, as previously discussed, was first with the British when they came through to fight the local sultan. They found a high grassland area and decided this was nice and sent other British back to survey it. It went on from there as the British requested use/lease of the land from the Sultan who gladly granted access to the useless land. The tea development went on from there and was originally a failure. The British eventually asked Chinese prisoners to help them figure out how to grow it before it was at all successful in the area.

Now we get into tea production.

Basically, all tea (black, green, and white) comes from one cutting and cutting is done manually. Women (and men) walk along the rows of tea plants with shears that have a basket with them. They cut about 4 inches from the top of the stem and this is what goes into the tea production. When the tea plant grows too tall, other people come through with something that looks like a weed wacker and cuts back the bush. It takes about 20 days (faster in monsoon) for the tea to grow to need to be cut again, so teams of cutters are assigned an area that takes about 20 days to cut and then starts from the beginning. I asked if the younger people are interested in doing this work and was told not so much anymore. It seems more and more labor is coming from outside the area - drawn to Kerala because the standard of living is better than others in India. So, back to tea….

White tea comes from the very top of the stem, green and black come from the larger leaves that are cut and differ only in how the are treated.

Black tea that is drunk with milk goes through a process known as CTC (cut, tear, curl). Black tea not drunk with. Milk goes through the “Orthodox” process where the leaves are curled and crushed (the rest of the process is pretty much the same as the other).

Orange pekoe is called orange because it is actually an orange color when it’s brewed. The larger the end product ”leave” the milder the tea, so tea that looks like dust is very strong.

I haven’t forgotten green tea. It is steamed, pressed/rolled and not oxidized. Black tea should be steeped no longer than 5 minutes or it continues to oxidise. Green tea can steep all day and you should use 1 teaspoon per person for whole day- just re-use the same tea.

White tea, using only the tips of the cutting (hardest to pick and the most expensive), is dried in sunlight.

Regarding which goes in the cup first- tea or milk? Answer: tea- that said, poor people (used to) put milk in first because milk was less expensive than tea. Regarding hot milk or cold milk? Answer- used to always be hot milk because heating the milk was a form of pasteurisation.

After the Tea Museum we decided to see if we could find some elephants. We were successful and found about 9 elephants, 4 or which were babies.

In addition a barking deer decided to go through the meadow at the same time as the elephants and we saw another giant squirrel. There is a close up courtesy of Hadlee and his amazing camera lens

The baby elephants were very young - one around 2 months, another 1 month or less. So if the entire elephant population of the area is about 100, we saw about 10% of it today. Pretty exciting.

We returned and gave the Dam a miss again in favor of seeing the tea pickers end their day. We saw them coming down and combining their picked tea into their daily bag so it can be weighed for, hopefully, a bonus if they picked over quota. In this video you can see the scissors they use to pick the tea.

We we’re still able to be back in time for our tea And being able to appreciate it all the more. Today’s tea snack was some sort of fried corn fritter and I asked for seconds. I met some new guests - Alex, Annabelle and Flynn (son). Alex is stationed in Muscat, part of the UK airforce, but doing work for the Oman army. His tour ends in May and is now going back to the UK for his next posting to base in Somerset. Tonight I wasn’t particularly hungry, but had a chicken salad sandwich and more tea!