Tea and elephants

Time for another India blog, I think.

Half way through our visit, we took a five and a half hour drive to Valparai, a remote town in the middle of the Western ghats, where as far as the eye can see, there are tea trees.

The drive itself was interesting - not least because of the thousands of pilgrims we saw, walking barefoot along the side of the motorway. (If you want to read a bit more about my impressions of spirituality and India, check out this earlier post). And wind turbines - hundreds and hundreds of them. I did try to spot whether any of them were related to Bob, our turbine, but I think most were distant relations at best...

And the landscape changed. Gradually, we moved into much more agricultural land, with groves of coconut trees and rice paddies and other vegetable gardens lining the road. That's one thing that never ceased to amaze me about India - how green it was, in spite of the heat.

Finally, we saw the vague outlines of the mountains; indistinct and hazy, as though someone had pencilled them into the landscape and rubbed them half-out again.

We began to climb.

The road into Valparai has 40 official hairpin bends - every single one of them is marked to tell you exactly what number you're up to. I would love to know whether there are official angles for hairpin bends, as I'm sure a lot of the non-official bends made it into the 'hairpin' category in my head!

We stopped at one point to take in the view over a lake. Below us, the road twisted and turned through the green-ness, a dark ribbon along which the occasional bus, lorry or motorbike would rumble. (You had to hope you didn't meet them on the bend, because there was no right or wrong side of the road in that situation, just an 'I need to get round this corner' vibe.)

What was a little alarming at this point was that half of the retaining wall of the viewing platform had already collapsed - leaving nothing between us and the long, long drop down the mountainside. In fact, when we stood at the side of the platform, there was a huge crack in the stonework of what remained, which makes me think that at some point, quite a bit more of the platform might disappear too...

We carried on through the hairpins (the only time I felt car-sick in the whole of my time in India!) up and over the mountain and into the tea gardens.

I cannot express in words how green the tea bushes are, and what a distinctive landscape they are part of. It was breathtaking. We stopped briefly at a tea shack in the Waterfall tea gardens, where a team of pickers were at work. The ladies consented to having their photos taken, but I didn't take any at that point - I think I might have mentioned on earlier posts that sometimes, taking pics felt like an intrusion, depending on the circumstances.

Valparai itself  is a town built on steep slopes either side of a river; it is busy and bustling and was in full festival mode, as we discovered when the nearest temple (massive complex with lights to rival Blackpool illuminations) began loudspeakering prayers at 6am the next morning, which woke us up in spite of the double glazed windows in the hotel. And which is the reason why I found myself watching the sunrise before walking round the town at 7am, jotting notes and sketching the amazing view...

Sunrise in Valparai

Looking down to the river...

My scribbly sketch of the same view...

From the road just behind the hotel, looking back at
where I stood to take the previous photo...

We spent two days in Valparai, visiting remote churches (each tea plantation has its own community facilities, which often includes a small church building), on wildlife safari (we were accompanied by Rev William who is a fabulous photographer - you can see some of his pictures here on facebook - and Dr Relton, a wildlife expert from Bishop Heber College. Without them, we wouldn't have seen half the animals and birds we did), and a tea factory.

Over the course of our stay, we heard a lot about the tea plantations and workers. The men and women tend to do different jobs; women pick the tea (managing between 300 and 400 bushes a day) while the men transport the bags full of leaves, spray pesticides and work in the tea factory.

When you next brew a cuppa, bear in mind that the people who made it possible face lots of dangers in the tea gardens. They might look idyllic and peaceful, but in these isolated areas, there's a very real risk of snakebite from king cobra...being trampled by elephants...attack by leopards, sloth bear or wild dogs...cuts or neck problems from using mechanical shears...

The tea factory itself was a huge revelation. I'd always thought the tea was picked as a harvest - once a year, probably. I hadn't realised it was year-round. And the process was completely opposite to how I'd imagined; I expected the leaves to be dried and then chopped up, but in fact it's the other way round. Providing I can remember the process correctly ( we weren't allowed to take photographs and it was sometimes difficult to catch all that the manager was telling us because of the noise levels), this is what happens:

The tea comes into the factory and is chopped up. Because it's wet, it is dried and allowed to oxidise. Then it's dried again, in huge tea-tumble-driers fed with warm air heated by enormous furnaces (the woodpile certainly put Mr Squidge's efforts to shame!) and ground again. The resulting different tea types come out as granules, not leaves, and are graded on a variety of categories before being packed and sold. Every hour, the tea is tested by the tea taster, and depending on how it tastes compared to the standard, slight adjustments are made to the process to bring the flavour and appearance back into line.

Mind you - it was also an eye-opening experience with respect to health and safety. No ear-defenders, no thermal gauntlets for opening the furnace doors, no cages around hot or bladed equipment... Which is one of the reasons these kind of visits aren't usually allowed, because Western folk tend to get a bit upset about the safety aspects. Given that knowledge, it was a real privilege to have been allowed into the factory, both to understand the process and to witness the working conditions. (And there is part of me that thinks that by removing all risks in our society, we do future generations a disservice, because how will they be able to judge risk for themselves if they are never exposed to dangers?)

There were known to be elephants in the area at the time of our visit. Indeed, the manager of the tea factory told us about his 'pet' elephant, which had several times trampled his garden or damaged part of the house, yet had also seen off strange elephants from 'his' patch. (Oh - and the leopard which had eaten his dog...) He was erecting an electric fence to try to protect his home, but there had been stories of elephants taking logs to knock the wires down before they trampled gardens or broke into houses. We saw elephant damage; a huge hole in the side of the house...

Anyway, Dr Relton made a few phone calls to try to pinpoint the elephants' location.

Now. Just before Christmas, one man had been trampled to death when he surprised an elephant on his way to work early one morning. And days before our visit, some tourists had been injured as 'even the click of a camera shutter can make the elephants mad.' Oh - and did you know that an elephant can run at 40 mph? I didn't. I also didn't know that they can run uphill easier than down - which went completely against my natural 'if-you-need-to-get-away-from-an-elephant-give-it-a-gradient' instinct.

So we headed deeper into the hills to look for elephants. We turned onto a private road and were stopped by the factory workers; it turned out we were waiting for a guide, a tea worker who had seen the elephants a short while ago. We were told it was best to leave the car and walk.

I won't lie - I was really nervous. We had no chance of outrunning an elephant, and now we were on foot, looking for one? Sheesh. After ten minutes or so, we came to a steep slope that led down to the river, where the elephants had been seen. And we heard them! My heart leapt, 'cos now we knew we were close...

Our guide began to walk down the path between the tea trees, and I remember asking M 'at what point do we say we're not comfortable with this?' If I remember right, he shrugged and we kept descending...

There was a track across the slope, so we spread out and watched the jungle on the opposite side of the river. We saw a tree shake - definitely something in there - and I was glad we were on the opposite side of the water.

Then we saw him...a tusker, framed in a small clearing between the trees. He was there only moments before he moved off and was hidden again, but it was a real, live elephant, with tusks and everything! Unfortunately I only caught his back end by the time I got my camera out...

See that brown lump in the middle?
Look closely...

Walking back to the car, our guide pointed to something on the track; elephant footprints. Each one the size of a dinner plate, and we'd been totally unaware of them on the way down. Mind you, I also hadn't noticed the porcupine poo (imagine rabbit poo but bigger and more ovoid), porcupine quills (SO sharp at the business end!) and mongooses which scuttled away from us under the tea trees...

So every time I drink a cup of tea, I'm transported back to Valparai...to the green-ness, the peace in the tea gardens, the hidden dangers, and how much work it takes to pick the leaves that make my brew...

Tea will never taste quite the same again.