We finished our tour of Sri Lanka up in the hill country of Nuwara Eliya. I had mentioned a couple posts ago that the tea here is the best in the world. Up here in the mountains, the climate is ideal for tea production and there are multiple estates cultivating and processing extremely high-quality tea. Usually by the time you get it in the west it’s been cut with blends of lesser tea – here we had it unadulterated and non-stop. I never knew how much I liked tea until right about now, and it still stands out as one of our better culinary realizations. There are some gorgeous views from the estates (and indeed from the drive up) of the plantations, each organized in lengthy and narrow stepwise plateaus. The town itself is like a place trapped in time – everything looks like a British tea estate from the mid 1800s. It made it easy to wile away the hours with sweets on our plates and pinkies raised. On our way out we made a pit stop and our driver Suren mentioned that he had to pick up something for his kids. Now I know what you’re thinking – something for their cellphones, a video game, something small, right? It was a bunch of bananas. And it put things in perspective, that the last things his kids could give a shit about was material trappings and time sinks. They were happy with bananas. It humbled me.
© 2013 Vijay