Tue, May 9: Colombo, Sri Lanka - Tea Plantation

We picked up another group of five people today and headed out on another long drive, fortunately not as long as yesterday.  Our destination today was the Raygam Tea Plantation.  

We got to sample tea and cakes and had a tour through the processing facility (no photos allowed inside).

The tea leaves are dried to remove about half of the moisture, and then dropped (by hand) through chutes to machines that rubbed or ground the leaves.  The rubbed leaves go through a rough sieving process and are then dried some more.  They then go through a grading operation where they are shaken through several sets of sieves to separate out the pieces by size. 

They also have a color grading operation that was the most sophisticated operation in the entire plant.  The color grading machine used a photo system to assess the leaves going through the conveyors and a puff of air is used to blow out the discolored tea.

Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry for years Mary could follow the processes well as there were some similarities to operations she had seen but the operation lacked the formality she was used to.  For instance, they stated that they had 17 grades of tea…however, not a machine or a container of tea had any kind of labeling as to contents or grade.  And all of the ladies on the production floor had no shoes on.  And it really wasn’t clear that all of the mounds of tea on the floors were actually discards and weren’t somehow reintroduced back into the process somewhere.

However, the tea we got to taste was great and many of us bought some for gifts back home.

Then it was a long drive back to Colombo...

where we had a short drive around town to see some of the sights.  

One of the stops was at the Independence Memorial Hall celebrating the independence of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) from English rule (4 Feb 1948).

We also saw the capital building...

and lots of decorations for the Full Moon Festival.

We had no travel delays due to floats and the day was sunny all day so we got back to the ship in plenty of time.