BOH is the name of the tea plantation that we visited this morning. It was established by a Mr J A Russell in 1929 and was the first highland tea garden in all of Malaysia apparently. The current CEO is Caroline Russell, JA’s granddaughter. The tea bushes themselves look gorgeously green as you can see in the picture and the brown patch is where those bushes have been pruned. Matthias was full of all sorts of information about the growing of tea but as we looked at the views we got on to discussions about other stuff and we learned that in Malaysia if you are a Muslim you are taxed at 15% and if you are not, then you are taxed at 27%! Matthias himself comes from a Chinese mother and his father was half Ceylonese and half British!
After we’d looked at the views (and put the world to rights) we had a whistle stop tour of the factory itself and saw the machines that process the tea through five stages – withering, rolling, fermenting, drying and sorting before the leaves are sent off to Kuala Lumpar for packing. The factory machines all date from 1935 which is when the first leaves were picked – originally by hand but in the 1980’s tea picking machines were introduced which are hauled up the slopes by two men. Tea picking happens after 9.00am when the day has warmed up a little and the dew on the tops of the bushes has dried. Originally, it was the Tamils from India that were brought over to pick the tea and you can see the roofs of the houses in the photo that the families that work for the Russells live in. There is also a primary school, a catholic chapel and a Hindu temple! Now they are mostly Indonesians who work there.
No blog is complete without a description of what we ate and drank – at the end of our tour David had a pot of gold blend tea and I had a mug of earl grey flavoured with tangerine made with a tea bag! We shared a warm coconut cake and a square of banana cake!!
Hope you are all surviving the snow!
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