Update 4

January 25...

We leave for a flight and drive to the Glenburn Tea estate in the hills near Darjeeling, right next to Bhutan. The drive up the narrow winding mountain roads with no guardrails and steep precipices to the side adds a new dimension to the thrill of driving in India. We must ascend to 6000 feet and then descend to about 3200 feet where the estate lies. We pitch about like bottles in the ocean for the last 3 km of the road, which is unpaved, rutted, and replete with axle testing potholes. We arrive late in the day and our hosts greet us with hot tea served on the verandah of the 100-year-old bungalow that is the headquarters for the estate. Susan and Tim will stay in the bungalow itself. The others will get settled in to the new Water Lily bungalow. We meet for drinks and dinner with other guests, staff and family. We are lucky to encounter the whole Prakash family, who have been in residence for the Glenburn Tea Festival, a yearly event of celebration for the 1000 member estate staff which guests are invited to join. The patriarch of the family, Mr. Sudhir Prakash, presides over the dinner table. He has recently made a trip to Seattle to visit his nephew and is convinced that our city is ripe for a tea shop featuring branded Glenburn tea. We are urged to plant the flag for Glenburn at home. The Prakash family has owned Glenburn for only the last 10 years but has been in the tea planting business for five generations (or at least four as the six and two year olds underfoot cannot have developed much business sense yet).

January 26...

Happy Republic Day! Today is a major holiday in India, celebrating the inauguration of the constitution that made the country a republic two years after India achieved independence from Britain. Independent they may be but at Glenburn all things British are still prized from the china and décor to the tea itself. Colonial settlers first began planting tea in India in 1846, using cuttings from bushes smuggled in from China, which formerly had a monopoly on this valued commodity. The tea bushes are actually camellias -- didn't know that! For our first day, we decide to visit the campsite down by the river. Those with bad knees descend by vehicle but Tim, Rama, Gopi, Anne and John make the 3-hour hike down on foot. We walk through the villages of the local Nepali people who work on the estate and through fields of tea bushes. To use the word, "field" seems wrong somehow. The tea bushes can be quite old, 80 to 100 years, but they are pruned severely so that they remain at picking height for the diminutive Nepali women who harvest the leaves. So instead of straight rows of crops, we see sinuous paths through bonsai-like bushes with a tall tree planted here and there to shade the tea. The effect is of a Japanese garden rather than a farm as we know it and the garden is draped like a deep green fabric over a steeply descending hillside. The winter mists that hang in the air accentuate the mood.

The villages provide us with another view of the diversity of life in India. Here the people look like what we would call Tibetan. They are smaller and have very Asiatic facial features. Their homes are built into the hillsides and supported by stilts. Some look sturdy; others quite precarious. Here homes are made of wood and brightly painted, perhaps to enliven the forest green of the lush surroundings. As we walk, we encounter chickens, goats, and children who are enjoying their school holiday. We all walk to the river camp, an old fashioned wooden structure, also on stilts, that presides over the riverbank. The river, green with glacial till, tumbles by through a field of boulders. Pools, rocks, and patches of white sand dot the riverbed that lies exposed during winter months. The estate staff provides a wonderful lunch with barbeque cooked over a wood fire and quiches and salads carried down from the main kitchen. Today, we share the picnic site with lots of local families celebrating the holiday and we can't help but notice that one other family will be having a barbeque as well. They will have roast chicken but have first to "do in" the fowl that has come live to the picnic. Fresh free-range chicken, indeed!

We take advantage of the afternoon to hike or just relax -- Glenburn is a vacation from our vacation, just as Rick Steve's recommends. No discussion of its charms would be complete without a comment on the cuisine of Glenburn. Every night delights. We eat with other guests and our hosts in a gracious dining room around an oval table that seats 15 or more. The linens are exquisite, a fire roars in the fireplace and the china setting change to match the theme of the meal. And the food! Homemade steamed dumplings, mushroom and cheese stuffed crepes, vegetables roasted Indian-style -- too many wonderful dishes to remember. We have homemade green tea ice cream garnished with a chocolate tea leaf for dessert and an orange cake emerges with candles for Dorothy and Rama, who have birthdays during our trip. We all have a favorite recipe to request, as no cookbook is available yet, darn it!

January 27

Another lazy day at Glenburn. We visit the government school on the estate. The Prakash family has established the Glenburn Trust, which is used to refurbish the school and sponsor private schooling for the most talented of children in the community. They also have sponsored a library and arrange for volunteers to assist at the Spartan school. Harry, a delightful young man from Britain in the midst of his "gap year," is currently in residence. Harry has been dining with us every night and now we get to see the fruits of his work. The children perform for us the song that they prepared for the festival, "We shall overcome" sang in Hindi, English, French (learned on the fly from visitors present during the festival) and Nepali. Harry is working with them on letters and drawings they will share with pen pals at a school in California.

Later we have the tea tour and Harry pops in to join us since Mr. Prakash, Senior, will lead the tour himself. His email is teaplanter@hotmail.com and he is the genuine article. We process in jeeps down rutted farm roads to his chosen spot, a place where a newly planted field is juxtaposed with an ancient grove ready for pruning. Mr. Prakash explains the science of cultivation and why the soil and climate conditions here produce the finest of teas. We see women descending the hillside with baskets resting high on their backs secured by a strap that wraps around the forehead. Today, they are carrying pruned branches but in picking season, they will fill the baskets with their harvest. They will pick only the youngest part of the plant, no more than two leaves and a leaf bud off the newest shoots. They pick in separate sections of the estate on a six-day rotation (five days of picking and one day of rest), ensuring that they capture new growth when it is at its most tender.

From the fields, we go to the factory, where the tea is dried (called "withering") and we learn that differences in the method of preparation rather than the tea plant itself create various types of tea. The same plant gives us green, oolong and all the other teas we drink. Except for herbal tea -- "An abomination," exclaims Mr. Prakash. "It is not tea at all!"

Finally, we taste. The tea estate manager leads this part of our tour. He shows how to taste tea -- it involves slurping and lots of noise to get the full taste. He has arranged eight teas for us to taste. We start with first blush tea, the tea made from the earliest spring new growth and move through the year to monsoon and finally autumn. The green tea we taste is much smoother than my Tazo morning cup and there are two white teas. Again, same leaves processed in a different way. Who knew? Tim who does not “do tea” has characterized this as "tea camp."

January 28

Time to leave Glenburn. One of the attractions of the estate we have not seen is the famous view of one of the tallest peaks in the Himalayas, visible from Glenburn on a clear day. The staff has promised a mountain knock in the early am, should a clear morning unveil the mountain, but alas no knock on this our last day. The winter mists still cling to the hillside this morning. We head off for another day of travel, down the mountain by jeep to the airport and by plane back to Kolkata.

By this time, we have been able to print a copy of the blog and others note a few missed highlights. First among them is riding camels in Udaipur. Our ride is short but memorable, mostly for the start and finish. We ride two to a camel and mount while the camel sits with his legs folded neatly underneath him. The handler tells us to hold on tightly when we mount and we soon see why. When the camel (a dromedary, or one humped camel, as Tim has pointed out) rises, his back legs come up first and in the front, he remains kneeling from the knee down. As a result, the riders tilt forward precariously until in a second fluid motion, the camel pushes up with his forelegs. The "ride" itself is smooth and we have a nice view of the lake. Then the mounting process is reversed for another precarious moment and we are done! Another method of transportation to add to the long list of how we have traveled in India. In reverse order of technological sophistication, by the time we finish in Bangalore, we will have traveled by plane, full-on tourist bus (well only for an airport transfer), mini-bus (a lot), SUV, car, overnight train, motorized river boat, rice boat (a south Indian house boat), auto rickshaw, bicycle rickshaw, vallum (a flatboat propelled by pole), coracle (a saucer-shaped fishing boat), elephant, camel, and by foot. We have missed only horseback and being pulled in a rickshaw by a man on foot and we westerners are way too heavy for the latter.

The riverboat cruise is another skipped item. The cruise was on a branch of the Ganges that runs through Kolkata, as close to the sacred river of India as we will get. As we cruise along the river, the incredible diversity of India unfolds before us. We pass through the "Raj" section of town with its British imperial buildings and through "black town," where the dilapidated mansions of Hindu traders who made fortunes trading with the Brits can still be seen. Along the banks of the river, people bathe and wash clothes at the "ghats" or steps down to the river. We pass a crematorium where some bodies are burned in gas-powered ovens but others in traditional fires. We cross under the new bridge where literally thousands of pedestrians stream by. Suru tells us that 2 million peoples a day cross over via this bridge. It sounds unbelievable until you consider that 14 million people live in Kolkata and another 2 to 3 million commute in every day.