On our drive from the cultural triangle down through the central highlands on our way to Ella, we stopped at a tea plantation. As Sarah is a huge tea drinker, it was a bit of an eye opener. The women picking the tea work for eight hours a day or more and get paid a pittance (less per day than you would pay for a single cup of Sri Lanka's finest tea in a London cafe). The tea is dried and sorted into leaf size and the sacks are sold at auction to the big tea houses like Twinings or Tetley. We were amazed that the process for producing the tea is unchanged since colonial times with the same equipment being used, still bearing the Victorian English manufacturer's marks.
