BOH Tea Plantation, Malaysia

We hired a driver for the day and headed out to find a Tea Plantation.

The closest Plantation to our hotel was about a 20 minute drive. About 5 minutes of that was on the main road which runs through the Cameron Highlands, but the next 15 was on a tiny rough road just barely wider than one lane. No one was directing traffic but the drivers seemed to know when it was their turn for their way of traffic to make their way and when they were supposed to pull into the ditch to let the other direction of traffic pass. I was again glad that we weren't driving ourselves in Malaysia.

Our driver for the day used to be a tour guide, and made an already fun experience even more interesting. Robby pulled the taxi over just before the plantation to let us get a good first view down into the valley and see the tea plants right up close. We snapped some pictures and then Robby explained the history of the Plantation to us. Then we drove down into the Plantation.

The BOH Plantation was started in 1929 and was the first highland tea garden started in Malaysia.

As we drove through the plantation, we saw a group of workers on the rolling hillside spraying the plants with insecticide. I noticed that the deep valley had a little stream meandering along at the bottom. Our driver mentioned that with the high humidity (both fog and rain) that there was no need to ever water the tea plants. That and because the plants were well established. Tea plants can live around 100 years, and many of the plants are indeed that old.

Before we reached the parking lot, we passed through the Kampong (village) of the Workers. The Plantation provides on-site housing, a daycare, a primary school, a bus to the local high school (about an hour away), and a small temple.

We did a processing tour and I was surprised to realize how manual of a process this still is. The workers use a saw like device held between 2 men to trim the leaves from tea plants. The tea is bagged up and carried to the roads where it's loaded on to trucks (or tractors and trailers) and transported to the Processing Area.

Machines are used to process the tea, but all the tea is still moved between the machines by wheel barrow and shoveled and out in by hand.

We weren't allowed to take pictures of the processing room, but we were able to watch the workers from behind the glass walls. I wonder what it feel like to being doing such hard work, while us tourists stare through the window at them.

After the leaves are plucked they are withered, usually over night. Next, they're shovelled into the rolling machines. After rolling the tea leaves need to ferment. The Drying Machine then stops the fermentation process. The tea then goes into the Sorting Machine where it's sorted by dried leaf size.  After that there's the Tea Tasting (Can I have that job?). The tea is then carefully stored in very dry conditions to age.