Beautiful Beautiful Tea Gardens

(April 13, 2008)

We travelled to another site yesterday. It was a quick 1 hour drive and the plant that we are now at is in the middle of some "tea gardens". I had no idea what a tea plant looks like, but these gardens are absolutely beautiful. I've taken some pictures, but am not sure they will do it justice. We also got a bit of a briefing on what types of wildlife to expect - only this time we can add land leeches, big bugs and other gross things to the existing list of snakes. They say that if we don't go out into the tea gardens and stay inside the compound that we will (should) not be bothered....NO PROBLEM the tea gardens are beautiful from afar!! The other thing that we can see here is that there are monkeys all around the plantation. We actually saw one as we were walking from the camp to the plant (5 min walk on pavement. no grass = no leeches, gross bugs, less likely for snakes). Maybe we'll see more in the next day or so. We will either be leaving this site tomorrow night or the following morning for the last plant we are going to visit prior to heading back into Dhaka.

Tomorrow (April 14th) is the Bangladesh New Year. There are supposed to be some celebrations - so I'm anxious to see what that means. I hear that if we were in the city there would be a bunch of music and dancing and all the people wear very colourful outfits...maybe I'll see some of that here.

So far I've avoided terrible jet lag (and usually the 3rd day is the worst). However, I have been waking up at unsightly hours in the morning wide awake. I've been making it through the days without sneaking away for a nap, but have had to fight the urge sometimes!! Well see how the next few days go...

Shay



All of the bushes on each side of the valley are the tea plants. They are perfectly picked and manicured by the workers in the tea gardens...whom you can be assured are NOT being treated according to standard labour rights!!! The plants go on for acres and acres, and they use small scissors (if anything) to work in these gardens.



These are some of the workers we saw as we drove past.


Me in the tea gardens... can you tell I'm thinking "Take the dang picture before a snake finds me here!!"