As you know tea grows in many regions all over the world. I recently had the pleasure of travelling to Myanmar (Burma) and spent a few days trekking into the hills around Hsipaw and the Shan people. We were fortunate to trek to a tea plantation area, and I wanted to share some of the photos with you. Tea is grown in Myanmar principally for their own use. It is not really exported, and virtually every restaurant serves green tea with your meal free! Here is our group trekking thru the tea plants. I had pretty good weather for most of my trip, but this was one of the few days that it rained almost all day. While we were soaking wet - it was still warm out -thankfully.
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Tea Picker in the fields
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| Tea Plant |
There were lots of tea pickers on the trail, and they were all super friendly. Unfortunately they didn't speak much english, but allowed us to photograph them! The processing of the tea was pretty cool to watch. This was done at night when it was dark. Most of the day they worked in the fields etc.
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| Tea Pickers Coming In With Full Load |
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| Steaming the tea |
The tea was first steamed for a few minutes. The large pot was filled with leaves and put on a wood burning stove. They checked it by feel and eye sight. I'd say it was steamed for about 5 minutes. Once it was fully steamed they dumped it on a flat table and two people used these large forks and tossed it around to cool it off.
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Cooling off the leaves
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Once the tea was able to be handled, they put it in a large metal pot on top of this type of spinning table. When the table was spun, the leaves fell between the two table platforms. The bottom platform was was grooved, and the spinning motion rolled the tea leaves through this grooved cut outs. Once it was determined that the leaves were rolled enough, they opened the shoot and the leaves fell out onto a tarp. They were then bagged into large sacks that were transported to town where the leaves were either dried and sold as tea, or fermented further and used as food for tea leaf salad.
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| Rolling the tea leaves |
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| Transporting tea to town |
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| Kids having fun while parents work |
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| Rolled tea |
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| Tea leaves fermenting |
