A Winter in India

We are back in Delhi. Its “cold” here. It was in the 90s F in Kerala, and it’s in the low 70s here in the afternoon!! We missed an historic frost in Delhi; while we were gone it was below 32 degrees F, zero degrees centigrade. That’s the first time to hit below freezing in seventeen years, that global warming problem just keeps rearing its ugly head.

The tea plantations around Munnar cover so many of the steep mountain sides. Some of the plantations were started when India was still a British colony over 150 years ago. There are narrow paths between the plantings that allow the tea harvesters to reach all the tea leaves. They use an instrument that looks like a manual hedge clipper that catches the snipped leaves in a box type container. The tea leaves are then dropped into a large sack carried on the person’s back. The tea bushes look just like the hedges that I clipped regularly in front of my family’s house. Just like the blueberry harvest in Maine the harvestor is paid by the weight of product brought to the scales. The tea leaves are processed close by where they are chopped up and slowly heated and grated according to each processor’s secret formula.

The tea business is still expanding, and modern biotechnology has cloned certain popular tea bush strains for consistent brand taste and quality. Tea is big business, in fact, the leading producer of India tea is a comglomerate called Tata Industries. Tata makes steel, automobiles, plumbing pipes, etc and grows tea.

The bird watching was really good here, as well. Lots of LBB’s (little black or brown birds), but also some very colorful characters, e.g. scarlet minivets, brahminy kites, pied wagtails, red-whiskered bulbuls and yellow-cheeked tits.