Into Assam

 March 14

“Assam is a long way from the rest of India”... what an understatement!  This morning we drove back to the Kolkata airport to catch a 1.5 hour flight to Jorhat.  Jorhat is closer to Lhasa, Tibet than it is to Delhi.  We then drove to a local tea estate for lunch and an abbreviated tour/ education session; we had to skip the tea tasting portion of the tour because we still had another three hours to drive to get to Kaziranga.  Kaziranga is on the main east-west highway that runs through the “gooseneck” that connects Assam to the rest of India. That means the highway has a lot of trucks. Who gets to pass whom on this two lane undivided highway is, as one of our drivers said, “a video game every day”. It is markedly cooler here than in Kolkata or even the last day in Kanha. 

About tea: the tea estate we visited has been in the same family since its founding in 1900. There are tea bushes as far as the eye can see, with an occasional tea tree (same plant, different pruning) near the house for landscape purposes.  Did you know that there is only one tea plant species all over the world?  The different flavors we all recognize are a consequence of soil and climate and the handling of the leaves, particularly the degree of oxidation. More oxidation makes a tea stronger flavored. Oxidation begins as soon as the leaf is bruised, so the harvesting of leaves is a very delicate process, involving the plucking of pairs of new leaves and their connecting stem (by handling the stem you protect the leaves). Because the harvesting is easier if all the tea bushes in the field are the same height, only a few leaves get harvested from each plant.  Bushes are harvested on a seven-day rotation, ten months per year.

After harvesting, the tea leaves are washed. The next step depends on what flavor you are making; finer grinds make for stronger tea, uneven crushing adds a diversity of flavors. The rule of thumb for “when is oxidation finished” is for the leaves to “look like a copper coin and smell like an over-ripe banana “.  The house grounds also included some birds that don’t exist in central India. 

Pictured: Asian Barred Owlet, Cinareous Tit, Tickell’s Leaf Warbler, tea workers at the end of the day