Tea

On Friday, November 6th, we went on a lengthy excursion with Father George and his colleague, Father Michael. We started, around 10:00, by tracing backwards the route our tour took on the way down from the Western Ghats to the backwaters. We stopped at Valanjankanam Falls,

which we had passed but not visited on the tour. We turned off the route to Tamil Nadu at Kuttikanam, heading northwest, through tea plantations.

After asking directions in various places, we picked up a man in one village who guided us along a rugged dirt road back through the tea to a tea factory. We saw the process by which the leaves a mechanically sorted, dried, powdered, roasted, graded and bagged in large sacks. It was very dusty in there.

The tea would then be auctioned online to the big tea companies, which would blend and flavor it and double the price. When visiting the tea-pickers the week before, we had learned that they had just finished a successful strike for higher wages. This factory was just getting back into production after that strike, but there was some question as to whether they could make any money at it, since pricing was more in favor of the retail tea companies than of the producers.

Next we gradually climbed, climbed, climbed to the village of Vagamon, where we stopped for lunch (chicken biriyani) at a restaurant-hotel. The restroom was the bathroom of one of the hotel rooms.

We started down, stopping at an overlook where there was a clutch of motorized ice cream carts (a sort of ice cream tuk-tuk), catering to people, like us, there for the view--but we didn't buy any ice cream. We could see clouds creeping down the mountains. Father George had hoped to start back before 2 p.m., to avoid getting fogged in--this was a normal daily occurrence here. We were running a little late, but stayed ahead of the fog, though the rain caught us. That, however, stopped chasing us when we reached the lowlands.

Now, it was time for more churches. First, we visited the tomb of St. Alphonsa (1910-1946) at a church (I forget its name) in Bharananganam.

Then we crossed denominational lines to see the Jacobite Syrian Church's Cathedral of St. Mary, in Manarcad. This was a group of former Syrian Rite Catholics who had, at some point, abjured the Pope. This cathedral is a major pilgrimage site, and crowds of people were there--some being blessed by a priest, some walking a number of times around a cross out back, some lighting oil lamps, some even listening to the vespers service going on.