Tea For The Tillerman

To answer what might be an inevitable question, there's no tillerman in this post.

Our trip to Southeast Asia earlier this year had us in Singapore for a night, on to Cambodia for three nights, back to Singapore for another seven nights and then finishing in Malaysia for four nights. Cambodia was amazing. Singapore was amazing. Malaysia was...not amazing. There was nothing necessarily regrettable about our time in Malaysia. It just wasn't amazing. 

I don't know what we did wrong in Malaysia but the place didn't capture our imagination the way the other two countries did. Maybe it was our questionable choices to visit the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park and take a trip out to the coast to see (very, very few) fireflies at night. Maybe it was the fact that we found one of KL's marquee tourists attractions, the Batu Caves, to be mostly just smelly and hot. Or maybe we just didn't get anything out of taking the elevator up to the top of the Petronas Towers (once the tallest building in the world) because there's nothing else up there to look at. Whatever it was, we didn't love Malaysia. Maybe it was just Kuala Lumpur. Maybe we should have gone to Penang.

If there's any other evidence needed of how much we didn't love Malaysia, consider this: Cambodia got five blog posts; Singapore got five blog posts; Malaysia's getting one. Yes, there's one post shared between all three countries about food but as far as Malaysia-only posts, this is it. It's about tea. And it was the best thing we did by far in Malaysia. 

To be clear, this isn't like a token post to make me or the country of Malaysia feel good about the fact that we visited. Our time with tea in Malaysia was worth writing about. So here goes.

Boh tea plantation. Cameron Highlands, Malaysia.

I grew up on tea. I spent the first 11 years of my life in England and drank tea every day pretty much for as long as I can remember. Now, I'm sure there was a time when I was really young that my mom fed me something other than tea, but as far as I can remember in my childhood, there was tea on the breakfast table and for afternoon tea on weekends every time we had breakfast or tea. It's an essential part of growing up in England and likely always will be. I don't drink tea really today like ever but when I go back to England to visit I do. Every time I have any sort of sit down meal to start off the day. It must be some kind of innate behavior kicking in.

Of course, tea doesn't grow in England. The reason why English people drink tea is that they took over about half the world centuries ago and produced goods in all their territories to make life back at home in Britain that much better. That included tea, which was produced in massive quantities in places like India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and Kenya and Uganda and yes, even Malaysia.

As of the beginning of this year, I had never visited a tea plantation anywhere in the world. Some of that has to do with the fact that I haven't really been that many places where tea is grown. Yes, I've been to Kenya and Uganda but I was a bit more focused on something other than tea in the week long safari we spent in each of hose two countries (although we did see tea plantations in Uganda). I've visited a coffee plantation (in Hawaii), but never tea. Time to change that. In Malaysia.

Some of the seemingly endless greenhouses that coat the Cameron Highlands.

There are no tea plantations in Kuala Lumpur. Or anywhere near there really. Apparently, something about the climate or the soil or the elevation or something isn't right there. KL is barely above sea level and it's hot pretty much all the time. Particularly in February. So we had to get out of town a bit to the north.

There's a spot in Malaysia called the Cameron Highlands which is perfect for growing almost anything that needs soil and water to grow. Tomatoes, long beans, greens, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, cucumbers, you name it. The elevation and climate are ideal. It's also (as the name suggests) high enough above sea level (say 5,000 feet or so) that the nights are cooler and misty and the land doesn't get baked by the mid-day (or late day or early morning) sun. It's also a pretty good spot to grow tea. There are at least two very large tea plantations there. 

The problem? It's nowhere near Kuala Lumpur. Want to drive out there? Google Maps says three hours to get there. Train? Five hours. If we wanted to go there (and we did), we'd need a ride. 

We found one on Viator. We picked what sounded like a jam packed 12 hour (!!!) day traveling to the Cameron Highlands, exploring various things up there (including a tea plantation) and then back again to KL. We paid to make the tour private and then hoped we'd be able to talk our guide into skipping most of the stuff and just focusing on the tea plantation part of the whole thing. It sort of mostly worked. Kind of. His wife tripped us up a bit.

So what was on the tour? Ready for this? A basket weaving demonstration. A waterfall. An aborigine village. A vegetable market. A strawberry farm. A butterfly farm. A honey bee farm. A cactus shop. Lunch. A visit to a tea plantation (Boh Tea, as it turned out) and a photo stop at a second tea plantation. We didn't figure we needed all that. I mean, why do we need to go to a vegetable farm? It's not like we are picking up some garlic and some long beans or something like that. Pass on the vegetable farm. Pass on the strawberry farm. Pass on the basket weaving.

We figured we'd just stick to the things we were really interested in and if we were able to squeeze a bit more time at the tea plantations, that was good for us. Plus maybe then we'd have a day that lasted less than 12 hours and could make it back to the hotel in time for afternoon happy hour in the executive lounge at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton. Free food and booze. Always with the mooching with these two.

Three hours to Cameron Highlands is no joke by the way. It was two hours on Malaysia's super-modern North-South Expressway followed by an hour's drive up and around twisty-turny roads to the beginning of Cameron Highlands. And our driver was no slouch. He was definitely driving at a good clip. There were times that the roads definitely tested his ability to keep his Toyota Innova on the road or at the very least between the lines. It would be at least 30 minutes after the three hour mark before we got to anywhere we could stop.

It is truly a different world in the Highlands, by the way. When you get out of the hot and sticky lowlands of tropical Malaysia and up a bit in the clouds, it's a totally different world, one which man has figured the best thing to do is cover it with greenhouses as far as the eye can see. I'm not convinced there was a single right angle used in the construction of a single one of these things. Those stick and plastic-built plant incubators covered the contours of the land and mimicked the surface of the Earth. A dip in the land meant a dip in the roof structure. 

And it is COLD. Not like freezing cold but I definitely regretted not bringing something with long sleeves with me. A 20 to 30 degree drop in temperature will do that to you.

The approach to Boh Tea's visitor center.

Somewhere between the butterfly farm and the cactus shop, we stopped at Boh Tea.

Malaysia is not a huge tea producer. China leads the world in tea production at 2.47 million metric tons per year. That number represents 40% of the world's total tea production. India is next. Then Kenya. Then Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka manages just a bit more than 10% of China's output at 349,000 metric tons per year. Malaysia isn't anywhere close in terms of volume produced. It isn't even in the top ten. How much in Malaysia? 10,000 metric tons per year. That's nothing. It doesn't look that way when you visit one of these plantations, though. I can't imagine these things in China.

A metric ton by the way is 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds. 2.47 million metric tons is a lot.

My first impression of our drive to the Boh Plantation was how incredibly beautiful these tea plant covered fields were. They are a gorgeous mix of dark and light green colors and the plants coat the Earth just the same way those greenhouses we passed on our way to the plantation do. Although instead of ugly white-ish plastic, it's verdant green. The plants create a cover for the ground, with tiny paths separating the plants for the pluckers to walk through. This is a strange analogy but the only thing I can liken the appearance to is a craquelin topping on top of a chou pastry bun. I know that's ultra obscure (yes, I do watch the British Baking Show religiously) but for me, that's exactly the look.

Every surface that can be covered with tea plants is covered with tea plants. There's no need to mess about with anything else. The walkway to the plantation visitor center is as narrow as it can reasonably be to accommodate the volume of incoming tourists. Either side of the path? Tea.

Tea plant. Up close and personal. 

It's funny what you don't know about how things that you consume are produced. We came face to face with that last year in Zanzibar when we stopped by a spice farm. We got the same kind of experience here in Malaysia. I mean, I had no idea how tea was produced. I could have guessed at the picking but after that...I don't know. Ignorant.

There are five basic steps after picking: withering, rolling, fermentation, drying and sorting. Do these five things in that order, and you end up with some tea. Withering takes about 20 hours to complete. Drying takes just 20 minutes. The object of the entire process is to get the moisture content of the tea down, down, down and concentrate the flavor so it's useful to make drinks for British people and whomever else out there loves a good cuppa. There's a display outside the 1934 factory on property that shows the various stages of leaf condition during the entire production process.

The factory, which was built about five years after the plantation was established, is still in use today. A tea plant, by the way, takes about that length of time to go from seedling to tea-producing vine.

The entire process of tea production, along with the history of Boh Tea and some ancient tea-rolling and drying equipment that replaced hand labor and time respectively, are on display for all to see in the visitor center. If you are a tea geek (and I'm not quite sure I'm completely in that category) this must be a dream come true. For someone like me just generally interested in food production, it was still pretty fascinating. I mean the lengths people used to go to just to dry some plant leaves so they could be shipped halfway around the world and steeped in hot water so people who couldn't have imagined the sight of the place where these little leaves came from could have a drink is just amazing to me.

And of course they had samples. They had to have samples, right? And I have to say...my eyes are opened.

After you get through all the history of Boh and the stats about worldwide production of tea and the process of the whole thing, there are four urns of tea (I was honestly going to use the term coffee urns but, well, you know...) each of which has a different flavor of sweetened tea. And get this...the tea is powdered. 

Now, look, I know that we can buy powdered iced tea drink here in the United States but I figured that was some kind of synthetic drink that wasn't really tea. Some sort of chemical concoction to approximate real iced tea drink. Apparently I was wrong.

Iced tea is disgusting by the way. It just is. It's one of those American things I can't get my head wrapped around.

This powdered tea stuff...incredible! They were serving this stuff in tiny cups and I must have had 12 of these things. I kept going back. I don't know what they made this stuff with, whether it was milk or water or some magic elixir but the taste was just mindblowingly good. And I'm not particularly a tea guy (except in Britain...) and no way am I a powdered tea guy. But this stuff. Just wow! The caramel and matcha flavors were just indescribably good.

I will say that we have purchased some U.S.-based version of what we had at Boh and I just can't make it the way they made it at the headquarters there in Malaysia. It was just transcendent. Maybe it was the being there. Being there often makes the difference, although if that's what this was, it was a pretty extreme example of being there making a difference.

Antique tea-rolling machine (top) and the good stuff (bottom). The matcha and caramel...I'm telling you.

This travel stuff is eye-opening sometimes. But ain't that most of the point of doing this?

So about that plan to spend more time at the tea plantation and get back early. I think it worked. We milked maybe an extra 15 to 20 minutes out of our time at Boh. We probably could have got a little bit longer stay but honestly, we were pretty much finished anyway. And yes, we did make it back for free happy hour at the hotel.

We also visited the vegetable farm. Or at least a market. I said we were skipping it. We didn't. 

Apparently, vegetables in the Cameron Highlands are significantly cheaper and presumeably better than veg available in the local supermarkets around Kuala Lumpur. And our driver had a list from his wife and (I think) an appointment at a specific stall. So we stopped. 

Far be it from me to get in the way of a hardworking Malaysian couple and a some groceries that can save them a ringgit or two. I'm not being facetious here. I am sure both of them work harder to make ends meet than we do or ever have and I don't want to stand in the way of any of that and I'm not stuck up enough to be so self centered to be upset about this. We try to tip well on these excursions for just that reason. We had two priorities for this day: (1) spend as much time as possible at a tea plantation and (2) get back for free happy hour. We got both. I appreciate our driver pushing the schedule and his car's ability to climb those hills. I think we ended up with a 10 hour day instead of a 12 hour day. That's a heck of a long time to spend driving two tourists around. I'm happy to stop for some veg. 

We did stop at a second tea plantation (Cameron Valley Tea) for a photo opportunity. More of that gorgeous tea-coated Malaysia landscape. That's what this whole day was about and it was completely worth it. I won't forget those landscapes. It's the craquelin. I don't know how else to convey the appearance.

Top to bottom: Boh's factory; the view from Boh's visitor center; Cameron Valley Tea plantation.