Finding Our Cup of Tea

We are in a van on a four hour trek through the middle of Sri Lanka on our way to visit Udawalawe, the National Park with lots of resident elephants. Luna is singing in the back of the car, Josh is taking anti-nausea medicine because the roads are so curvy, and the laptop is propped on my lap as I’m writing this blog post during our drive. We’re driving through old villages, passing monkeys and markets and men carrying 50 loaves of fresh bread on trays through the streets. Today we have been traveling for 2 months, and are at the halfway point of our journey around the world. It’s strange because, even though we’ve been gone for so long- it feels like time is standing still at home. When we think about what month it is, we still think that it’s August, yet the months have flown by and our days have been full.

Over the last few days we’ve climbed up an enormous rock, called Sigiriya and explored the famous tea plantations of Sri Lanka. Sigiriya, literally translates to “lion rock”, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s an old fortress built over 1500 years ago, and still has complete frescos intact. A king built a pleasure palace on the top of this mountain, complete with a swimming pool, ballroom and it’s only a mere 1900 steps up to it. The 200 royal wives were most likely carried up the small pathways to the top of the palace, where they relaxed and enjoyed the constant breezes at the top. That is, until the king was defeated and then they all jumped off the top of the mountain. We were thrilled that we didn’t have to carry Luna up to the top, as it was quite steep (it’s amazing how M&M’s can inspire a child to keep going).

After Sigiriya, we visited Kandy, to visit The Temple of the Tooth, where one of the Buddha’s teeth is enshrined by seven golden caskets. This is one of the most sacred sites in all of Buddhism, so it was really interesting to visit and observe how people worship. Outside the temple, stalls of fresh flowers line the streets- full of lotus and water lilies. People buy the flowers as offerings to Buddha and drop them off at the shrine as they pass through the queue to see the shrine. After visiting Kandy, we took an old rickety train through the tea fields up up up into the highlands of Sri Lanka, where the temperature dropped and we had to wear jackets for the first time in weeks. The views were spectacular and the train was quite slow-going, only 4 hours to go 100 kilometers because it was constant curves.

I love tea, so coming to Sri Lanka and actually getting into the tea fields was a dream come true for me. When you are up in the highlands, there are small mountains all around, covered with tea plantations that have been cultivated for over 100 years now. It looks like a fairy land with tea plants lining the mountains, waterfalls flowing down into the valleys, big boulders strewn about, and big groves of eucalyptus and pine trees to help with erosion. Yesterday, we visited both Mackwoods and Blue Field Mount Harrow tea plantations, and were able to walk through the tea fields and factories, and see the process that tea leaves go through to become famous Ceylon tea. These factories would most likely never pass codes in the US- as people were walking around barefoot, using shovels to move the tea around the factory, and picking up tea that had been processed to show us and then throwing it back into the pile for production. Here, tea is cultivated by hand by women with sacks strapped to their foreheads and resting on their backs. These women pick up to 50 pounds of tea every day, six days a week for a mere SIX dollars a day. That’s $36.00 a week (6 day work week), $144.00 a month and $1728.00 per year. It’s difficult for me to see people working so hard for so little.

On this part of the trip, we’re seeing very different tourists than we typically see during our travels. At dinners in restaurants, we are surrounded by Middle Eastern families and couples- most women are clad in full burkas, and they are only lifting up their face covers to spoon in rice or access the straws from their bottles of Coca-cola. This has been quite a contrast to the belly baring local women of Sri Lanka. We are the only Americans that we’ve seen for weeks now. I love to travel because I am exposed to the world as the “other” but here we stick out like a sore thumb. It’s an odd feeling at moments, to be so very different from what is all around you, and makes me miss home. I miss being in a place that is familiar to me. I miss knowing where to go for good bread, organic produce, good books. It’s hard to constantly be in new places and, although exploring is fun and we love it, it can be a bit tiring at moments. I miss sleeping quiet places. I miss being able to trust food and water completely, as we could in Japan. It’s been over 4 weeks now of drinking and brushing our teeth with bottled water, and Luna mentioned last night that it seems totally normal to her now.

I never really think of myself as a flag-toting, overtly patriotic American, but when I travel, I find myself more proud to be an American than ever. At home, I feel consistently frustrated with political drama, a Congress who is moving at a snail’s pace to get anything accomplished, and the social issues that our communities face. Yet, when I travel, I find myself admiring our country. For all of our troubles, we are still a melting pot brimming with hope for the people of the world. And although we falter at times, we have a society which provides basic things that are absent in much of rest of the world. I am grateful to live in a place where we can speak our minds and contradict our government without fear of reprisal. I am grateful that Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir had the foresight to set aside the beautiful parts of our country, which was a leading example for the rest of the world. I am grateful for the opportunities that we have for upward mobility through hard work and determination. There is no perfect place in the world, nowhere that has it all figured out, but I am forever grateful that my passport is blue and has a golden eagle emblazoned upon it.