For a few days already and over the next few days, we will be traveling through Sri Lanka's tea country. However, on this day, we did the longest and most scenic part of the journey. Established during the British colonial era, tea plantations terrace the misty hills of Sri Lanka's mountains for several hundred kilometers and the historic hill train passes through it all. This is one of the world's great rail journeys and the 1st class "Observation Saloon" has been sold out for weeks but there's always standing room (read: squeeze in as many passengers as possible) in 2nd class. For us, this usually meant sitting in the train doorway, right by the bathroom. We're not complaining though, there's no experience like hanging out the door of a moving train and the wide open views are brilliant. The terraced hills are a beautiful, manicured green and, once in while, we could spot tea pickers working the fields, or their ramshackle villages complete with colorful Hindu temples. All of Sri Lanka's tea pickers are Tamil women from southern India. Even here, where labor is cheap, they seek even cheaper labor to do this work. The going rate is about $4.50 per day for very hard work. Meanwhile, the small processing plants in the area sell the processed product at a substantial mark up to international tea conglomerates who then, in turn, sell the final, packaged tea for about 20 times the price they pay for the ready product. It's a good reminder about how international business works with those on top of the food chain making plenty of money while the bottom rung laborers share very little of the profits.
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