Devon tea plantation

Wednesday 11th June. Ratmalana
We are now back with Jeev’s family as we near the end of our visit to Sri Lanka. It’s good to see Neil again but I am concerned that he and Jeev have had so little time to themselves and it has not really been a holiday for them at all. At least when they get back to England they can find some private time together and I suppose it’s natural, with Jeev living so far away, that her family and friends want to see as much of her as possible while she’s here.

Kate and Rob haven’t arrived back yet. I imagine they are wisely making the most of their remaining holiday on the beach at Hikkadua.

This morning we left our hotel at Ramboda about 8am. Lionel took little, badly metalled, rural byroads across country to link up with the road to Devon Falls which we wished to visit. It was a spectacular journey with wonderful views. Our route took us through small Tamil villages with their Hindu temples, strung out along the tiny roads. As everywhere in Sri Lanka, life is lived, not privately at home, but in groups along the roadside, gathering at watering places to bathe, to wash clothes or to collect water for the house. Women carry water, rice or babies for miles along the roadsides. Men, invariably wearing the sarong, hack away at the verges or ditches with mattocks. The mattock is the most used implement we’ve seen and is frequently used by young boys of nine or ten as well as by the men folk. We even saw women in their pretty robes using them, helping to build the roads.

Most women however work as tea pickers on the high tea plantations that cover every corner of this rocky, mountainous terrain, covering the landscape in a deep green against which the women’s clothing gives bright spots of colour. Beside the road, the women gather for their meal breaks, sipping tepid tea, which they carry in plastic water bottles, to accompany their breakfast or lunch. Beside them would stand their baskets filled with freshly plucked tea tips. Once full the women would set off for the long walk to the factory, their baskets strapped to their heads, to have their loads weighed. There didn’t seem to be a system of roadside collection. Each woman carried a long stick which appears to be used to mark out the area of leaves they are working on. They may also help with balance as the women move from place to place on the steep plantations.

Most of the population is rural, living fairly self-sufficiently, coming into the towns periodically to purchase necessities or to sell produce. The shops are no more than wooden shacks lining the streets which are a seething chaos of humanity, lorries, buses, cattle, goats, motor bikes, cycles and bullock carts. The road surface is generally broken tarmac, potholed and deeply rutted, the sides broken away and degenerated into yellow dusty sand. After one of the regular downpours at this time of year everything becomes mud, the potholes fill with water and life continues to splash through it all.

We stopped in one little town where we visited the public library, upstairs above the ayurvedic medicine centre. It was a pitiable sight when compared to our British libraries where we think ourselves under-funded. The librarian, a young lady in a pretty pink sari, was rather astonished when we walked in, but she was happy to show us around, to point out the large photograph of the president of the Sri Lankan Library Association above the issue desk and to proudly inform us that she was a grade two librarian who had studied at university. With virtually no money she is expected to provide books in English, Tamil and Sinhalese. There was nothing recent on the shelves at all. Occasionally a few books are donated by the British Council. The shelving is old, broken and mostly empty. A large table and some shabby chairs form the reference section where one of the few books that caught my eye was an encyclopaedia of clinical medicine. Written in Sinhalese it was published in 1969 – one of the more recent acquisitions! The children’s section had a few dirty, greasy Ladybird books but little else. I didn’t notice any books for children in Tamil or Sinhalese. Back-runs of local newspapers were piled on the floor and a few old, grubby newsheets were scattered on the tables. The lending section had such titles as “Wuthering Heights” “Persuasion” and “The Citadel”. What can borrowers make of such novels living the way they do in their isolated rural villages high in the hills of Sri Lanka? They were well used however. Dirty, yellowing paperbacks held together by the grease of many hot hands. A wooden cabinet housed the catalogue of hand written cards in three languages, classified using the Dewey decimal classification scheme. The drawers were, like the shelves, largely empty. There was not even an old fashioned typewriter. It must have been a soul-destroying job for a professionally qualified librarian. Loans are recorded in a ledger. We were asked to sign to say we had visited the library. I think we are probably the only English people ever to do so! We left the poor lady looking rather bemused.


Hill country near Watagoda. Children using the library at Talawakele.

As we came out a fine mizzle started and the air felt rather reminiscent of a damp day on Dartmoor. Well, we were approaching Devon! Half a mile further along the road we reached the Devon tea plantation, a sector of the St. Claire estate, where we were treated very kindly by the owner of the New Devon Tea Room from whom we bought packets of tea for friends at work. We photographed the plantation manager’s “Devon Bungalow” dated 1923 and the 281 ft Devon Falls - a sheet of white water opposite the plantation.


New Devon Tea Centre near Dimbula Devon Bungalow. The estate manager's home.


Devon Tea Plantation. Devon Tea Estate. Devon Falls

Had it not been for our determination to see the Devon area to gather information for Ian’s Devon website, we’d never have crossed the mountains by the tiny back roads that allowed us to see so much of the real life of the area. Lionel said he’d never been asked to do such a thing before and he was very impressed with the scenery himself. He says he’s never been out of Sri Lanka so felt great pride that we found this area of his country so beautiful.

We started the long decent back towards Colombo with its heat and its traffic, to which we were not in the least looking forward to returning. It took hours working our way down. Distances may not be great but routes are so tortuous that travel is both slow and dangerous. A sort of code of give-and-take operates in the hills but is totally absent lower down.

We stopped for lunch at a place all tourists get taken to - the spot where the film “Bridge on the River Kwai” was made. It is a pretty place but no more spectacular than could be found in our Devon. What couldn’t be found in Devon however, is the huge, 8ft long monitor lizard that lumbered out of the bushes beside us as we stood on the river bank, clambered into the fast flowing river and swam to the far bank where it pulled itself out and pottered slowly along beside the water. That was really exciting!


Kwai Bridge, Kitulgala. Location for the film.

We ate a very pleasant buffet lunch of assorted curries in the garden overlooking the old bridge, presumably used in the film but now abandoned, before rejoining Lionel whom we found in the restaurant lounge watching T.V.

As we approached Colombo the white-knuckle ride began again. Lionel became possessed, getting completely into the mood, swerving, twisting, weaving, accelerating, and, when absolutely necessary, braking violently. People wandered across the roads, tuc-tuc drivers did U turns without looking or signalling, cars cut across in front of each other or pulled out of side roads without even reducing speed. At one point we ended up braking to a screeching halt in the centre of the road, nose to nose with a bus, also in the middle where it had been overtaking a lorry - just one of many similar incidents as we navigated our way through the suburbs of Colombo. Nobody ever gets road rage. Drivers simply untangle themselves and plunge off into their next traffic adventure.

The dirty, crowded, ugly, soulless city that is Colombo quickly closed around us. The heat reduced us to wet, limp and exhausted passengers but eventually we arrived, miraculously intact, at Abey and Nita’s home. Neil came to the gate to help us unload and Lionel set off for the long drive to his home, 100 km north of Colombo. He was a very nice man indeed.