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This summer we had a beautiful experience and we are tempted to share it with all of you, tea lovers. At the beginning of September, we set off on a 20-day journey between India and Nepal where we wanted to discover tea and experience the unique process of harvesting it with our own hands, working it, and then turning it into that wonderful drink that we all love. Half of the trip was spent with a Nepalese family who kindly hosted us and let us live according to their rhythms, culture, and knowledge. We had contacted them previously through a woofering website called workaway.
In Deepak's family, tea has been cultivated and harvested for generations. They live in a region of Nepal called Ilam, a few kilometers from the border with the Indian region of Darjeeling. Ilam teas are becoming increasingly famous for their truly unique body and taste. Deepak has a small piece of land where he grows his vegetable garden and a few rows of precious tea plants. Most of the Nepalese in that area have small plots of land with a house, just like Deepak. They pick the leaves and sell them fresh, still wet from the night's humidity, to factories where they are processed to become teas that will most likely end up on the Indian market, always eager for chai. Deepak, on the other hand, picks the leaves and keeps them for himself. He processes them himself, with the help of his family, and creates his own personal tea, completely artisanal, which he then sells to those who come to visit like us, or at most, he drinks it himself. This is done without the use of any machinery, which he cannot afford. Deepak's family is very humble and simple, they mainly eat what they harvest, consume very little, depend heavily on the land and the nature that surrounds them, just like us. But there the connection between man and nature is felt much more. For this reason, they respect the environment, animals, and in general, humans and creation. In Nepal, many animals are not afraid of humans. • On our Facebook page you can see all the photos of our trip! In those beautiful ten days, we learned a lot; in the morning, we went down to the fields to pick tea leaves, depending on the type of tea we were going to make, we picked the buds (for white tea) or the bud and the first and second leaf (for all other types). When we went back up for lunch, we spread the leaves to dry in the sun on bamboo mats. Then in the afternoon, we "rolled" the leaves, and if we had to make black tea, we let them oxidize, otherwise we "cooked" them with steam or fire, depending on the type of flavor we wanted to create. In the evening, we tried the tea from the day before, talked about this magnificent plant, and life in Nepal. We brought back some tea from Nepal, which, however, was quickly gone, to the point that there wasn't much left. We hope that Deepak will be able to send us more, thus starting a fruitful collaboration for both of us. We will keep you updated.
• Don't forget to take a look at our selection of loose leaf teas for sale online!
