Recent Comments

Feeds
« nigi nigi noo noos
sand flies »

tea pluckers

Posted on February 25, 2006 @ 5:42 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, people, travel, wordpress

teapluckers plantation malaysia aynaku illustration adobe

In 1985 I went to Cameron Highland the renowned, Malaysia’s most extensive hill station, at an altitude of about 1500 mt. A trip to Cameron is not the same without visiting Boh Tea Plantations in Tanah Rata. These are beautiful and idyllic settings. The rolling green waves are neat rows of tea plants. The green waves dip and swell to reveal winding brown roads lined by eucalyptus trees. Birds chirp overhead, squirrels dart between the bushes and water hens wander about the streams. The tranquil scene belies also the female tea pluckers’s tough livelihood. Pluckers work from 7 am till noon, six days a week, and each kilogram fetches less than 50 sen (local currency is called ringitt, which is divided into 100 sen). A plucker gathers at least 50 kg of tea leaves daily (it takes five kg of leaves to make one kg of tea…); There are collection points besides the roads and the women work their way to them along near-vertical ledges. Curiously enough I found out that many of them came from Indonesia and Bangla Desh…

Illustration Friday’s topic is tea

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 and is filed under blog, people, travel, wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 people have left comments

you have traveled a lot and what a nice place to visit. i like the details in your story and how you have drawm the faces of those female tea pluckers.

isay wrote on February 25, 2006 - 7:49 pm CET

Have had great troubles visiting your site this week. Glad to arrive in time for tea :) Have plucked grapes, berries and beans but not tea in Malaya! I like how you can see the faces of the ladies out of the tea plants!

Anonymous wrote on February 27, 2006 - 1:47 am CET

yes, you were not reachable for some reason till today! Another astonishing submission from you! oh the life you have lived! How wonderful, very exotic visual and beautiful story but sad for the tea ladies…

valgalart wrote on February 27, 2006 - 8:42 am CET

A hard life. But this seems like a kind of homage to those women´s strength :)
You have a very distinct style!

cristosova wrote on February 27, 2006 - 9:24 am CET

Unbelievably hard work, it was very good to know, we should respect tea as it is. Your image is very good to go with the story, there is a certain strenght to these pluckers you have captured.

Katili wrote on February 27, 2006 - 1:17 pm CET

Amazing the work that goes into tea… lucky for them not everyone goes off tea the way I have ;-) but it was once my favourite beverage!

Thank you for increasing my awareness - you are good at doing that.

Caroline wrote on February 27, 2006 - 8:40 pm CET

Very gud nice …looks like a srylankan batik ACCIA’

adventure chef gino wrote on March 1, 2006 - 7:32 am CET

Hi,
Great! Tea pluckers are often forgotten. I love it when art is reaching out to its audience in more than one way, besides being personal to your adventurous travelling experience, this is an ode to the tea trade…

Lovely lines and discipline. I wish I could draw like you!

Nx

Ninetta wrote on March 3, 2006 - 12:23 pm CET

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.


Comments links could be nofollow free.