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After leaving Kinabatangan we had a 5 hour trip to reach the tea plantation, stopping on the way at a fruit market and a restaurant with an unusual menu.
The fruit stall had some pretty unusual candidates too, the stallholders were happy to let you try before you buy... the durian fruit sellers were on their own at the far end of the market and I would have probably been thrown off the bus if I'd bought one of their foul smelling beasts...
In the end I plumped for dukus (the small jersey potato look-a-likes); manggis (the figgy coloured ones) and the aptly named snake skin fruit, they were all delicious with various citric flavours and palate cleansing effects...
The restaurant had tanks full of live fish, eels and huge frogs for selection and it's fair to say that some of the menu items were a little less appealing to the more conservative western diner...
In comparison chicken floss biscuits and snack bags of broad beans with onion & garlic seemed very tame...
The villain of the conservation peace; here a pile of palm oil nuts that had been harvested from some of the many nearby palm oil plantations that are rapidly replacing the once lush rainforest. The thing weighed a ton and was sticky and spikey to boot. Bad nuts, in your pile...
Finally we arrive at the tea plantation and after a welcoming cup of...... tea, we are shown to our accommodation in a traditional bamboo long house...
Despite appearances it was really quite comfortable...
... and very well ventilated...
A quick evening stroll in a brief heavy shower... we thought we could hear a stream, but it was just the rain on the other side of the valley but not on ours, well for a few minutes anyway before the well practiced scramble to don ponchos and put up brollies...
Not massively photogenic, but the tea was grown and processed on site organically and used as a 10% constituent in Twinings earl grey apparently...
That night we were entertained and the local children were traumatised by our collective efforts at traditional dancing and playing the local gongs... the group assembled after doing the canoe, harvest and various other jigs. Hats off to Viv who risked his ankles doing a hopping dance between pairs of bamboo sticks that were opened and slammed shut to a beat a little similar to 'we will rock you'...
The next morning it's a tour of the tea factory... shredding...
After a fair few processes in between, the tea is sifted into its various grades...
After a morning's work, time to relax with a little tea bagging...
Suitably educated in the ways of tea, we climb a small local mound for more leach encounters in the wet leaves. After our descent we walk to a river for some really pleasant swimming, with toads, tadpoles and a passing storkbilled kingfisher (no photo's unfortunately)...
