We had a quick stop at a bee farm on the way to the Cameron Tea Plantation for mum to buy some fresh honey products.
The last time I saw a tea valley was in Hangzhou but this is much closer to Singapore.
There are a couple of different tea plantations in Cameron and we ended up at the the Cameron Valley estate. It was a hot and beautiful day and before we ventured into the tea grounds, we first had our tea with yummy scones at the top of the valley, overlooking the endless tea bushes!
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After satisfying ourselves with food, we started hiking into the tea valley. It’s an incredibly huge estate and it was extremely tiring to hike all the way down and back. My mum almost could do the trip back up and had to hitchhike on one of the work vehicles!
There were 2 methods of harvesting employed here. Manual labour and machine cut though they are going to completely replace hand plucking with machines.
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I managed to speak to one of the tea harvesters to teach me and let me try my hand at harvesting some leaves.
It’s crazy hard work and the basket is heavier than it looks. But it was a fun experience and for the first time I got to find out how a tea fruit looks like!