You're reading: Savoring tea trails in Darjeeling and Assam, India

JORHAT, India — "This is your own home now," announces our host, welcoming us to Thengal Manor. And we wish it was, this gracious residence of one of India's great tea dynasties, which has opened the family villa, with its idyllic gardens and an impeccable staff of 15, to overnight visitors.

Thengal
Manor marked the start of a two-week journey through the world’s finest
tea growing areas — India’s Assam and Darjeeling. We mingled with
nimble-fingered women as they plucked a green sea of bushes with
astounding speed, we drank pink gins by the fireplace in colonial-era
parlors and we were very easily seduced by the pampered lifestyle of tea planters.

And
of course, we drank many a cup of Assamese — “bold, sultry, malty” —
and Darjeeling — “the champagne of teas, the color of Himalayan
sunlight” — enough to send aficionados into ecstasy.

Let me
confess that I am not particularly tea-addicted. Too much tannin does
funny things to my tummy. But my wife, a Scot, more than makes up for
it. So that, plus our love for northeast India, sparked our interest in a
travel niche that is very much a growing trend: tea tourism.

It’s
not a particularly well-organized pocket of the industry, but more tea
estates, also called gardens, are opening their properties to guests
interested not only in their product and how it comes to be, but in the
unique world of tea planters, the “burra sahibs,” and their domain.
Most estates are charmers dating back to the British Raj.

Those
taking to the tea trails of northeast India, regions of the south and
Sri Lanka, include locals and foreigners. Among them are an increasing
number of Americans, apparently because of a percolating interest in the
United States in the art and taste of quality teas, though my wife
insists American tea culture still consists of “hot water and a tea
bag.”

Along with two friends from France, my wife and I had
Thengal Manor to ourselves, its five acres (two hectares) of lawns, a
chandeliered dining room with elegant silverware, bedrooms with soaring
ceilings and four-poster beds and a gallery of portraits of the Barooah
family going back to Bisturam Barooah, whose son built the manor in 1929
after becoming the richest Indian tea planter in Assam.

The
family began to take in visitors in 2000, but it remains very much their
personal place. In a serene enclosure behind the manor stand 19
temple-like tombs, one prepared for the current patriarch.

During
our time at Thengal, ringed by rice fields, bamboo groves and neat
village homes, we visited the nearby factory of the Gatoonga Tea Estate
to observe the five stages of black tea-making and tour two contrasting
tea trail options: Gatoonga’s Mistry Sahib’s bungalow and the Burra
Sahib bungalow on the Sangsua Tea Estate.

The century-old Mistry
is the ultimate getaway, almost smothered by the surrounding greenery, a
classic bungalow with a wrap-around verandah shaded by an immense
banyan tree. Burra Sahib has been modernized and features an 18-hole
golf course meandering through the tea gardens.

Our second stay in
Assam was on the Addabarie Tea Estate near the city of Tezpur, where a
tourism enterprise has leased a luxurious onetime residence of the tea
estate manager, the three-bedroom 1875 Heritage Bungalow, and five more
modest houses.

“The tea planter’s lifestyle
is this,” said manager Durrez Ahmed with a wave of his hand. “Lovely
bungalows, sets of servants attending to your every need. So visitors
who want to enjoy this kind of lifestyle come.”

It also was and remains a hard-working, lonely lifestyle
in a world unto itself. Addabarie and most other larger estates have
their own clinics, schools, shops and day care centers. (Almost all tea
pluckers are women; far less nimble-fingered males need not apply.)

Ruling
over estates is the manager, described as a benevolent despot who like
his British antecedents still retains a large staff and observes strict
protocol. His bungalow, in the words of one Indian author, “is to the
garden folk what Windsor Castle is to British citizens.”

“And why did tea tourism get started?” we asked Ahmed.

Smaller,
private estates began welcoming guests in the 1990s as a marketing
strategy to help pull them out of a worldwide tea glut. Another slump
followed in the early 2000s when India opened up its markets to cheaper
imports, forcing some growers to seek alternative sources of revenue.
There’s been no looking back.

From the lowlands of Assam, we
ascended 7,000 feet (2,100 meters) to the Olympus of tea: Darjeeling,
where altitude, soil, slope and sunlight come together to concoct magic.
Among the hill stations the British founded to flee India’s blazing
summers, Darjeeling’s gems include the Windamere, haunt of tea people
past and present and often cited as one of India’s finest colonial-era
hotels.

Originally a hostel for bachelor tea planters dating back
to the 1880s, the hotel is owned by the Tenduf-las, a prominent Tibetan
family with close ties to the Raj who maintain the aura of those bygone
days.

There’s afternoon tea with scones, served daily since 1939
in Daisy’s Music Room where family albums are stacked atop a piano
lighted by candelabras. Hot water bottles are tucked into beds each
evening, and real English porridge dispensed by white-gloved waiters at
breakfast.

Around Darjeeling are nearly 90 tea estates, including
Makaibari, producer of India’s first organic tea and a pioneer in tea
tourism, offering 21 homestays with estate workers and an upmarket
residence. Its factory has changed very little since it was erected in
1859, and barely relies on modern technology to produce high-end tea for
export to the United States and Europe.

“We need the human touch —
and nose — not a robotic arm or an aromatic sensor,'” says production
manager Sanjoy Mukherjee, inviting us to sample six of his teas,
including Silver Tips Imperial which fetched a record $455 a pound
($1,000 per kilogram) at an auction in China.

Back at the
Windamere, we dined by candlelight with music of the 1920s and ’30s
softly in the background. Served is honey-glazed lamb and chocolate
soufflé, which our French friends pronounced “delicieux.” Before
dinner, Sherab Tenduf-la, the hotel’s owner, offered us pink gins, the
quintessential colonial drink, by the fireplace as cold mists veiled
the looming Himalayan peaks.

The gentleman, exuding charm of
another era, told us that the last of Darjeeling’s British tea planters,
Teddy Young, died earlier this year. But along the subcontinent’s tea
routes, much of the style and substance they created remains firmly
implanted.

If You Go…

TEA TRAIL ACCOMMODATIONS:

—Thengal Manor, Jorhat, India, doubles $120, http://www.heritagetourism.india.com

—The Heritage Bungalow, Balipara, India, double occupancy, $460 including meals. Other bungalows are $156, including meals, http://www.wildmahseer.com

—Windamere, Darjeeling, India, Colonial Suite, double occupancy, $210 including meals, http://www.windamerehotel.com

—Maikabari, Kurseong, India, homestays $11 per person including meals. Tea is free, http://www.makaibari.com

GETTING
THERE: The airport in Kolkata, India, has the best air links to both
Assam and Darjeeling regions. Taxis can be hired at most larger towns.

WHEN
TO GO: Weather-wise, October through February is best in both Assam and
Darjeeling but tea production takes a winter break toward the end of
November.