Ινδία, συλλέγοντας τσάι στην περιοχή Darjeeling

The Himalayas rose almost out of nowhere. One minute the Maruti Suzuki hatchback was cruising the humid plains of West Bengal, palm trees and clouds obscuring the hills to come; the next it was navigating a decrepit road that squiggled up through forests of cypress and bamboo. The taxi wheezed with the strain of the slopes. For an hour or more, as we climbed ever higher, all I saw was jungle with hardly a village to break the anxious monotony.

Finally, around 1,200 meters, or 4,000 feet, the foliage opened just enough to allow a more expansive view. From the edge of the road, the hills flowed up and down and back up, covered with low, flat-topped bushes. Tiny dots marched among the bushes and along the dirt tracks that zigzagged up the hillsides - workers plucking leaves from Camellia sinensis, the tea bushes of Darjeeling.

Flying to a remote corner of India and braving the long drive into the Himalayas may seem like an awful lot of effort for a good cup of tea, but Darjeeling tea isn't simply good. It's about the best in the world, fetching record prices at auctions in Calcutta and Shanghai. In fact, Darjeeling is so synonymous with high-quality black tea that few non-connoisseurs realize it's not one beverage but many: 87 tea estates operate in the Darjeeling district, a region that sprawls across several towns (including its namesake) in a mountainous corner of India between Nepal and Bhutan, with Tibet not far to the north. Each has its own approach to growing tea, and in a nod to increasingly savvy and adventurous consumers, a few have converted bungalows into tourist lodging, while others are accepting day visitors keen to learn the production process, compare styles and improve their palates.

I set out to travel from estate to estate last March during the "first flush" harvest, said to produce the most delicate, flavorful leaves. (The second flush, in May and June, is really just as good.) My first stop was Makaibari, an estate just south of the town of Kurseong, around 1,500 meters above sea level. Founded by G.C. Banerjee in the 1840s, during the region's first great wave of tea cultivation, Makaibari remains a family operation, run by Banerjee's great-grandson Swaraj - better known as Rajah. Rajah is a Darjeeling legend: He's arguably done more for Darjeeling tea than anyone else in the district.

In 1988, he took the estate organic; four years later, it was fully biodynamic, the first in the world.Today, it produces the most expensive brew in Darjeeling, a "muscatel" that sold for 50,000 rupees a kilogram (about $555 a pound) at auction in Beijing last year. You won't often spot his logo on grocery store shelves, but you'll find his leaves in boxes marked Tazo and Whole Foods.

(πηγή: www.ith.com)