A giant tea boiler which can be seen from the drive from Hatton to Nuwara Eliya at Devon. Tea boilers like this but much smaller, small enough to fit on a table were found on small road side ‘petti kade’. These were very small cafes (if you could call it that) which served tea and buns. A picture of the modern variant has been posted earlier. Hope to share a photo of the real thing soon.

Pictured in the background is the Watagoda (Originally spelled as Wattegoda by british planters (වටගොඩ in sinhala) rock.

To make the best tea, you need to pluck just two leaves and a bud from a tea bush. The leaves should not be too mature either. There’s only one way to do it, by look and feel. Each day, hundreds of thousands of a workers across Sri Lanka pick millions of these sets of two leaves and a bud to produce the finest Ceylon Tea, which of course also happen to be the finest tea in the world. That begs the question how do they do it in other countries? using machines of course. Those machines pluck not just the two leaves and the bud but a bunch of leaves and a few twigs as well.