Sri Lanka-4

63 We've left Kandy behind. The mountain landscape has some visual treats in store for us. Other treats await us on the train. 64 Nileme sells small snacks in the carriages. He's done this for many years. It provides a living for his family. He has three children 65 I prepare the food at home. And bring it to the train. I've been doing this for twenty years. Vada is a small snack. You take two or three pieces. I make a living doing this. 66 My regulars like my pure vade. That's why I always bring freshly baked goods. I have a permit and am allowed to sell it on the train. 67 The passengers like it too. We're gradually getting used to the gentle rocking of the train. The women's colourful clothes strike us again and again. 68 The Mainline snakes its way higher and higher up the plateau. 69 The working population up here - mainly the women - are employed in the many textile companies. Their goods are Sri Lanka's most important industrial export. 70 With wages at just 50 Euros a month, manual labour is no luxury, and it's cheap, compared to purchasing a loom. The women get to pick the colours. 71 We tend to use strong, bright colours. In a day you can weave a sarong that's around two meters long. 72 The thread is spun on the spindle they've made themselves. The thin yarn of the sarong is very water-absorbent. It’s made of cotton and very pleasant on the skin. Silk is less practical. 72a In the mountains, where it rains a lot, a cotton sarong is better. 73 We're apparently really lucky with the weather today. We're told on the train that there hasn't been a single day without rain in two and a half years. 74 The British originally built the railway line to transport tea from the mountains to the port of Colombo. At first tea was merely a substitute for coffee, which had been affected by a fungus, 'coffee rust'. The British recruited highland Tamils from southern India, 74a as cheap labour. To this day, tea is harvested 75 on the unimaginably large area of 2210 square kilometers, a safe job for many. 76 We work on the plantations picking tea leaves. We thank our president for that. It's good work. 77 The income from the tea plantation made the former Ceylon the favoured colony of the British. In those days the tea pickers only got rice as wages. Today, they get a bit more than three euros a day, working from sunrise to sunset. But that's not something they like to talk about. 78 This is where the famous Ceylon tea comes from. We're in one of the countless tea factories and we're proudly told what makes it special. 79 A young, tender, soft leaf - maybe the better portion of the leaf - and the coarser stalks and mature leaf can be the substandard material, where you have less chemical components; where the young leaf is concerned, they have the better quality, and the flavour by the way of chemical components: the caffeine, amino acids, polyphenol and some aromatics, and essential oil[s] are very rich when the leaf is young. 80 A hundred people work in the Halpe tea factory which is around a hundred years old. After the tea leaves are dried, they are broken up by being rolled and shaken. 81 After that, they're fermented and dried. The next step is to sort the tea by size. Sri Lanka is one of the world's biggest tea exporters. During the early years, the 82 construction of the railway had to keep up with new tea plantations opening in the highlands. 83 The railway has long since lost the significance it had in those days. 84 Best time for the Mainline was during the time of the British - when they were transporting the produce; and the tea's being produced over there... train 85 With the changeover to road transport, not a pound of tea is being transported by train today