Tea tourism in Sri Lanka: what shape should it take?
Aug 22, 2018
guest post from Nikhil Subbiah, who recently spent several months researching plantation communities in estates in Sri Lanka and Assam as part of Churchill fellowship.
The ‘line room experience’ as sold…
In June, a site of tranquillity became one of controversy when the owners of Warwick Garden Hotel, a picturesque Edwardian-style planters[1] mansion in the heart of Sri Lanka’s tea country, announced a new offering to its visitors. The Meena Amma ‘line room experience’ was, according to the website of parent company Jetwing, a concept that had been designed to provide tourists with an opportunity “to immerse [themselves] into the lives of Sri Lanka’s iconic tea pluckers” – an effect to be achieved through a stay in the newly refurbished home of a former tea estate worker, Meena Amma, in a sort of rustic, ‘back-to-source’ experience bringing the consumers of tea closer to the world of its producers.
