Tea time

I loved yesterday!  We spent almost an entire day devoted to tea.  In the morning we toured a small part of the Phoenix Tea Farm, walking up the hill to a scenery viewing pavilion.  The view of the valleys and cities below and the mountains off to the side was wonderful.  We have been having unusually good weather lately, with little rain, so there was not a lot of fog.  In most years, we would not have been able to see nearly as well because of the fog that occurs daily.

The rail alongside the stairs is used to carry tools and supplies up the mountain.

Back at the visitor's center, we spent two hours learning the art of tea brewing and drinking.  This was one of the things that I was looking forward to doing the most on this trip, and it did not disappoint.  In the traditional tea ceremony, there are many steps, beginning with warming the teapot, pitcher, and cups with hot water.  This water is discarded in a bowl, and then the proper amount of tea leaves are put into the teapot.  The amount of leaves depends on how tightly rolled they are.  With tightly rolled leaves, the pot is filled 1/4 full, while with unrolled leaves the pot is filled 1/2 full.  Then, the pot is filled with hot water to warm the leaves.  This water is immediately poured into the smelling cups (or drinking cups if smelling cups aren't being used), and then is poured from the cups over the outside of the teapot.  This is to keep the temperature of the inside and outside of the pot even, and to make the pot appear shiny and more beautiful.  The pot is then filled again and allowed to steep for one minute for the first round of tea to be drunk.  When the steeping is complete, the tea is poured into a pitcher and then into the cups.  This process is repeated for up to six rounds of tea, but the steeping time is altered for each round.  The second is only 20 seconds because the tea leaves have already been unfurled and the flavors released from the first round.  The third round is lengthened back to 45 seconds because the tea strength has started to dissipate.  15 seconds is added for each subsequent round after that.  ("This is only a rule of thumb and should be adjusted based on the tea's release time and personal preference for tea strength.")  I think this line was repeated three times in the video we watched about the art of brewing tea :)  We tried both DongTing Oolong tea (the specialty at Phoenix Tea Farm), and Oriental Beauty tea during our tasting.  Oolong tea is a semi-oxidized, tightly rolled tea that has a little bit bitter taste but a sweeter aftertaste.  Oriental Beauty is also semi-oxidized, but it is loosely rolled and can only be made from tea leaves that have been damaged by a species of leaf hopper.  It has a sweeter taste than oolong.

I really enjoyed the tea ceremony, and felt completely sedate afterwards.  It was so relaxing, and it made me want to buy a Chinese tea set to bring home with me.

After our tasting, we learned about the production of tea from the tea master at Phoenix.  Tea making is a many-step process that is different based upon the type of tea being produced.  Teas may be unoxidized (green), partially oxidized (white, oolong, gold), or fully oxidized ("black"/red).  In tea terminology, the oxidation is referred to as fermentation, a name that was given before the more scientific definition of the word which implies microbial activity was firmly established.  Only the young tea leaves are used, usually the top three leaves on a stem of new growth, for making tea.  Leaves may be harvested up to four times a year, and there will be very slight differences in taste between the tea harvested from the same plants during different seasons.  One slight complication was that the tea master did not speak English, so what he said had to be translated for us.  This really wouldn't have been a problem except that three different people were competing with each other trying to translate.  It was almost comical, a perfect example of the phrase "too many cooks in the kitchen."

Finishing up our tea lesson, we ate lunch and left the farm.  Our next stop was bamboola, a shop that specializes in high quality bamboo products.  One of the items they are known for are their puzzle boxes.  Each one has a different secret locking mechanism, ranging from simple to very difficult to discover.  We spent quite a while working on figuring out how the most difficult boxes worked, but we got them all J  I had a lot of fun solving them. 

This shop was our last official stop for the day, so after leaving there, we headed to Sitou Experimental Forest.  We will stay for five nights in this location and complete our research project here.  I was expecting Sitou to be a remote, natural forest similar to natural parks in the United States.  This was completely wrong.  Sitou is actually more like a giant city park filled with tourists.  It is forested, but much of the forest is actually not the native forest, but stands of a variety of cypress from Japan that the Japanese planted in 1960 during their occupation.  In Japan this tree is very good for timber, but in Taiwan it grows much faster, so the wood is not of good quality.  In an attempt to increase the “natural” aspect of the forest, it has not been heavily managed in recent years, so the undergrowth is mainly native plants.  There are apparently parts of Sitou that have native forest if you travel further into the park and away from the tourist epicenter.  Hopefully I will have the chance to hike there sometime before we leave.