Towards the end of todays bus ride Nina saw the road sign shown in the first photo below, and decided that it was a very good single image summary of our perception of Srt Lanka. The country seems to be a mix of the old and the new and this is shown very well in the range of vehicles from late model electric cars to animal drawn carts.

The primay attraction of todays outting was to a Tea and Rubber plantation called Rayigam. We got a short demonstration of how rubber trees are tapped> for natural latex. I had thought that natural latex had been pretty much displaced by synthetic rubber but a quick google search informed me that natural rubber makes up 15%-20% of cars tyres and a higher pecentage of other types such as truck and aircraft tyres and the world uses about 15 million tons of natural rubber every year.

We got a lengthy tour of the on-site factory that processes the plantations tea. The factory was built in 1930 and is an amazing throw-back. There is only the minimum amount of (very old) machinery that does only the steps that people cannot do, such as forced air drying, cutting tons of tea leaf into the correct size and sorting tons of cut tea leaf by size. All the rest particularly the movement of the leaf from station to station is performed by human muscle.