The Tea Route

The road climbs out of the coastal heat into the highlands, and the landscape stops looking tropical somewhere near the top. Tea does not grow on the beach. It grows up here on the cool, wet, red-earth ground south of Curepipe, where the cloud sits low and the light is soft, and the fields run over the hills in the clipped waist-high rows the plant is kept in so that pickers can reach the new leaf.

You smell the factory before you reach it. Warm leaf, wet wood and something faintly like tobacco. Inside is a working building rather than a museum: withering troughs, rollers, the dryers, a sorting line, and a level of noise that means the guide has to lean in. It is machinery of a kind that has not needed to change much, doing one job well: taking a green leaf and turning it into something dark that keeps.

Tea has been grown in Mauritius since the colonial estates went looking for a crop to sit alongside sugar, and the industry now is small and mostly domestic. Which matters at the tasting, because what you are given is not an export blend: it is what the island drinks. That means vanilla tea first, sweet and unapologetic, taken on a terrace above the lake with the plateau falling away below. Plain blacks follow, and a rum or two if the estate keeps them.

The wider route links the plantation with a couple of colonial houses further along, each with its own tour and lunch. Doing all of it is a full day and a lot of interiors. Doing the plantation and adding the south coast afterwards is the better shape of day, since you are already halfway there.

Good to know

• The highlands are cooler and considerably wetter than your hotel. Take a layer and something waterproof.
• Whether the factory is in production depends on the day and the season. Ask us to check if seeing it run matters.
• Closed shoes for the factory floor, and expect noise. Anyone sensitive to it should be warned before you go in.
• Buy the tea at the estate rather than the airport if you want it. It is lighter than rum and it is what people actually miss afterwards.
• Fees, tour times and which houses on the route are open vary by estate. We confirm the day’s arrangements in writing before you travel.