Srimangal

Tea gardens and how to see them properly

The estates around Srimangal are working plantations, not parks, and that is worth remembering before you wander in. The best way to see them is on a bicycle or by slow car along the estate roads early in the morning, when the pickers are out, the mist is still sitting in the hollows, and the light comes in low over the bushes.

Pickers work to a daily weight quota and are paid accordingly, which is a harder life than the scenery suggests. Most are descended from labourers brought from Odisha, Bihar and elsewhere in India in the nineteenth century, and many communities still speak their own languages. Ask before photographing anyone, and if you buy tea, buy it at the estate.

Several estates allow factory visits by arrangement, and they are worth the trouble. You can follow leaf from the withering trough through the rollers to the drier and the sorting screens, in buildings that have not changed much in a century. Ask your guide to set it up a day ahead rather than turning up at the gate.

For the postcard version, the Nurjahan and Finlay estates are the ones people photograph, and the tea research institute at Srimangal has neatly terraced slopes. But almost any estate road will do — this is one of the few places where the ordinary view is as good as the famous one.

Lawachara National Park

Lawachara is a patch of semi-evergreen rainforest 15 minutes from town, about 1,250 hectares of it, and one of the last homes of the hoolock gibbon in Bangladesh. Perhaps sixty of them remain in the park. Trails run from 30 minutes to three hours; the short ones are easy and well used, the long ones muddy and much quieter.

Go at dawn if you want to hear the gibbons. They call at first light — a rising, whooping duet between mated pairs that carries a kilometre through the canopy — and it is one of the great animal sounds anywhere in Asia. Hearing them is close to guaranteed; seeing them takes patience and a guide who knows which fruiting trees they are using that week.

A forest guide is required at the gate and worth every taka. They will find things you would walk straight past: stick insects, a roosting owl, the trail of a python across the path. The park also holds the Khasi villages inside its boundary, where betel leaf is grown on vines trained up the trees, and a section of the old Dhaka–Sylhet railway line runs right through the forest.

• Hoolock gibbons, capped langurs and macaques
• Over 240 recorded bird species
• The Khasi villages inside the park boundary, where betel leaf is grown on tree vines

Seven-layer tea and where to drink it

Srimangal invented seven-layer tea, and it is exactly what it sounds like: different densities of tea, milk, spice and syrup, poured so carefully that they sit in visible bands in a single glass and stay there. Romesh Ram Gour, a local tea maker, worked out the trick in the early 2000s and it has been imitated across the district ever since.

It is a novelty, and any honest person will tell you the individual layers are not the best tea you will drink here. Go anyway. The small stalls that make it are the most sociable places in town, and the plain, strong, milky tea sold on every corner for a few taka is the real local drink.

Buy loose leaf to take home from an estate shop rather than the tourist stalls, and ask for the second flush if it is the season.