Jet Setter
Tea Farming through Nepal
Weston Martin
The beauty of travel is in the unknown, the risk. Without risk, the ability for something to go wrong, there would be no reward, no satisfaction that it went right. This is why I love travel. It makes you problem solve, makes you uncertain, makes you a novice.
During December, for nearly 3 weeks, I leaned into and embraced the unknown. I bought a ticket for Nepal 3 days before my departure date and just went for it. Through www.workaway.info (a work-exchange website), I was able to connect with a family that lived in rural Nepal on their own self-sustaining farm where they grew mainly tea, among an assortment of fruits, vegetables, and other herbs. It had always been a dream of mine to experience tea farming, especially because even before experiencing it, I knew I wanted to be a tea farmer. It was everything I dreamed of.
In all of this, I didn’t have a plan for how I would get there. I followed some loose instructions of:
get on a bus going towards Ilam –
get off at Birtamode –
ride in a jeep to this Phikkal –
ask around for our house.