Assam Tea Tour

Assam tea goes back almost two centuries. A Scottish adventurer, Robert Bruce, first came across it for the West in 1823, when the Singpho tribe, who were already drinking it, gave him samples. By the 1830s proper study had shown that the Assam plant was a different variety from Chinese tea. In 1839, just as the West was falling in love with tea, Britain began leasing land to companies to grow it, and when the first Assam tea reached London a few years later, buyers were deeply impressed. That was the start of the Assam tea industry. The early planters were an adventurous lot and brought a laid-back way of life with them — grand bungalows, and a social round built around the clubhouse. Most of that has faded under the pressures of a global market, but the estates still carry their colonial past, and Assam remains the largest tea-growing region in the world, with more than eight hundred estates laying the plains out in continuous green. The trip starts in Dibrugarh, a small riverside tea town in the far east of the country, in a colonial planter’s bungalow run by the Jalan group and surrounded by miles of tea. You visit a factory to see how tea is made, and go out to pick fresh leaves with the women who pluck every day. Across the plains of central Assam is Gatoonga, the estate of the Barooah family, whose nineteenth-century patriarch Siva Prasad Barooah was a planter, philanthropist and politician, and published Assam’s first daily newspaper. You stay in another century-old bungalow there, and at the nearby Tocklai Tea Research Institute, the world’s leading scientific center for tea, you meet the people working on how tea is grown. There is plenty besides tea — local markets, the Ahom monuments at Sivasagar, villages, and a day across the Brahmaputra on Majuli, the island at the center of Assamese monastic life. The food moves between tribal, Assamese and Indian, and there is a chance for an informal cooking lesson with a family on the island.

Traveling with Greener Pastures means hassle-free, insightful journeys in the hands of passionate experts. All our naturalist guides are from the region and have deep knowledge of the local wildlife, terrain, and communities. Every tour can be tailored to your interests and fitness level.