A Rainy Weekend in Sreemangal: Tea Gardens, Lawachara and Seven-Layer Tea

It is raining when you leave Dhaka, and it is still raining, more softly, when the city finally lets the bus go. Water streams sideways across the window. Outside, the fields have turned into sheets of bright green and silver, paddy standing in flooded plots, ducks paddling along the ditches, villages perched on their raised ground like islands. Everyone else on the bus seems to be asleep.

You are going to the tea country for the weekend, and you are going in the rain on purpose.

The tea is greenest in the wet

Most people visit Sreemangal in the cool, dry months, and there is a lot to be said for that. But from roughly May to September, when the rains come, the tea gardens are at their greenest and the plucking is at its busiest. The bushes put out new leaves almost faster than they can be picked, and the low hills around the town glow.

The bus reaches Sreemangal in about four or five hours, depending on traffic. Trains on the Dhaka–Sylhet line also stop here, and some travellers swear by the train for the last stretch through the hills and the forest.

Sreemangal is small and unhurried, known as the tea capital of Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Tea Research Institute is based here, and the estates press right up to the edge of town. You drop your bag at a cottage among the gardens, borrow an umbrella, and walk out.

Walking between the rows

The tea grows on gentle slopes, clipped to waist height in rows that follow the curve of the land, with tall shade trees standing over them at intervals. After rain, everything drips and shines. The paths are red mud. The air smells of wet earth and something faintly sweet and green.

On a working morning you see the pluckers moving along the rows, baskets on their backs, fingers quick. Their families came to these gardens in the British period, brought from across India to clear and tend the estates, and their descendants still live in the labour lines with their own languages and festivals. These are their workplaces and their homes, not a backdrop: walk on the roads and paths, do not pick leaves, and ask before taking anyone’s photograph.

When the rain comes back, as it will, it comes across the hills in a grey curtain you can watch approaching. Then it is on you, loud on the umbrella, and then it passes, and the sun comes out on a garden that seems to have been freshly painted.

Lawachara at first light

The next morning you are up before it is properly light, in a CNG heading for Lawachara National Park, about eight kilometres out of town. The reason for the early start is the sound you hear as soon as you step under the trees: a loud, rising, whooping call, echoing from somewhere high in the canopy. That is the hoolock gibbon, the only ape found in Bangladesh, and the forest is at its noisiest in the first hours after sunrise.

Lawachara is a patch of tall evergreen forest on low hills, and in the monsoon it is at its lushest. It is also at its muddiest. Wear long trousers and closed shoes, tuck your trousers into your socks and carry a little salt, because the leeches love this season as much as the trees do. Stay on the marked trails, keep quiet, and you may see capped langurs and macaques moving through the branches as well as hearing the gibbons.

Then, unexpectedly, a railway line. The Dhaka–Sylhet line runs straight through the forest, and part of Lawachara’s charm is seeing a train emerge from the green and vanish into it again. A scene from the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days is said to have been shot here. Trains really do run, so keep off the tracks.

Inside the park there is also a Khasi village, where families grow betel leaf on vines climbing the forest trees. Visit only if you are welcome, and quietly.

Seven layers of tea

Back in town, wet to the knees, you go where everyone goes: Nilkantha Tea Cabin, the place that made seven-layer tea famous. The glass arrives in distinct bands of colour, pale to dark, each layer with its own sweetness and spice. You are supposed to drink it slowly, layer by layer, and on a rainy afternoon with the drops drumming on the roof, slowly is the only speed that makes sense.

Lilies on Madhabpur Lake

In the afternoon, take a CNG to Madhabpur Lake in Kamalganj. It lies inside the Madhabpur tea estate, where a stream was dammed between the hills to hold water for the garden. In the warmer months the surface is crowded with water lilies, and the lake bends away between steep tea slopes like a river that forgot to go anywhere.

A path runs along the water and up onto the low hills. From the top, you look down on the lake curling between the rows of tea, the clouds sitting low, a few pluckers moving on the far slope. It is a working garden, not a park, so keep to the path and leave the bushes alone.

A few more ideas for the wet season

If you have an extra day, the rains are the season for water. Hakaluki Haor becomes a vast inland sea, with boats going out from the haor-side villages. Baikka Beel, a wetland sanctuary, is quieter now than in the winter bird season, but the view across the water is wide and calm. And the Hamham Waterfall, deep in the Rajkandi forest, runs strongest in the rains; the trek in is slippery and leech-ridden, so go only with a local guide and only if you are steady on your feet.

Rain on a tin roof

In the evening the rain returns. You sit on the veranda of your cottage with another cup of tea, frogs calling from every ditch, the gardens disappearing into the dark. Somewhere a train sounds its horn. Tomorrow you will head back to Dhaka, damp and muddy and entirely restored.

Plan this trip

• Best time: May to September for the greenest gardens, the busiest plucking and a rainy-season mood; expect mud and leeches. October to March is drier and cooler for walking.
• By bus: buses from Dhaka reach Sreemangal and Moulvibazar town in about 4–5 hours. Search buses to Sreemangal or Moulvibazar; for going on to Sylhet, see the Dhaka–Sylhet route. Trains from Dhaka to Sylhet also stop at Sreemangal.
• Getting around: hire a CNG for half a day or a full day to combine the gardens, Lawachara and Madhabpur Lake. Book your room ahead for weekends.
• Read more: our Sreemangal tea garden travel guide, and the Moulvibazar and Sylhet district guides.