Besides sitting beside the crackling fire, drinking hot cocoa, staying at Goatfell afforded us the opportunity to walk through a working tea field, immersed in the quotidian rhythm of the women picking tea leaves. They, seemingly, spent all day in the field. A row of women could work in silence or could chat in Tamil or Sinhalese or flash quick smiles and stifled giggles at the passing foreigners.
They brought lunch and their own tea with them to the fields, as well as plastic ponchos in case of rain.
Surprisingly, Goatfell had a swimming pool. I was the first to brave the chilly waters when Clementine dropped one of her toy to the bottom of the pool. When I asked one of the butlers (yes, Goatfell had butlers. Three of them, to be exact, waiting on us basically hand and foot), if they knew the temperature of the pool water, they replied, "18 degrees." (64 degrees Fahrenheit!)
The following day, one of the other adults who happened to he at Goatfell the same time we were, Peter and Clem's art teacher, in fact, inspired the kids to take a leap into the freezing pool, a bona-fide polar bear plunge!
The weekend "crew".
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