Tea From a Tree

As I mentioned Thursday, I have some problems with drinking tea. It isn’t just the caffeine that will do me in, but that’s a big one. When I discovered a tea at a restaurant that I could drink, I got a little too excited.

They passed around a little bowl holding the ingredients in the tea. It included things like ginger and cloves, a bit of sugar, and some tree bark. The only thing I couldn’t easily get my hands on at home was the tree bark.

This set me on a quest. I wanted to buy some of the bark to take home with me. My best chance came when we went to see a waterfall. Little shops were set up all along the way. I can’t remember the exact distance, but I’d guess the walk was about two miles. Many of these shops offered tree bark for tea.

I checked out each shop along the way down to the falls, then set about making my purchase on the way back. My intention was to get a bag from each of three different shops. Instead, I got caught up in a hard sell and bought three grossly overpriced bags from the same woman. Half of the purchase was about extracting my mother and myself from this woman’s clutches.

I then had the fun of packing it so that it didn’t get too badly crushed on the way home. I ended up buying a ceremonial offering basket to hold them. There was a rice steamer I would have gotten, but some of the people in our group snaked me on it.

I get the bark through customs amazingly easily, and transfer it from the little cellophane bags to jars. Along the way I tried a taste.

Nothing. It tasted no different than any other bark I’ve put in my mouth. (Quit laughing. I don’t make a habit of eating bark, but I have tried it a time or two.)

So all that money and effort were just for something that makes hardly a bit of difference. Still, I can now proudly point at a pretty jar on my shelf full of tree bark from Bali.

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