Photos

A migrant tea worker on his lunch break, very pleased to have a chat with a wandering western tourist. He works on the Boh tea plantation, one of the earliest established in Malaysia in the 1920s. He's from Napal, and doesn't think life is great. He's not been home for 5 years, and lives one of the hut villages provided by the company, but, sure, things are much better there than in Napal. On the tour the company claim that the piece workers using the latest equipment can earn $15 (US) per day, which is around the average for Malaysia, and at least an order of magnitude more than Napal. Even allowing for the assumed optimism of the official statement, it's easy to see the incentive.