No Wonder Bosscha Feels at Home!

KOMPAS/RIZA FATHONI

Tea pickers work at Malabar tea plantation belonging to state plantation PTPN VIII Malabar in Pengalengan, Bandung regency, West Java, on June 22, 2019 (22/6/2019).

Our mobile phone alarms were ringing, one after another. It was before daybreak when we woke up hurriedly, fighting our drowsiness after our tea plantation tour. Bathing was unnecessary. At the Malabar tea estate in Pengalengan, Bandung regency, where the temperature was 11 degrees Celsius at dawn, bathing would be suicide.

We were headed to Nini Hill, accompanied by Ade Hermawan, a security officer. The hill was only around a kilometer from our lodgings, close to the home of Karel Albert Rudolf Bosscha in the tea plantation. The complex is managed as an agro-tourism destination by the PTPN VIII state estate company.