Cameron Highlands

The highway up to the north was nice and smooth. I was able to relax and get a bit of reading done while we were heading out of KL. But about half way we turned off the highway and started going up a narrow, curving two-lane highway up into the mountains. So much for reading, the road was way too windy to read without getting car sick. For several hours we went up into the mountains. The road was full of cars and it was slow going. The bus driver was a bit of a daredevil and he wasn't afraid to take the full size bus and pass another bus or a truck up around the curves of this mountain road. We went higher and higher. Passing through tea plantations and farms and sometimes side by side with the clouds. Finally after so much twisting to and fro and side to side we made it to the town Tanah Rata which is kind of the hub for tourists visiting the Cameron Highlands. The town is full of guest houses and tea shops and small restaurants. I was walking down one of the main streets and shocklingly they had a Starbucks in this little town.

My hostel was okay, nothing great. It was close to the center of town so it was easy to find food and supplies when I needed to. I didn't really know much about what to do in this little town. All I knew beforehand was that this was a tourist destination between Kuala Lumpur and the north. The weather here was really nice. As I write this in another hot hostel in Penang, I look upon with envy the cool and mild air up in the highlands. At night it actually got cool enough to necessitate using a blanket. The locals were wearing jackets and long pants, but I found this to be a bit extreme. The town is a bit boring at night so I just sat on the porch of the hostel with the other backpackers and talked about different places and the weather and things back home.

The next morning I went on a countryside tour. A minivan picked a group of us and took us around the highlands. This was more of a family type tour. There are rose gardens and butterfly farms, we walked around a bee hive farm and then they tried to sell us honey for our health. The associates at the honey store made it seem like honey was a sort of panacea that can prevent or cure all kinds of diseases. The only interesting thing to me on the tour was when we went to the Boh tea plantation. Boh is the biggest producer of tea in Malaysia. You get to walk around the tea fields and see how the tea is grown, cultviated and processed. There is a tea factory where tons of tea comes in and is mixed and dried and prepared. The Cameron Highlands is a good place to grow tea because it is relatively cool and it never frosts up there. There are lots of tea plants and the rows look a bit pretty over the rolling hills. There's a little museum where you get to learn about how noble and sublime the tea company is and how they started from small roots and grew into a massive corporation. They have a tea house/restaurant that sits on a kind of balcony over the tea fields. Its a bit like the protruding structure at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin. I tried some delicious fresh tea and relaxed at the edge of the balcony in the cool mountain air.

After the tour I went back to the hostel and mostly just sat and read my book. The town was kinda boring but that was okay. I've been enjoying the moments when I can relax and read. Especially as the climate there was temperate. I spent one more night there, going to bed early for the next day when I would go to the Perhentian islands on the Northeast coast of Malaysia.