Our visit to the Cameron Highlands has been lovely. We scheduled this time as a time to relax in the relatively cool temps. It has been so nice to feel a little bit chilly and actually want to use our blanket at night. After our first evening of relaxing at our hotel, meeting some fellow travelers and going out for really good Indian food, we decided to take a tour. Many of the tours included treks, but our hotel also gave us a map of the local trails and other travelers have said that they enjoyed doing those on their own, so we decided to do the least expensive tour that included lots of sites, but no trekking. The man at the tour agency laughed at us several times calling ours the “lazy man tour.” We just smiled and gave him our 50 ringget (about $15 US) for the 2 of us and got our tickets.
The tour really packed a lot into a half day! We started out with a stop at a tea plantation since the area is known for its tea production. The hills are covered in row after row of tea bushes, and since the machinery used at the flat lowland plantations can’t maneuver the hills, we were able to watch as workers made their way through the rows using bucketed sheers to toss tea leaves into large baskets on their backs. From the plantation, it was just a stones throw to the tea factory where we took a tour to see how the leaves were processed and ended with the freshest cup of tea possible!
Next we stopped by a hydroponic strawberry farm, a honeybee farm, a rose garden, a Chinese temple, and finally a place that had a butterfly enclosure and lots of reptiles and other insects. There were stick bugs that would more accurately be described as branch bugs based on their size and a variety of lizards and snakes.
Back at our hotel, we met a nice young couple from Germany and planned to join them for some trekking the next day. We got up, had breakfast and hit the trails. The trail we chose was shaded almost the entire way and it was a great way to spend 4 hours – scrambling over tree roots, watching for snakes (we only saw one) and getting to know some new friends. When we finished our hike, we were all getting quite hungry and decided to go out for a “steamboat” dinner where they bring a small gas stove
to your table and a pot filled with broth followed by plate after plate of things to cook in it – about half of which was seafood and the other half veggies, tofu and noodles. We all ate our fill and headed home to clean up before getting together that evening when it cooled down again.
We almost decided to extend our stay one more day, but the man we’ve come to call “Hacking Hank” who coughs loudly all morning and night making repeated loud trips up and down the hall to go smoke and the family with 8 rambunctious children that Colin had to yell at to be quiet well after midnight made us decide to move on. Besides, we’ve got a lot of trip ahead of us! Next stop: the island of Penang.