Cameron Highlands

Well its supposed to be 5 hrs to get here, 7 hours after leaving George Town we arrive in the Cameron Highlands. We are staying in an area called Tanah Rata which is little more than a high street with a couple of places to eat and some shops.



I cannot say i am impressed with the places that do food here most of it is pre made and sitting around waiting to be ordered and so is served up cold.



Its cold up in the hills and it rains a lot (which is why the food really needs to be hot!). This is where all the English used to come for holidays to escape the heat of the low lands. The big thing here is strawberries, there are loads of strawberry farms and small shops offering 'real' Devonshire cream teas with strawberry jam!!! They also have a lot of tea plantations here.



for the first time on this trip i am using my sleeping bag it really is cold!! (have you caught on yet its cold?)



Armed with a map Dana and i head off to do a spot of trekking (taking Wans advise of route 9!) down past Robinson's Waterfall (very nice) and through some jungle. it only really took a couple of hours to make our way down to the road, and that included one wrong turn where we had to do some back tracking and lots of scrambling over/under fallen branches and a small stream! It was another 45Min's walk by road (uphill all the way) to get to the tea plantation i was totally worn out by the time we got to it and was very much in need of a nice cup of tea! (Boh TeaPlantation)



The views from here were lovely and the tea bushes were spread across the hills as far as you could see- they look like some crazy jig saw puzzle!



We didn't fancy heading back through the jungle and fortunately once we had made it back onto the main road a chap stopped and offered us a lift back to town for a small fee. On the way we passed a sign- 14k back to Tanah Rata by road- thank god for that lift!!!



Further in to the hills is another town Brinchang which is quite disappointing in that it is exactly like Tanah Rata. The walk back from there was nice though and we passed the old smoke house which looks like some one just plucked it out from Henley in Arden or Stratford upon Avon and dumped it on a random hill station in Malaysia!!



Later when i was in Kuala Lumpur i found out that Malaysia's biggest spiders (bite not poisonous but hair will give you a nasty rash) and its deadliest Scorpions (yes i mean deadly) both as big as your hand live in the Cameron Highlands. Thankfully i was completely unaware of this when i was scrabbling under logs and through leaf litter!!