Tea and Scones in Cameron Highlands

---

The drive to Cameron Highlands was pleasent, we had to make an ascent of 1500 meters from Kuala Lumpur so it was a windy road with some good views as we got higher up.

We'd heard lots of things about the Cameron Highlands and only decided to add it to our itinerary after chatting to a Malay bar owner in Melacca, one point in particular that stood out was that it was very English, which was hard for us to imagine while we were anywhere else in Malaysia as it's a hot and quite dry country and all we had seen so far were very Asian towns and cities. Cameron Highlands was named after William Cameron, a British surveyor who stumbled across the plateau in 1885 during a mapping expedition. Once a road was constructed to allow traffic, wealthy residents and British government officials started building retreats on the slopes of the highlands and some stayed here permanently.

As we drove up that same road we soon understood what the rumours were about, we felt like we were in the English countryside. The landscape was green and lush and the small towns and villages that we passed through were made up of (mock) tudor houses and were covered in beautiful flowers.

A minivan from the guesthouse that we had made a reservation with, 'Fathers', was waiting to pick us up when the bus dropped us off which was a real treat not having to walk for half an hour in the heat with our bags. As he drove us up the drive of the guesthouse, which turned out to look just like an English country manor house, it started to feel even more like home. The lawned gardens were packed with even more flowers, the weather was a little drizzley and grey and there were two nice dogs sitting in the courtyard.

After we checked in we decided to walk back into the town and have a potter around. As well as being famous for flowers, Cameron Highlands is also well know for its tea and stawberries; because of its perfect ecosystem all three thrive here. There were shops and stalls all crammed with goods relating to either flowers, tea or stawberries, the cafes advertised tea and scones with stawberry jam which we never got around to trying but the scones looked every bit as delicious as they are back home. We stopped for something to eat in a restaurant and then made our way back to Fathers. Fathers Guesthouse has a huge living area and showed films everyday twice a day which was great as the next day it was still quite rainy so we nestled ourselves on one of the sofas, watched Shrek the Third and caught up with our journals and were generally lazy for the day.

The following day we had booked ourselves onto a half day tour of the surrounding areas. The first stop was some terraced gardens, it sounds a bit boring but Cameron Highlands is the leading producer of flowers in Malaysia and this place was beautiful. Set on the side of a hill the terraces seemed never ending and each flower was more lovely than the last, they even have a green rose which you can't find growing anywhere else in the world. We took many of photo's of these flowers before it was time to leave to the next stop which was the tea fields.

Our guide stopped at the side of one of the roads that runs through the hills where the tea grows in perfect lines of seemingly endless green bushes; the owners of the entire plantation known as Boh Tea are a family from Scotland who have run it for generations. We were told about all the different blends of tea they produce and how refined it is. Our guide asked us what kind of tea we drink back home, he looked a bit confused when I said Yorkshire and some other people in our group muttered Tetleys, we're so uncivilized.

Our next stop was some butterfly gardens that also acted as a small and fairly cruel zoo. They had lots of bugs and reptiles, as soon as we arrived the keeper rushed to a tank and quickly produced a large horn beetle, handed it to a man in our group to hold and then started tapping it with a stick to try and wake it up. He then woke up a small gehko from a tiny tank and handed him to me, they also had scorpians which you could hold. They cages were over crowded and the animals all looked quite annoyed but we still played along and took lots of photos. The butterfly section was also pretty bad, we walked in and saw what seemed to be hundreds of butterflies sitting on the path, on closer inspection we realised they were all actually either dead, or dying. We thought may be they'd been trodden on by clumsey visitors or children. We did find some live ones on the plants which were beautiful.

Our next stop was the Boh Tea plantation that we'd learned about earlier, here we got to see how the tea was made, it felt a bit like a school trip but it was quite interesting as I like tea. After the factory tour we went to the cafe and had a lovely mug of Boh Tea whilst admiring the view of the tea growing across the hills below us. Next stop was a stawberry farm, it was huge and the strawberries were being grown with great precision; they were fed water through little tubes and the soil was laid out on special benches. We sampled their homemade strawberry milkshake which was delicious. After this our guide took us to a local market which was similar to the stalls we had seen a few days earlier, each sold an abundance of products mostly relating to stawberries; strawberry pencils, stawberry shoes, strawberry umbrellas, and many strawberries.

When the tour was over we were taken back to Fathers where we found ourselves settling down infront of yet another film, the weather was still grey and rainy. That night we went to a night market in a nearby town with some friends we had made which was fun but unfortunately more of the same strawberry crazy stalls and the rain had started to get even worse so we called it a night quite early on.

The next day we got up nice and early and headed into the town to catch our bus to Georgetown.

---