Cameron Highlands Jungle Walks 9 and 9A

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Walking to Habu

Todays plan was to walk down one of the jungle walks from Tanah Rata to Robinson Power Station and on to a Buddhist temple just a little down the road, and then back to Tanah Rata.

Just past Robinson Falls, the trail branches, and I had decided to take the steep option down, and come back the easy path. It seemed like such a good idea at the time! At this point, the descent is about 200m to the power station in a horizontal distance of just over 1.2km. Should any of you geometry geeks want to do the sums, please do. My view was it was one of the steepest scrambles that I had seen for some time.

Nice flat walk to the temple, and then started to look for the return trail. At this stage, there were two conflicting sets of map data. One showed the start of the trail a little way along the road to the Boh tea estate, the other showed it on the road back towards the power station.

The monk at the temple was no help, so I explored up the Boh estate road for about a kilometre, exploring a couple of likely looking places but with no success. I hadn't seen any sign of the start of the trail coming down from the power station, so I decided to go the extra half kilometre into Habu. Nearly 800m later I was at the junction to the main road to Tanah Rata.

Took a short break here and started back up to the power station. At least I knew where the trail down had ended, even if it was going to be pretty tough going.

I was now conscious that I was going to cut my deadline pretty fine - I had promised Elaine that I would be back in time to join her on a mini-bus tour, and with the time to return there wouldn't be much time to make myself presentable.

What a relief it was to find when I came back to the temple that there was a sign that I hadn't previously noticed pointing up a trail into a garden plot. So up I went, pretty much straight up the ridge to the top of the garden plot - then nothing. Well, no more trail, just the edge of the jungle. I scrambled around for what felt like several hundred metres, but in reality was probably more like 50 metres or so. This was not fun. Romantic stories of white explorers in the jungle seem to have a number of native guides who conveniently slash a path through the vines, and they hadn't turned up.

Getting off the ridge line was fun! It was steep, and going under the vines was marginally quicker than trying to step over them most of the time, so I spent a fair bit of the time on my back sliding down on my pack.

By now I was learning that signs of good fortune might not be all they seem, so when I found an irrigation pipe beside a path, I was a little sceptical. But at this stage, any path was better than spending another couple of hundred metres on my back getting to the edge of the garden plots below. This time I was in luck - I had found the return path I had been searching for.

Shortly after, I met a couple who had been on the bus with us the previous day. He muttered something, but she said hello with a look on her face that said I was probable not looking my most glamourous.

Back to the point where the trail split at the top of the valley, and then a hard push back to the hotel. Made it with a couple of minutes to spare to shower and be back in the foyer for our afternoon excursion.

Must admit that I was not impressed when the first two places we visited were clinging to the ridge line beside the main road, and everything past the entrance required several flights of stairs.

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