More Tea Vicar?

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Imagine a warm English autumn day. Broken clouds dot the sky and the warm sun is diluted only by a slight chill on the breeze. That's pretty much the climate up here in the Cameron Highlands which is perhaps why there's quite an English feel to the place. Restaurants in the town offer cream teas and tours take you to strawberry farms (actually nothing more than a greenhouse full of gro-bags) and tea plantations. Now there's nothing more English than tea, I'm sure you'd agree, and although we don't grow the stuff back home, they certainly do here - by the valley-load.

On our long, winding journey up through the mountains, we passed a couple of tea plantations and it all looked rather interesting so today's adventure was to head for the nearest one to us and find out a bit more about the nation's favourite brew.

Easier said than done! It didn't look that far on the map but then the disclaimer on the map might have mentioned not being to scale... So we followed the road down into the valley, walking along the hard shoulder due to the absence of any kind of foothpath. Cars and trucks zoomed past, often a little too close for comfort. As we walked, we spotted a sign stating the plantation was 4km away. Glynn wasn't too enthusiastic about continuing as although 4km isn't far to us on foot these days, the walk back would be completely uphill and extremely hard work. I persuaded him to keep going and was majorly miffed when the distance turned out to be closer to 7km due to all the hairpin bends we had to negociate.

When we made it to the tea plantation, we were greeted with a lovely view of row upon row of tea bushes lining the slopes of the valley for as far as the eye could see. It was quite a sight - one minute we were walking past dense jungle and the next the hills were just made of tea leaves. It was a waste of time visiting the Bahrat Tea Plantation as all you could do there was take a few pictures by the tea shop and sit and have an overpriced cuppa. Rather than waste our money in the shop, we sampled some tea by the roadside where an enterprising man had set up a stall not 20 metres from the plantation. For just 1 Ringgit instead of 8 we tried black tea and strawberry tea, both of which were very nice.

With the prospect of a long uphill trek ahead of us, Glynn wasn't very happy and I can't say I was looking forward to it either. I had considered asking around other tourists to see if we could hitch a lift back to the top but by a stroke of luck I didn't have to. Just as we got up to start walking, a taxi came hurtling up the road and with some manic arm-waving, I got him to pull in. It was the first passengerless taxi we had seen all day and we honestly couldn't believe our luck. The driver kindly offered to wait for us to take photos and look around some more but we really didn't need to. Just 15 minutes and 6 MYR (about a quid) later, we were back at the top and both very relieved indeed!

Once back in Tanah Rata, we stopped in some souvenir shops on the lookout for some new clothes for Jish. In one we found a wee souvenir t-shirt with strawberries on it that was perfect. When Glynn got Jish out to put the t-shirt on, we honestly thought the shop keeper was going to die laughing. It was really funny!

After a shower and a nap, it was time for dinner. Tonight we went back to the lovely T Cafe although we had such wonderful main courses there (egg and noodle soup, potato salad and non-spicy curry), we didn't have room for any of their delicious cheesecakes :-( Back at the hostel, we tuned in to some more episodes of 24 but were so hooked that it was 1am before we could stop ourselves watching any more!

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