Tea and Scones

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Hi All,


Once all our friends had left it was also time for us to leave the Perhentians. We made the deicision, booked our boat and started packing. Finola cooked us up a farewell dinner of pasta (with real parmesan), and we stayed up with her drinking our last beers and finishing off our Thai Song.

The boat back to Kuala Besut left at 8am, so we trudged down the beach, and hopped onto a taxi boat to take us out to our speedboat. We arrived back at the jetty, found our bus and then had about 1/2 hour to kill before the bus left. The minibus took us about halfway, and then it was a change to another bus an onto the Cameron Highlands. The buses are all linked to travel agencies, that are generally linked to a lodge/chalet or hostel somewhere along the line. On arrival, the bus will generally take you to 'their' lodge, and then if you're not happy they'll take you to one more place, and from then on you're on you own.

Father's Lodge was at the top of a hill just past town. It was 32RM a night for a room overlooking grass, in what used to be a WWII army bunker. We decided to stay here, it looked to have some great areas for socialising, and was relatively clean. The walls were however very, very thin. The first night we were kept awake by what we decided was a very new couple. How else would they have had that much to talk about all night? The combination of that and a double bed with single blankets on it (we were fighting over them all night) was enough to make us consider finding alternate accomodation. We rectified the blanket and sheet problem the next morning (sort of, although they had a D marked on them, I still wasn't convinced) and decided to hang in there. The next two nights we had a snorer, and on the last night some young English backpackers who wanted to party all night.


The Cameron Highlands were a nice cool break from the heat. It was again a Malaysian public holiday whilst we were there so extremely busy. One of the tea plantations (which is the reason people visit) ran out of hot water to make tea! Hiking is the other main attraction of the so on the advice of some of our hostel inmates we set off on trail 1. We missed the local bus to take us to where the trail started, either because Patrick wouln't get out of bed quickly enough, or Sage insisted on food, so we had to cheat a bit and take a taxi. We walked about 3.5k to reach Gunung Brinchang (a ccommunications tower I think). It was steep and muddy and we were very glad of our new hiking shoes. The elevation is 2031m, once again there was cloud and nothing to see at the top. The walk down to the town was about 11k. So it was a big walking day for Sage and Paddy. The traffic was so bad on the one-lane roads that we were beating a lot of the cars. Some Singaporean students gave us a lift about 2km, and after some KFC (yep it was pretty revolting) and a quick visit to a strawberry farm we arrived back in Tanah Rata at about 5pm, tired and sore.


My greatest frustration with the Highlands was that I had run out of books to read. There are no bookshops in town, and some of the lodges offer book swap, but there are many books that I have either read, or aren't in English. We ended up swapping with another traveller at the Lodge, he gave us three for one.


The next day, we recovered, read, did some washing, and organised our bus to Penang.

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