Cameron Highlands

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We took the air conditioned bus from Penang to Tana Rata in the Cameron Highlands. This took about 5 hrs and cost about £3.50. We passed a lot of areas where there had been landslips. This was caused by recent heavy rain as well as illegal logging, people told us. (In the east of Malaysia there have been terrible floods recently with deaths and people losing their homes.) Our guesthouse was 2 minutes from the bus stop. The Cameron Highlands are much cooler than the lowlands, which was a releif! It rains here most afternoons it seems, but is sunny in the mornings. One of our prime interests in this area is the tea growing! (many readers will know that tea is my favourite drink, and almost an addiction). They also grow a lot of vegetables and strawberries here. Tea and rubber are both crops introduced to Malasia by the British when it was a colony. The place has a distinct ex colonial feel. There are several places where you can buy a cream tea, and a lot of the concrete new buildings have fake tudor beams on the outside, a bit like an English pub might. The vegetation around here looks a lot like New Zealand. There are fern trees in the jungle, manaku, and bottle brush trees. Both places are wet and relatively cool.

We took a walk down to one of the tea plantations where we had a nice cream tea and cake overlooking the tea gardens, and then walked about amongst the bushes taking photographs. (A point of interest....tea in the wild grows to be a big tree. It grows like this in the Burmese forests naturally. It is pruned to keep the bushes short for the convenience of picking) The sun was out and the tea gardens looked lovely with their various shades of green. We could see the workers picking the tea....they do not pick by hand like the lady on the front of the PGTips packet here any longer. They use a thing like a hedge trimmer to run along the top of the bushes attached to the collecting sack; but the slopes are so steep that they still have to walk between the bushes carrying the sacks on their backs.

We went on a really good tour higher up the mountains in the cloud/mossy forest with a very knowledgable interesting guide. (It was so different to the fruit farm tour in Penang.) The trees up there are literally dripping with a thick coating of mosses and liverworts because of all the moisture in the air. He showed us a single branch and named 15 different sorts of plants growing on it, including orchids,mosses, ferns and rhodedendron. He showed us raffia creepers that are used to make furniture, and bamboos which the Orang Usli, original natives of Malaysia use to make blow pipes, with a poison made by heating the sap froma particular leaf.....which he then demonstrated how to make and use. He showed us a couple of small orchid blooms, but most of the orchids bloom later in the year. If we were lucky we might have seen a Rafflesia flower (biggest flower in the world), but none of these were in bloom either - slightly dissapointing - but not to worry since we had already seen one in the greenhouse of the botanical gardens in Wellington NZ. We saw the really wierd and unusual pitcher plants which catch and eat insects. The pitchers are not actually flowers, but are formed from curled round leaves. We saw several sorts of ferns, including one with very big leaves, which would have been growing at the same time as the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Another time we went for a jungle walk with 2 other european couples staying in the same guesthouse. It was more of a scramble than a stroll....almost vertical climbs up over tree roots, and we managed to get caught out in a tropical rainstorm....but we had fun despite this.



Other than this, we have been having a relaxing time, eating, drinking iced lemon tea, and enjoyed the novelty of being slightly chilly instead of too hot!

Tommorrow we will be off on the bus again to Kuala Lumpur.

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Comments

[ChrisP]

Great shapes. Expected it to from is straight lines