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Published: November 28th 2011
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Photo 2
The jeep doin' its thing. The Cameron Highlands are really cool, both literally and figuratively. It was a welcome contrast to the heat we'd been dealing with. We rolled into Kang's Guesthouse in the early afternoon, wound up with a more pricey room since everything else was taken, shrugged because what can ya do? and headed out to find some food. We were directed to a great little Indian joint with excellent chicken masala. We didn't do much the first two days except have a couple of drinks with an Aussie couple we met that first day and move rooms to a tiny box in the side of the dorm on the second day. (The box smelt like Durian, but it took me a while to place the smell so for the first night I thought I was smelling dead mouse or something under the floorboards. I was really happy when I figured out it was fruit, not corpse.) The reason we did next to nothing was that it rained quite a bit. In KL it had rained a bit every afternoon, but here it rained all day for a full day. It was nice, on the one hand, to have some clean rain and cooler
Photo 3
Bamboo bridges temperatures, but we were also spoiling for something to do.
Now, the Highlands are famous for a few things: jungles, the rafflesia, which is largest flower in the world (which isn't actually a flower, but more on that later), tea plantations, and strawberry farms. We had already discovered the English tea influence in town, as most cafes serve scones and tea. The scones are excellent, and we ate them a few times. Mmmmmmm scones (sorry, as I write this Ev and I have just gotten back from 12 hours of cycling around the Angkor Wat temples, and we are ravenous).
We checked the weather forecast, found that the next day was supposed to be mostly clear, and signed up for a tour that took us to everything – jungle trek, rafflesia, playing with blow guns in an aboriginal village, tea plantation, strawberry excursion, butterfly sanctuary, we were off to see it all. We wound up in a jeep with a pair of Malaysian girls (apparently the majority of tourism in the area is other Malaysians), another couple from London whose names escape me (but they were really cool) and an older English couple who complained loudly
Photo 4
climbing down through a hole in the foliage and frequently about everything under the sun. We dubbed them Captain and Missus Grumpypants.
The tour started out with a jeep excursion up the muddiest, most rutted backroads I've ever seen. The drivers didn't seem to know how to drive on slick backroads, and they did everything wrong. They drove in the ruts instead of on the side, they revved the engine really hard whenever they started losing traction, and they sped up when attacking anything bumpy or difficult. The result was whiplash-inducing for those of us in the back, and we had to get out a couple of times so that the jeep could get through some particularly slick patch of clay. The bottom of the jeep kept taking chunks out of the middle of the road.
Eventually we got to a point where the jeeps could go no further, and we started walking. Missus Grumpypants stayed behind (“It probably won't be worth the effort anyways”) and they rest of us scrambled up and down slopes, through thickets, under ant-infested logs, across wobbly bamboo bridges (and on one occasion across a slippery log over a stream) until, some 45 minutes or so later,
Photo 5
bamboo... not even a bridge we arrived at a clearing where a guide was showing another group the rafflesia flower, and explaining that it isn't actually a flower. It's a fungus that looks like a flower. It grows only on a certain kind of tree ro, takes two years to germinate and bloom, comes into bloom only at night and then lasts only a couple of weeks, and for the first few days after opening up it smells so badly like rotten meat that you don't want to get within a dozen meters of it. Ours was a few days old so it smelled OK. The smell attracts insects, who eat it and then pollinate other rafflesia when they munch on the next plant (rafflesia are male and female). After taking a few photos, we scrambled back the way we came, and all the way down to the bottom of the road. The walk was fun, and easier on our spines than taking the jeep. On the way we ran into a large group of Malaysian school kids who took a picture with us and declared “Malaysia number 1!” before continuing on their way.
Next we went to the local village and
Photo 6
the raflesia 'bud' played with blowdart guns. (Oh yeah side note: this tour company is cool because instead of just bringing in tour guides to do the whole tour they hire locals to do individual legs of the journey. So the first part was with guys who know the mountains and track the rafflesia every year. The villagers who show us their homes actually get paid fairly for their time. Etc etc)
After that we went to a tea plantation and saw the process for drying, sorting, and fermenting tea leaves. We tried some, and it was good, but personally I think Sri Lankan tea is better. Last but not least, we got strawberries with whipped cream and strawberry cheese cake at the strawberry farm. It was a delicious end to a long day.
The next day Ev and I decided to hitchike to Georgetown. To be continued...
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