Cameron Highlands, not our cup of tea

Cameron Highlands is the Malaysia's largest hill station and a place where both Malay and foreign tourists come to escape the steaming hot lowlands and to enjoy the green hills covered with a thick jungle, tea plantations and strawberry farms. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? Well, after three months of traveling we should know better than believe everything our guidebooks say. But we succumbed to the idea of lush greenery and vast open strawberry farms like the ones we'd seen in California, and decided to go.

We found out on our last day that if you come to Cameron Highlands from Kuala Lumpur, the scenery is indeed quite pretty and green. But we were arriving from Georgetown and all we saw along the road from our minivan were hideous hotels made of concrete, golf courses, and as for the strawberry farms, they cover the hills with ugly greenhouses hiding the plants. We had planned on staying several days, trying some of the hiking trails, but we were so unimpressed that we decided to do the bare minimum. Also, D's tummy was quite dodgy these days, so wandering into the jungle was out of the question anyway.

We booked a halfday tour through our hostel, that promised to visit all the highlights of the area in just 4 hours, sounding fishy at the very least, so we rightly didn't expect much from it. First we were taken to the top of the mountain Gunung Brinchang (2031 m) for the 'view' which that morning there was not. We snapped couple of pictures of the clouds at least...

View of the clouds

Next on our program was the 'hike' through the Mossy Forest, quite a lame walk on wooden platforms through trees covered with, well moss of course.

The misty Mossy Forest

The scenic view of the tea plantation saved the moment as it really was as pretty as it looks on all the postcards, and we got our pictures taken where thousands of other tourists before us. It made us want to visit southern India to see the plantations there, on our next trip!

Like a postcard!

Later we visited the tea factory where we were given a brief explanation of how the tea is made, and we obviously tried a cup of the local Palas Supreme blend and some cakes.

The plantation with the workers' houses and a temple

We thought that the visit to the butterfly and reptile farm would be the most boring thing of all but it turned to be the very contrary. The butterflies were beautiful as were all the other inhabitants of the farm - beetles, snakes, spiders, scorpions, frogs or turtles. We would have stayed much longer there if we could.

I wish we knew what these are !!!UPDATE!!! Now we know, thank you Michael!
Dark Blue Glassy Tiger

Red Lacewing

Malaysian (or Common) Cruiser

Rhinoceros beetle - don't touch his nape!

Red tail rat snake

Don't touch this guy on the back... We could hold it if we were interested but I am not sure our insurance policy covers a scorpion sting

Just don't touch this fella anywhere

The last stop at a strawberry farm was the most useless one, 5 minutes during which we were supposed to buy something and we didn't learn a single thing about strawberry growing (apart from seeing that in Malaysia they use hydroponics instead of growing them in the soil).

Hydroponic strawberries

Amazingly, all this really took only 4 hours! We were driven around everywhere so now we know what it will be like to travel when we are sixty or more, but we knew beforehand what we were getting into so it wasn't too frustrating. There was, however, one thing that got me bummed out quite a lot. We were only six people in the tour group, us, an elderly English couple and two guys we picked up in another town, who were - from Slovakia and from Czech Republic! I haven't met too many compatriots during our travels so I felt quite excited and tried to strike up a conversation with them several times. No reaction whatsoever. They spoke pretty much only to the English couple and ignored me entirely! I understand that I might not be the most interesting person they've met, but anywhere in the world, when a Spanish person meets another Spaniard they immediately start talking, the same for the Italians. You always see them forming groups. Well, not the Czech people. It is not the first time this happens so I am starting to think there is a pattern here. It is frustrating but for some reason the Czech don't like to socialize with other Czech...

Not all was as disappointing in Cameron Highlands as the strawberry farms and stuck up Czech/Slovakian people. We got to eat some awesome Indian food again. And we did manage to catch a break from the heat, mind you we even had to dig out shoes and socks from our backpacks! The temperatures dropped as low as 15 degrees at night (as opposed to the 36 of Georgetown) and it was nice to be cold for a while. We would miss it in our next destination, the Straight town of Melaka.

Feast for me

... and plain rice and plain naan for the sick boy