Shivering in Malaysia's Mountains

I had a fun week and as I think about that it's been so long since I've written, I'm full of apathy. I like writing this well enough but it's a bit of a drastic departure of my usual schedule of wandering around with other backpackers. They can't understand how I have the discipline to write even as much as I do as the best I've ever seen from anyone else is a biweekly journal entry that's one page long. Well, a couple people made journal/scrapbook combos with messages from other travelers and paper documents (tickets/currency etc) taped to some pages. Those are pretty cool but lack the photographs.

So the last time I wrote, I said that I was going to the city of Penang. That didn't happen as later that night I paced about in the heat thinking that I may not want to go to another dirty humid city and that I could go to some mountains if possible. I found an area in my guidebook that claimed to be part of the classic 'banana pancake trail' (FACT: long term backpackers love banana pancakes) and immediately made that my new destination.

I took a long series of buses that went high into the mountains to a place called the Cameron Highlands, famed for its cool weather, trekking, and tea plantations. The British first mapped the area and developed it as a hill station and farming community in the 19th century and now it serves as a tourist destination that's above the usual heat of the Malaysian peninsula. The temperature here rarely exceeds 70 degrees or goes below 50. This is basically a cool cloud forest and sees a lot of rain. It was really enjoyable to be able to wear jeans and a jacket for a change. I met an American guy, Chris, and a Dutch girl, Ynika, on the bus and we chatted a lot on the 6 hour bus ride from KL to Tanah Rata, a popular place to stay in the highlands.

The town is not too pretty. None of us had made reservations and when we got to town that rainy evening, we found the only hostel was full and the other places listed in LP were as well. We did find a guesthouse with a 3 bed room and made reservations to stay in the hostel the next night. After dinner we purchased a bottle of vodka (the worst) and played cards into the night.

In the morning we moved into the new hostel which had a much nicer courtyard, met some of the folks staying there and set fourth to see a tea plantation. The guide book recommended one about 15 km from our town, and then off the main road a 4 km hike down into the valley. Unfortunately the hourly bus missed us by 5 minutes so Chris proposed that we just hitch, and after sticking our thumbs out for 30 seconds we got picked up by a Chinese girl driving a company van. She took us all the way there, which takes a long time on those narrow steep roads, and seemed happy to do it. Chris charmed her good.

The tea plantation is called the Sungai Palas Boh Tea Estate and I guess that you can get some kind of your there but we just enjoyed a few pots of tea from a stylish tea house overhanging a steep slope overlooking the valley. The tea grows on shortish bushes that have all been given flat tops from the repeated trimmings over the decades that they've been alive. They look like bonsais to me and could be very old. Workers carry baskets up the steep slopes and use scissors to trim of the young leaves for production. Others use a lawnmower device to do a rough trim of the tops of the bushes and collect lower grade cuttings from it. The older leaves are very large and don't taste nice, but I didn't think that chewing on the young ones was appealing either.

We hitched back to the main road in a government agricultural inspector's vehicle and then walked a short ways to a strawberry farm. There are a lot of these up here in the mountains and there's also butterfly, honey bee, and orchid farms to tour as well. Those ones aren't free though, more like $2. Though we could see the strawberry plants just fine, you did need to pay for the excellent strawberry covered vanilla icecream. Well worth it. We hitched home as it was starting to get dark and the clouds looked threatening.

Back at the hostel, I was chatting up some new friends when in walked Diane and her sister Steph. That was a real shock. We had no idea that we'd be in the same town and I was elated. Diane was very pleased to see me as well though it was very slightly awkward with her sister there. I went out to dinner with them to catch up and found that Diane's sister is pretty cool too so all was well. In the evening we had a salsa dancing breakout at the hostel and hung out late into the night with all our new friends at the hostel, of which there were many.

Steph and Diane were talking about paying for an organized tour around town, so I offered to take them and a couple others to visit the tea plantation again and work from there. So, in the morning we met very early, 11 am, and got down to hitchhiking. Our group was a good one I think... we added on Polly, a quirky English girl, and a friendly Argentine girl whose name suddenly escaped me. I blame her for the salsa routine. Once more the tea was good, and we walked back quite a ways before getting picked up and taken to the strawberry farm for more icecream. It was a big hit, but we ran into some trouble getting home as it started raining and nobody picked us up for 1/2 and hour so I negotiated a cheap cab ride the rest of the way.

This was a pretty fun cab ride actually... we got a very energetic and talkative Indian driver named Doe-Ray who insists on being the center of attention at all times even scolding you if he thought you weren't listening. He showed us his xrays and the bandages on his shoulder and said that the week before he went off the road in a rainstorm and I think that made Steph a little nervous. He also stopped a couple times to show us magic tricks and to point out the local plant life. In the end, he dropped us off in a small park a couple kilometers from our hostel that we could take a jungle path into town from. There was a small waterfall and I don't think that we were in the jungle longer than 10 minutes but it was the closest that I've been to the jungle since I've been in Asia. Pathetic, I need to do some trekking.

That evening we met up with the hostel group again and chatted over beers for hours on end. Besides chatting with Diane endlessly I also got to know a couple English guys names Leeroy and Tuley. They were good fun. An extremely friendly Malaysian guy named Howard, who works a hostel in Malaka, cooked BBQ for us at the outdoor hostel bar and the wind blew the smoke over us all night, not too pleasant the next morning. Also that night I brought out the ukulele and played some songs with Howard and a Californian girl named Jen. That was a lot of fun and I'm really getting together some songs that I like to put on. My latest addition is Bad Moon Rising though I've been polishing the ones that I already know. Maybe with the new laptop I'll finally make some recordings. I'll try to find a decent mic I guess. Late in the night I said goodbye once more to Diane as she was leaving in the morning before I'd wake up.

There was a incident that night that I probably shouldn't share but it made me laugh so what the hell. Diane's sister went to bed earlier than the rest of us and so eventually Diane and I snuck off to my room. No surprise there. Half and hour later, and in a compromised position, her sister was calling her name outside our door. Diane motioned for me not to say anything and after 5 minutes her sister gave up. It was an awkward wait. Apparently she then, in tears, wandered up to the bar next door and asked people where she was. I'm sure half of them knew but nobody said they did. When Diane saw her once more in their shared room, she got an earfull!

Upon waking up I was alone once more and back on the road... metaphorically. The backpackers that were still in the hostel for another day were out of ideas and so we once more hitched to a tea plantation. This one was different, but also featured a tea house overlooking the valley and had iced tea ala mode. Good stuff. We also hiked down into the valley to loaf amongst the tea bushes for a while and take novelty photographs in. I wish that I had a laptop so I could have gotten those pics. Hopefully Facebook will come through.

As per usual, in this town we ate South Indian food at the same few restaurants that line the main drag. The food's not that great, but dirt cheap and better than the other options. That night we played many more drinking games. There were 12 of us playing and I was one of the few who knew everyone's names. I'm getting better at this. We said goodbye as we'd all be heading in different directions in the morning.

I got a seat in a minivan heading towards Kuala Lumpur that left at 8am. We got there a very uncomfortable 4 hours later and I made my way to the airport by bus. That's another hour. A couple hours in the airport, a couple in the air, and one on the ground got me to my hostel in Phnom Penh Cambodia. Eh... maybe I'll do that one in a new post.