Tanah Rata, Malaysia - Into the Cameron Highlands.

Robinson Falls.

Anyways, I digress, on with the blog. Although a small town, it is still larger than we expected. There are quite a few shops and low and behold, the fastest and almost cheapest internet cafe I have ever used. I so did not expect that here. The scenery is great, lots of green rolling hills and rainforest. Went for a walk down to Robinson Falls which are cool. Shame in a way its not the rainy season because you can see where it doubles its normal size. Would be very impressive. There are lots of Tea Plantations around here. You can see them all over the hillsides. We are off on a long hike and climb tomorrow and also visiting a Tea Plantation along the way. “Cameron Valley Tea” is the drink made from them. We had a cup of it earlier this afternoon along with a scone with cream and jam. The Tea even came with real milk not the tinned kind. All very english don’t you think. I guess during our earlier occupation of this country we must have made kind of an impression here.

Our walk today was Jungle Trail No 1. Imaginative name. We caught the bus to Brinchang and started the trail. It was quite a long walk being around 20km or so, much of it being very steep either up or down. We went from just below 5000ft to above 6600ft and of course back down again. The views were awesome. Lots of rolling hills covered in jungle and some shrouded in mist. We went up the short way (short distance, almost vertical). We went down the long way (longer distance, not too steep). On our way down we visited the “Boh” Tea Plantation. The factory wasn’t up to much. More for show than actually making tea. The real factory is some distance from here. The plantation stretches for miles though, as far as the eyes can see. They are harvested by hand but it must be really difficult as they plant some of them on extremely steep slopes. We enjoyed a nice cup of “Boh” tea there and then continued our walk down.

We saw quite a bit of wildlife today. The first thing we saw was a Siamang. That is a large monkey in the Gibbon family. It was swinging through the trees. It even stopped at one point and looked back at us. Its so cool seeing them in the wild like this. Millions of butterflys and birds and beetles. There was even this thing that moved just like an ant. Same speed and everything, but it had loads of legs. Maybe a new species. We have decided to call it an antipede. At the bottom we passed a few strawberry farms. We were too knackered to go and look around so we just bought some strawberries and caught the bus back to Tanah Rata. By the way the last picture of the bread was my breakfast. Yes it really is green, not sure why. Its got raisins in it and is quite sweet. Maybe something to do with the Tea?