Cameron Highlands

We are now in the Cameron Highlands, which is the highest part of the Malaysian Peninsula...and it is actually CHILLY here! The cool, FRESH air has been a wonderful contrast to Kuala Lumpur, and I am a little sad that we have to leave tomorrow morning. This is definitely an awesome little place.

Nature, green, and clean fresh mountain air = smiling Chloe.

While I can't really paint an accurate picture for you, I'll try anyway (and you should look up pictures of the region online until I can figure out how to upload my own photos!). Basically, the whole area is full of tiered hills with fresh produce gardens, strawberry, honey, rose, and butterfly farms, and, most famously, tea plantations. In fact, this is the biggest tea-producing region in the country.

Sidenote:
I had never seen how tea grows before, and it is really quite a spectacular thing to see. It's also particularly fun and beautiful to see how the workers collect and harvest it by hand. I will definitely never think of a cup of Lipton tea in quite the same way!

So, back to the picture-painting. We are way up in the hills, as I said (majorly nauseating twisty-turny bus ride to get up here!), and we are staying at a quaint little hostel/guesthouse looking over the town of Tanah Rata. (Okay, so the cheap rooms are actually down the hill with metal roofs and are kind of like summer camp...but the MAIN lodge is really cute!) The hills with the tea plants look like they are blanketed in green corduroy, and you sort of just want to go roll around in the soft hilly carpets! But alas, that wouldn't be a "proper" thing to do...and instead most people get scones and tea to enjoy while they just LOOK at the plushy hills. I tried to find a middle-ground, however, and while I didn't ROLL in the lush green plants, I still went traipsing around in the plantations for a little bit (after I ate a scone)...

Speaking of today,
it was really cool, memorable, and sensory jam-packed.

Woke up a little chilly and went for a run and filled my lungs with mountain air.
Awesome.
Then,
I met my guide for a jungle trek.
Now, I debated about signing up for one of these "tours" for a while, because, I didn't want to waste money on something that was really slow-paced and heavy on talking and light on actually experiencing...AND I'M SO GLAD I WENT.
Mostly because no one else came. Lazy fools!

So, it ended up being just me and the guide--QUITE an eccentric Malaysian man (and plumber by profession) who grew up here and is obsessed with nature and "acting like a kid" in the jungle. He is also especially fond of orchids and finding new species of them...and he insisted that I take many photos of said orchids (So, for those of you who are interested, I will save all seven billion of the photos for you. Well, maybe not ALL of them).

ANYWAY, while I definitely can't do justice to the actual "trek," suffice it to say that he took me all over the jungle, through some very muddy, wet trails, gardens, mountains and valleys while he taught me all about what I was seeing (he was pretty psyched that I was a Science teacher, although I frequently wondered if I should have kept my mouth shut about that fact...since I could hardly identify any of the plants he thought I should know all about!). Overall, I learned so much from this guy (including a firsthand account of the biases that many of the Indians, Chinese, and Muslims in this mixed community share about each other!).

Some (unbiased) highlights/facts for you that my guide shared with me:
- cinnamon comes from a tree
- some ferns are MUCH taller than trees and some don't even use spores to spread
- tigers roam in the jungles here (no, I did not see one)
- the guide, who loves ALL nature, made an exception for the tea plants, and couldn't tell me anything about them...he said he could care less about the tea because it is not native!
- I was the first American (apparently) to see a "confidential waterfall" that my guide discovered a few weeks ago, score!
- pitcher plants are really cool to see up close
- Here's a convoluted one: there are these special wasps who live in holes in the ground and sting tarantulas to paralyze them, then they lay eggs on the immobile tarantulas and then the baby wasps eat the tarantulas when they hatch and this kills the tarantulas (bet ya didn't know THAT did ya?!)

So, after lots of mud and fun, we walked through the Orang Asli village, where lots of cute little local kids were running around and playing with sticks and rocks and dogs (as all kids do on Saturdays), and then we meandered through part of the tea plantations for the rest of the trip.

Then home for food and a hot (ish) shower.

GREAT day. Too bad I can't teleport lots of you here to physically experience this place. Hopefully my descriptions are decent and not totally hard to follow!

Leaving for Melaka (home of the famous Straits) on the bus tomorrow.

Thinking about you all lots and lots!!