view from our apartment of the hills surrounding Tanah Rata
We are in the beautiful Cameron Highlands! I added 17 pictures to this blog post, which seems excessive considering the fact that Jochem is adding our pictures to our picture gallery as we speak, but I really need pictures to do the Cameron Highlands justice.
We are staying at Father's Guest House in a small town called Tanah Rata in the midst of the Cameron Highlands. We arrived by VIP bus from Kuala Lumpur on Friday afternoon. The bus ride took just 4 hours and was incredibly comfortable, kind of like flying business class but then on a bus. In town we were awaited by a couple of employees and their minivan who took us to Father's Guest House for free.
Father's Guest House is situated up a hill just outside of the city center and is comprised of a couple of buildings - all are surrounded by a lovely collection of trees, plants and flowers. We're not staying in the main building but in the self-service apartment just a couple of blocks away. We only pay 17,50 euros for our double room per night and I think that it may be the nicest place we've stayed at during this trip so far (of course excluding our 4-star hotel in Phnom Penh). It's a very homey place. When you walk in there's a large living room and kitchen, including a bar with bar stools, a huge couch, a flatscreen TV with lots of English-speaking channels, 2 large tables with chairs, and a reading corner with books and magazines. We also have a terrace and a small balcony overlooking the hills. Our bedroom is cozy and our shared bathrooms are so spotlessly clean that I've even dared to walk barefoot in them. I consider myself to be a 'huismus' (a wonderful Dutch expression describing a homey person as a 'home sparrow' [literal translation]), so this apartment is a real find.
The apartment is not the only thing that we love here, of course. Tanah Rata is a cute little town that you can walk through in about 5 minutes, but still seems to offer anything that you could possibly want, including a Starbucks (I know - I could scarcely belief it myself!) and lots of Indian restaurants offering vegetarian noodles and roti, which, as you may remember from my last blog post, I've grown quite addicted to. The town is surrounded by rolling green hills from every side.
The weather is another thing to love about the Cameron Highlands. It's supposed to be quite rainy here, but despite a few rainy moments here and there we've had lots of blue skies and sunshine. It's not hot and it's not humid - we've had temperatures between 15 and 25 degrees Celcius and we've been wearing clothes likes jeans, shoes, sweatshirts and jackets. We don't need AC or even a fan - we just leave the window open while we sleep. It's incredibly nice.
enjoying the morning sun on our balcony
On Saturday we took a walk around town. We saw a Hindu temple, a mosque and a Chinese temple (which we thought was quite extraordinary, considering how small the town is). The Cameron Highlands have fertile grounds and a lot of produce is grown here. One of the funniest things that we saw were these statues of different vegetables and fruits all over town.
There are numerous hiking trails in the Cameron Highlands and we decided to go for a hike on trail # 4, just outside of town, to see the Parit Falls. We also chose this particular trail because, supposedly, this is the trail where Jim Thompson got lost on March 26, 1967. You may remember Jim Thompson - he's the rich American who was very succesful in the Thai silk trade and whose antique house we visited on our last day in Bangkok. He left Bangkok for a vacation in the Cameron Highlands, went for a pre-dinner stroll, and never came back. It's a big mystery because he was never found, so there are a lot of speculations about what really happened - perhaps he planned his own disappearance? Walking on trail # 4 nowadays, however, it's difficult to imagine how he got lost, because it seems like you'd have to try really hard to wander from the stone path. After this hike and a short walk through a Malay village nearby we went to one of the nicer hotels in the area to have a cup of tea in their English tea garden. We also bit into some homemade scones smeared with cream and homemade strawberry jam.
When we walked back into town we made another quick stop at a local cafe to try the locally grown strawberries in a different setting - Jochem had a strawberry milkshake and I opted for fresh strawberry juice. It was basically a walk & eat kind of day.
On Sunday we went on a tour organized by Father's Guest House. Our first stop were the absolutely breathtaking tea tree covered hills of Sungai Palas Boh Tea Estate.
Our tour guide told us a lot of interesting facts about tea. Did you know, for example, that tea without caffeine is not technically tea at all? Nor are flavored teas like strawberry or peppermint. After we snapped hundreds of pictures we went on a tour of the tea factory. We also tasted two types of locally grown tea and had blueberry scones.
Then we made our way uphill to the biggest mountain in the Cameron Highlands at 2031 meters: Gunung Brinchang. Here we climbed a watchtower where the views were absolutely breathtaking.
Then our guide took us into the so-called Mossy Forrest. Our guide was like a walking encyclopedia of local flora and fauna and told us about species like the carnivorous pitcher plant. The Mossy Forrest is a very surreal piece of forest to walk in - you are covered in mist, everything around you is covered in moss, and it's hard to walk on the forest floor, which is covered in layer upon layer of rotten leaves a couple of meters deep. Lose sight of the person walking in front of you and it's easy to get lost, which happened to us twice.
Our final stop of the day was the local butterfly farm. After that we were very tired!
On Monday we went on another one of Father's Guest House tours. The whole point of this tour was to spot the rare Rafflesia flower in bloom. This flower is actually a parasitic flowering plant that produces the largest individual flower on earth. The way I understood it, it takes months for the flower to come into being from a cabbage-like form, and then blooms for just 5 to 7 days. Interestingly, if you blow inside of the flower, a smell hits you that resembles decaying flesh. To get to this flower phenomenon, we first had to drive for over an hour to get to the jungle, not always on easy terrain.
We were guided by a young man from one of the local villages in the Cameron Highlands who's spent his entire life hiking the jungle. At first he appeared quite blunt - he seemed to dislike tourists on principle (which may be understandable - a couple of Indian tourists in our group kept throwing plastic bags and bottles on the jungle floor despite numerous warnings). Our hike started easily enough.
After about 30 minutes we saw our first Rafflesia flower. Our guide then told us that there was another flower on a hill 15 minutes away. But this is a steep and extremely slippery hill, he said, and if you can't keep up with me, you can't come. We went with him, of course, and tried our best to keep up with this mountain goat of a man in the jungle's heat and humidity while wearing jeans and having forgotten our insect repellent, on a hill that seemed to be more vertical than anything else, while climbing over bamboo obstacles. I felt great though - confident and strong and fit. When the guide saw that we were the only ones who could keep up with him, I believe he finally started to like us. He helped Jochem saw a wild deer and fed me flowers that function like toothpaste for the local villagers.
After a strenuous hike, we finally found it!
Luckily we were allowed a short break on the hike back to the jeep at these waterfalls.
Our final stop on that day was an Orang Asli village, where we were allowed to try the blowpipe. If I wanted to, I could now kill you with this 'silent killer' - I was quite good at it!
The tour was really cool and proved to be a nice progression in our activities here. Despite the fact that we were exhausted afterwards, we spent hours trying to book a couple of beds in one of Singapore's many hostels that were (1) not too expensive, (2) near, if not actually in, Orchard Street, Chinatown and Little India, (3) not situated in one of the infamous party hostels, (4) not in a room with 26 (!!!) other beds and (5) not infested with bed bugs. It was a horrible process, but in the end we did succeed (or so we hope for now). Afterwards we were so sad to have to leave the next day already, that we promptly threw away our cheap bus tickets back to Kuala Lumpur and booked our room for an additional 2 days.
Yesterday and today we haven't done much of anything except run errands and enjoy our beautiful surroundings. Deepavali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, is today so it's quiet in town anyway. I'm incredibly sad to be leaving this place tomorrow because it's just so lovely here. I wish I could stay, but Singapore looms and if we don't leave tomorrow we won't have any time whatsoever in Melaka, and I don't want to miss its Dutch colonal architecture and local food stalls. I've tried really hard to write a good blog post and to show relevant pictures but I still feel like I've failed in getting across just how stunning it is here. I guess you should find out for yourself.
with one of the 3 dogs at Father's Guest House
If you'd like to see even more pictures of the beautiful Cameron Highlands, check out our picture gallery here!
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