Malaysia: Cameron Highlands
- Will Boddington
- Mar 17, 2018
- 3 min read
We arrived around midday and checked into our guest house before finding some lunch, where we experienced the Indian side of the local culture by ordering a naan bread with a mini dhal curry each. We had already planned to walk around one of the trails in the afternoon, so off we set with a water bottle in hand. This relaxing afternoon walk ended up being a 3 hour intense hike through the jungle! After scrambling over tree trunks and crawling under vines, we made it out just before sunset and headed back exhausted to the guesthouse.
Instead of booking a tour as we originally planned, the next morning we took a local bus up through the highlands to BOH tea plantation. The bus dropped us off at the end of an incredibly scenic 3.5km walk through the tea plantations to the factory.
Although not quite as informative as we'd hoped, there was a small area with signs explaining the stages of processing the tea leaves and a short walk through the factory so we could see these stages in action. The main focus of the plantation was a big cafe serving various teas and cakes, with a balcony overlooking the plantation.
Back at the main road, we walked down to the bee farm. Unfortunately this was really disappointing - it was a massive building of several floors just selling merchandise. We eventually found a maze at the back of the farm, which was closed, and headed through to where the bees were housed. This could have been a pretty garden, but the statues looked really old and the flowers weren't looking much better. Heading back inside, there were a few signs explaining the process of making honey, but overall it was a really unexciting experience.
Luckily our next stop, the butterfly garden, made up for this. Immediately greeted by brightly painted walls, we went through to a huge garden with various plants and hundreds of beautifully-patterned butterflies flying around us.
We spent a good hour walking through the gardens, and seeing the other exhibits the garden had to offer; snakes, spiders, scorpions, beetles and frogs, as well as rabbits, guinea pigs, ducks, geese, turkeys and a sugar glider.
By this point our legs were feeling the amount of walking we'd done over the past two days, and Will decided he probably had a fair idea of how a strawberry farm works, so we passed on the many 'pick your own' farms and waited for a bus back to where we were staying.
After waiting for almost an hour, the bus finally appeared... and drove straight past us! We started walking the 8km back but then it began raining heavily (just our luck) so we sheltered the entrance of a closed strawberry farm for a few minutes until the rain was lighter. Just as we were about to start walking again another bus was coming down the hill - luckily this one stopped for us! Back at the bus station, we booked a bus to Kuala Lumpar for the next morning and went back to the guesthouse to shower and relax.
Accommodation: Cameronian Inn, 2 nights, 85 RM per night for a double room. This guesthouse was a classic white-painted country inn - so pretty and perfect for a stay in the Cameron Highlands. The man running the inn was incredibly friendly and helpful, and the food served for breakfast (and during the rest of the day) was so good - and so cheap! We even got some laundry done during our stay which was returned to us by the end of the afternoon. We really enjoyed our stay here! 9/10.
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