CAMERON HIGHLANDS, MALAYSIA
Sitting at 1,500 meters (about 5,000 feet), the Cameron Highlands are the highest and coolest region of mainland Malaysia. It was here that Jim Thompson, the famous American silk magnate, went missing in 1967 during a walk and was never heard from again. These days the Highlands are better known for corn so sweet you can eat it raw, old tea plantations, strawberries, and tourists.
The Cameron Highlands are rather spread out, so my arrival without a car was not necessarily the best way to see the Highlands, but considering the traffic stretching for miles in places (it was the school holidays in Malaysia), I was rather happy not to be driving.
I settled into KRS Pines guesthouse, which I chose because it was described online “like a haunted house on a hill.” I was disappointed that it was nothing like the Bates Motel. Rather it was a friendly family-run joint on an insignificant hill, and dirt cheap too. There was little to do that first day but wander around town, eat, look at touristy stuff and traffic, and eat some more.
That afternoon I joined an inexpensive half-day tour of the Highlands, really the only way to see the sights (such as they were). Our vehicle was a four-wheel-drive horned beast, which served us best when we needed to go off-road to get around the highway congestion (illegally, I might add). Our first stop was the Robertson Rose Centre, where I walked around looking at roses and the view and wondered what the hell am I doing here?! Then it was off to a market, where the green guavas, I learned, were actually dyed green and the fruits on sale were not even from the Highlands. I could see how this tour was going to go.
Our third stop was a bee farm where the shop had expanded to such enormity that cultivating bees seemed an afterthought to selling stuffed animal bees and other junk to tourists. Yes, it was just another “buy crap” stop, and they didn’t even offer free samples of honey. By now, I had decided that this tour was the quintessential bad tour, or rather that the tourist sites in the Cameron Highlands were so bad that I would just enjoy the tour the way I enjoyed a bad horror movie, and that was to laugh my way through it. Actually, it was more like a grimace.
The kicker came when we stopped at a strawberry farm that offered no free samples, but sold things like strawberry ice cream and cakes and fresh strawberries. They withheld free samples for a reason, I found out. The strawberries really SUCKED! I was about to purchase a basket of them when my guide said, “I think you should try them first,” and he snuck me a few from one of the workers he knew. They were the most tasteless strawberries ever, no sweetness at all. My guide earned my admiration for that one, and I continued to laugh my way through the tour. I think even he knew how bad the sights were, but he had a job to do.
There were other stops on the tour, but by now we all knew the routine. We’d pull into the parking lot and all of us would look at each other and say, “naaah.” So the driver would drive out of the parking lot and onto the next sight. Only one sight of any interest remained – the BOH (Best of Highlands) Tea Plantation, which was the main reason I signed up for the tour in the first place. Of course we visited on the one day a week that the plantation closes, so we missed the tea demonstration and tasting. Ah, shucks! But we still enjoyed great views of the 80-year-old tea plants blanketing the hillsides like a giant quilted maze. This was undoubtedly the visual highlight of my brief time in the Highlands.
To round out the day, I took a short walk along backroads and enjoyed tea and scones with a vacationing Malay family at the Smokehouse Inn and Restaurant. The next morning I escaped the madness and caught a bus to Taman Negara National Park.
==================================================
To COMMENT, scroll down and leave your comments in the box below or Comment on Facebook.
See below for ADDITIONAL PHOTOS:
No comments:
Post a Comment