Cameron Highlands

The next day, I woke up in the Cameron Highlands to a very quiet town, but after a slow morning, I embarked on a full-day tour with our guide, Spencer, a young man from Japan, a Dutch woman and two German women. We piled into the back of a Jeep and drove to our first stop, an Orang Asli (“Original People”) village, where government funding has provided the people with houses, running water, and other amenities. These people still use many traditional subsistence methods, like planting crops such as beans and yams and hunting for wild pig, deer, and porcupine in the jungle with blow dart guns. A man from the village demonstrated how to use the blow dart gun—a long, bamboo stick through which a dart is blown to pierce an animal. Traditionally, poison from plants or frog skin are used on the darts. A piece of “jungle cotton” is stored at the opening so the darts don’t fall out. I was given the chance to try the dart gun and was surprised to land my dart quite near the center of the target!

 
We brought an older Orang Asli man with us on our next part of the trip as a guide. It was a good thing because after only about five minutes of driving up the muddy, rutted road, we got stuck. I’m not really sure why Spencer thought he would be able to make it up this road. He only got the vehicle more and more stuck. Finally, he gave up, and the Orang Asli man took us into the jungle while Spencer walked back to town to get a tow.

I never got the name of our guide, but he led us on a vigorous hike in search of the Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower at up to a meter wide. We walked along the muddy road, where large clusters of bamboo grew tall, curving to the sky. From the gaps in the vegetation we could see a forest-covered mountain peak shrouded in mist. It was humid and I was sweating before too long. I saw a few leeches on the ground but, luckily, none on my body. We hiked over a bamboo bridge, through trails, over fallen trees, across a sandy spit and a small creek, and took a small side trail to find a few dead Rafflesia, fungus-like, dark brown and decaying, and one that had not yet opened but sat like a red cabbage on the forest floor. We then continued to make the longer trek to the flower that was in bloom.

 

 

 

On the way back to the main trail, our guide stopped and cut into a piece of bamboo with his machete. “Water bamboo,” he told me, and I looked inside the long tube, which was filled with water. He told me to try it, so I tipped the long tube back. “Slowly, slowly!” he warned, but the water sped down the chute and landed all over my chin and chest anyway. We continued down the trail, where butterflies flew about the rainforest, umbrella-like tree ferns grew, and bamboo predominated. We reached a raging, muddy creek, where we took our shoes off and our guide led us across the rocks to the other side with a walking stick. Once we crossed the river, we soon left the main trail again and headed up a steep, slippery path, grabbing the trunks of small trees to keep from sliding back down to where we had started. Our guide chopped down branches in our way, and he soon revealed the giant Rafflesia before him.

The flower was perched on the hillside, rusty red and beautifully bright amongst the brown, leaf-strewn forest floor. Its petals, thick, uncurled and unfolded themselves along the ground. Its center was like a hollowed-out gourd, inside of which a spiky heart sat. Insects buzzed around the spiked center. Near the flower, two baby buds claimed their spaces on the ground, and several more dead Rafflesia decayed.

Once we were finished marveling at the flower, we headed back down the muddy slope, reached the trail, and continued back down to the road. I led the way, walking as the hot sun came out. The bottoms of my pants were wet with mud and water from the creek. Butterflies hovered over the path, and at one point, after hearing a rustling in the bush, a wild pig—smaller than I would have expected one to be—sprinted across the path. As I walked toward where the pig had been, I noticed its digging in the mud, where it had been looking for worms.

 
When we finished the hike, Spencer was waiting for us, the Jeep pulled out of the mud but still muddy. We piled in, despite how dirty we were and how much we smelled, and dropped our guide back off at the village before continuing to the tea plantation. The scenery there was absolutely stunning. The sun was briefly out, but everything was misty and wet. We drove by rolling hills, covered with rows and rows of neatly trimmed tea bushes. The greens were brilliant—jade, emerald. We wound around the hills of tea until we reached the Boh tea factory, where we went on a very brief tour and saw the machines and workers breaking the leaves down, drying, and sorting. Then we had a light lunch—apple pie and vanilla tea—at the tea shop. Malone had gone on a different half-day tour, and her group was visiting the tea factory at the same time, so I got to sit on the misty porch with her, overlooking the green tea fields.

I bought some black tea soap (which I have yet to use!), some green tea (which was delicious), and a postcard before we left and headed for the strawberry farm. There wasn’t much of the farm to see—just a few rows of strawberries growing in a large greenhouse—but we got to sample strawberry jam and dried strawberries and I bought 5 ringit worth of fresh strawberries, which were delicious.

Our last stop was the Butterfly Garden, which also housed insects and reptiles. I held a leaf-bug, a lazy gecko, and a leaf frog and got a closer look at a rhinoceros beetle and some red palm weevils when Spencer took them out of their tanks. The orchid praying mantis was particularly beautiful. There were tanks and tanks of snakes, some with ten or more tangled together, making it impossible to tell which body belonged to which head! Other tanks held geckos, chameleons, and other reptiles. There were beautiful butterflies and flowers in the butterfly garden. Between the butterflies, flowers, Rafflesia, strawberries, and tea leaves, it was truly a colorful day!

 

For dinner I had mushroom soup (it was actually Campbell’s soup, which isn’t something I normally eat, but it was nice to have some Western food for a change!) followed by a quiet evening. In the morning, we packed and got on a bus to Kuala Lumpur. It was an unpleasant bus ride down the windy mountain roads, but we got off in the capital city for lunch. Our bus to our next stop left later in the evening, so as our bus departed, we got to see the city skyline at sunset.

Crossing the Border

My last image of Thailand was from the window of a bus (the seat was hard) as we drove south to the border—the sun setting in an orange sky to the west and a huge, full, bright moon rising over palm trees in a dusky sky to the east. This view was quite nearly destroyed by the odor of what must have been a feedlot or slaughterhouse a bit further down the road. It was dark when we got to the border and the area was, for the most part, vacant. We walked across the border after getting thoroughly checked and scanned for drugs—our luggage was even X-rayed. We entered Malaysia with our lives intact (there is a mandatory death penalty for transporting drugs) and not a bus or taxi in sight.

So we had a scrumptious dinner at the 7-11—Cup O’Noodles and chips, yum!—and spent the night in a dodgy room near an empty market right across the border. It was someone’s home, and we had our own closed-off room, but had to walk through the kids’ sleeping area to reach the bathroom, which, as it were, had no running water. I spent the night still itchy with my hives and psychologically itchy with bedbugs, but luckily, I was exhausted, and I slept. In the room next door was a British couple who had gotten off the bus with us. They told me that in the UK, doctors won’t prescribe Malarone, the anti-malarial I had been taking, for more than a month at a time. I wonder why!  It certainly made me question the FDA's standards.

In the morning, we took a taxi to the bus station, a bus to Butterworth, a bus to Ipoh (where I ate watermelon and sweet corn at the bus station, having had only orange juice and cookies all day), and then finally a bus to the Cameron Highlands—Tanah Rata. After two full days of being transported, we finally were in a place we wanted to stay. Some hot tomato soup and garlic bread in town followed by a hot shower and a clean bed never felt so good.

We slept in the next morning. I had a peaceful, quiet day to myself in the mountain air (Malone was still feeling ill with her headache). The Cameron Highlands reminded me of Colorado. A tiny, one-street town was nestled in amongst the mountains, and the buildings just reminded me of a brick-building lined street in a small Colorado town. The day was rainy, and I think the cool, humid mountain air cured the remnants of my hives. I spent the day reading, writing on the sheltered porch of the hostel while the rain streamed down outside, exploring the town, and eating tasty Indian food. It was nice to have a peaceful day in a pretty place; the next day was packed and one of my favorite days in my memory!