Butterflies, strawberries, and tea... Oh my!

Malaysia is hot.  Like, burning hot.  We sit around sweating all day and all night (unless, of course, we spend the day in an air conditioned mall...).  But Malaysia also has a secret (or not so secret...) place where the weather is perfectly cool and you can frolic through tea and strawberries with butterflies swirling around you.  This place is called the Cameroon Highlands.  It's a 4.5 hour drive north from Kuala Lumpur, and it's worth every minute in the car to get there.

By some great luck, I met a very nice couple who rented a car and invited me to tag along as they drove up to the Cameroon Highlands.  What would have been an exhausting bus journey all by myself turned into a relaxing drive through the hills with Sina (from Germany), her husband Javier (from Columbia), and a man I'd been hanging out with in KL for a few days named Ahmed (from Iraq/Canada).  We thought of ourselves as the world's most bizarre "family".

The town in the Cameroon Highlands that we stayed in is called Tanah Rata, and the first thing we did when we got there was eat a steamboat.  This is a Chinese-type meal where you get a pot of boiling water and raw meats, fish, vegetables, and noodles.  You put things into the boiling water (in some special order, unless you're too hungry to care) and then eat the soup.  It was delicious.







The next day, we took a tour of the Cameroon Higlands.  This was a very efficient way to see all the sights, because there really are a lot of sights to see!  The first place we went was the Boh tea plantation.  It was amazing to see table-high tea bushes carpeting such a huge area of land.  We also saw workers in the field harvesting the tea.  Nowadays, Malaysian people can't be bothered to pick their own tea, so most of the workers come from places like Nepal, India, and Indonesia.  The workers we saw used big shears to cut the green tops of the tea bushes and then threw the leaves over their heads into a big basket on their backs.  The guide said that other workers also use cutting machine things that they carry around to cut the tea more quickly.

This is a cool panorama of the tea fields with Sina taking a picture of me and Javi in the foreground.

The next place we went was the called the Mossy Forest.  In school and in the media, you always hear about how rainforests are necessary to clean the air and water and how they're a home for strange plants and animals.  I always knew that rainforests are important, but now I fully understand that the rainforests are an extremely special thing.  Before we decided to do the tour, someone said to us that "you can go into the rainforest, and you will see something amazing and green.  However, if you go there with someone who knows the land, they will show you the real colors of the rainfoest."  They were so right.

This is me about the enter the Mossy Forest with our guide, Wasu.  Walking through the forest, I just saw moss.  Then, Wasu would point out crazy plants hidden in greenery and tell us all about the medicinal uses.  It was really more than amazing.

hanging orchids

lip flowers

giant fern

ginger

spider orchid

passive insect-eating plant

These are cool!  Under the umbrella-looking part of the plant, they secrete sweet stuff that insects like to eat, and poison stuff that gets the insects drunk.  So, insects come and start eating that stuff, then they get drunk and fall into the body of the plant.  There is digestive fluid inside the body, so the plant starts eating them.  The insects try to climb up the walls to get out, but the lips are really slimy and slippery, so the insects fall back inside and die.

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The next place we went was the butterfly garden.  I know, this doesn't look like a butterfly.  They trick you into coming here thinking that you'll see colorful butterflies fluttering about, and then they throw a big horned beetle in your face.  Just kidding - it's not that bad.  They had butterflies AND scary things.  Honestly, when I saw this thing, I thought I was going to die.  Apparently they don't really bite, though.  Instead, they snap their heads back and catch your fingers in the back of their neck.  That's still enough to cut your finger in half, but at least they don't bite.

 They also had a ridiculous amount of snakes.  I'm showing this picture because these are the friendliest looking of all the snakes.  Some of them were bigger than me, and I (again) thought I was going to die.

 Finally, they also had butterflies!  They were as pretty as you'd imagine, and the garden was sort of magical.  They were really used to people being there, so they'd even come land on you sometimes. 

On the way home we stopped for gas and ended up taking a survey that some kids were doing for school.  It was about the impact of tourism on Malaysia.  My survey was in Malay, so I'm not sure how many of the questions I got right.








The next day, I went on a hike to see the world's largest flower.  It was amazing and huge - like the kind of things you see in movies like Avatar and Jurassic Park.  Unfortunately, my camera died so I only have pictures of it on my iphone.  Even more unfortunately, I currently can't upload pictures onto this computer from my iphone.  I guess you'll just have to trust me that it was really cool.

This morning I took a bus from Tanah Rata to Penang, which is an island on the west coast of Malaysia.  This island is very famous because it's one of the oldest British colonies of the Asian islands, and it's now very commercially important because of it's location between Southeast Asia and India.  This results in a place with a lot of interesting cultural sights along with a lot of ugly commercial buildings.

I arrived in Georgetown (the main city of Penang) this morning at 11 am.  Once I got here, I decided to go out and see the town.  Unfortunately, I walked in the wrong direction and all I saw were banks, car rental companies, and other business-type things.  It was pretty boring, and I decided that Penang sucks.  However, I then took a look at the map and saw that there are tons of parks, forts, and temples in exactly the opposite side of town.  This is the life of a tourist: sometimes you make mistakes.  Tomorrow, my plan is to walk in the right direction.  I'll let you know how that goes.