Cameron Highlands-The Words

As you have seen from the pictures, I spent last Friday in Cameron Highlands. We stayed at Strawberry Park, which was really great. I would never stay in a place like that by myself because I am a penny pincher but when you split it 7 ways it works out to a reasonable rate per night (just under RM100).

On Saturday we drove up and checked in, had a late lunch in Brinchang and then headed out to the Sungai Palas Tea Plantation. I had been there but that was over three years ago and they have really changed the place since then. There is now one long building that houses a tea house that over-looks the plantation, then next to it a gift shop and then a theatre with a movie playing on a loop that gives the history of the Boh Tea Plantation and an overview of the process of making tea. Then you can also walk over and see them doing many of the things the video talks about in the tea factory, just next door. All the improvements are top-notch and I highly recommend going. Just remember to horn on the corners. :)

We were having tea when a shower came through and provided us with a fantastic, albeit faint, rainbow.

From there we drove to the top of Gunung Brinchang, which I have been told is the highest drivable road in peninsular Malaysia. It was getting late and the clouds were low and drifting in more like fog than clouds. We had a short walk around and then drove back down. I hiked up to the top of Gunung Brinchang (rather than driving) a couple of years ago and the 2.77 km hike took just over an hour but it is pretty steep. Just take breaks though and anyone can manage it.

We then went down to Brinchang and hit the night market. It is a really nice night market with loads of different things for sell. It is especially nice because Malaysian night market have sort of exotic flair to them the first time you go to one and then you realise they never change and all the same stuff is sold at every one. This one had lots of things you don’t find at other night markets. Lots of strawberries, (I got the dried ones) fruit, veggies, honey and of course souvenirs from Cameron Highlands. Needless to say, we went home with our hands full of bags.

The next morning we went out on an early walk around the hotel. I brought along both sets of binoculars and we saw a few birds. Here is the list:

1. Grey-chinned minivet
2. Silver-eared mesia
3. White-throated fantail
4. Crested serpent eagle
5. Oriental white-eye
6. Black-throated sunbird
7. Mountain bulbul
8. Mountain tailorbird
9. Mountain imperial pigeon
10. Chestnut-crowned laughingthrush
11. Oriental magpie-robin

We didn’t really work hard at birdwatching but it wasn’t a bad morning for amateurs.

We then drove out to the Boh Tea Plantation between Ringlet and Tanah Rata. It was a gorgeous morning and a great drive. I had never been to this one and the really nice part was that it has a short hike up a hill from where you can look out over the valley. Breathtaking vistas! We then hiked from there around the plantation and then back down to the tea house. I think the plantation is called Farlie but could be wrong. What a great way to end a hike, with tea and scones while gazing at undulating hills covered with tea bushes!

I love both Fraser’s Hill and the Camerons but for completely different reasons. The Camerons are a must visit for the majestic tea plantations and all the hill vegetable farms. Good honey, great tea and fresh strawberries don’t hurt either. I’m hoping to go again in a couple of weeks. I guess you could say that I like it there.

A flower growing near the entrance to Strawberry Park.

Cameron Highlands-The Pictures

Well, I spent the weekend in Cameron Highlands. I will write more about the weekend later but wanted to put the pictures up first. In case you don't know this, they grow lots of tea in Cameron Highlands.

Row after row of tea bushes can be seen at the Boh Sungai Palas Tea Plantations.

An orange flower I found growing on the side of the road.

The last time I went to the Sungai Palas tea plantation was three years ago. Now they have built a huge new visitors centre and the tea house has a balcony that overlooks the plantation. Also, the new video is really informative.

The view from the tea house balcony. Spectacular, no?

Beads of water

Yesterday I finished my morning class and then went home and was taking a break before my evening classes. I got a bottle of soda out of the fridge and poured myself a glass and left the bottle on the coffee table. My parents, during their visit, noted that drinks don't stay cold here very long because of the heat and humidity. After ten minutes or so I noticed that lots of condensation had developed on the outside of the bottle so I decided to take picture of it. I thought it turned out to be quite an interesting photograph.

Pandora's box

When I was young, I remember my mom used to keep really cool things in her purse, probably mainly to keep my brothers and entertained. One day, when I was about 8 we were sitting in church as a family and I decided to empty out her purse and find out what things she had in there. However, once I got the contents out, I had a horrible time trying to get them all back in again. Try as I might, they would not, could not fit! So, I had to, red-faced, ask my mother to help me put all the objects back into the purse.

Many days, I feel this is a good analogy to describe how it feels to live overseas. It is like taking something out of the box and finding it just doesn’t fit when you try to put it in again. The problem is, it is not just that you are taken out of the box you are in but then forced into another one, not the one you came out of, and you don’t quite fit in that one either!

Let me use an example. The other day I was with two good friends and after we walked out of the restaurant I “called shotgun” which means you just say “shotgun” out loud. For more information on calling shotgun, click here. Basically, I then had to explain the entire idea of calling shotgun to then, something the average American would immediately understand.

But this works that other way. Now when I go home, I want to use words like kiasu or chin-chai with my friends but the average American has no clue what these words mean. Click here for kiasu and here for chin-chai definitions.

I feel ultimately that I have a better understanding about the world and about my own culture’s impact upon my life but the problem is that it always feels like I am hiding a bit of myself. I guess that is why it is a bit like Pandora’s Box, which when opened unleashed all manner of mayhem but hope remained. Hope, I feel, is what all these boxes have given me.

How did I get HERE?

Isn’t it amazing how life is always unraveling in ways you never expected? I don’t mean unraveling in that you have your life all nicely knitted together and then the wonderful tapestry starts to unravel and gets into tangles and your whole life becomes a mess. No, I mean that at some point you sit down and think, “In five years I will be doing this or that” and then in five years you find yourself doing something that you could never have predicted at that moment five years earlier. I mean, I live in Asia! Not exactly something I planned out when I was 12.

I have a friend who told me once that she remembers the exact moment she became a person. She believes that you are just a baby or infant and that you aren’t a person until you have your first complex thought, a thought beyond the realm of, “Hmmm, maybe I will cry now because I’m hungry or sleepy or sick.” She still remembers what her first thought was. I can’t remember what my first thought was, but her theory made me think about how we map our lives out and try to predict or plan what we will be doing in ten years or twenty years. Everyone wants to be a firefighter or a policeman (not that I can remember wanting that) but there is a time it becomes more than just imagination and you start to dream how it can become reality.

You see, I should be living in the Canadian wilderness. No, I’m serious. When I was about ten I started to think about my future and start making plans for my life. We went, as a family, down to the Alamo in San Antonio. It must have been 1985 or so. Davey Crockett fought in the Alamo and he wore a raccoon hat or ‘coonskin hat. I bought a coonskin hat at the Alamo in some cheap souvenir shop and wore that hat like it was the latest fashion craze. I wore it everywhere. School, the store, at home, literally everywhere. The tail got ripped off several times at school but my mom would just staple or sew it back on the hat and off I would go.

Later, I lost the hat, but a couple of years later we went back to the Alamo and I bought a second coonskin cap. This trip we went on down into Mexico. While we were there we went to this market where they sold things to tourists. All the time we were in the market, I wore the hat. Merchants in the market would tug on the hat and say “Daniel Boone” (another famous American hero). One store was selling coats made out of deerskin, and the store owner and I convinced my dad to buy me a buckskin jacket with lots of tassels on the arms.

All this started me thinking that what I should become was a trapper in the Canadian wilderness. That was what Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone did, so why couldn’t I be the next famous trapper? Since I was a voracious reader, I started reading books on animals, trapping and trappers. I knew all kinds of facts about what animals lived in the Canadian wilderness, like pine martens or ermine and lynx. I especially loved Jim Kjelgaard. He wrote the best books about dogs and their masters and everyone knows that all good trappers have a dog and a horse.

One day, we were rolling up electric fence on one of our farms. Electric fence is temporary fencing that is just one strand of wire, hung from fence posts that you drive into the ground and then suspend the wire about a meter off the ground. You then hang insulators on the fence and attach a battery to the wire. Cattle will get shocked by the wire when they sniff it and therefore it is a cheap and easy temporary fence solution. When we rolled up the fence, my dad would roll the wire around an old tire rim and us boys, my two brothers and I, would pull the fence posts out of the ground and put them in the pick-up bed. This day I swore that I would live in the Canadian wilderness and be a trapper. The question was, how many years would I live there? I decided to count how many fence posts I collected and then that would be the number of years I would live in the Canadian taiga forests. (I knew they were called taiga forests because of all the books I was reading.) I still remember I collected 37 fence posts that day and vowed to live 37 years in the wilds of northern Canada.

So, here I am, in Malaysia, which may be the exact opposite of the Canadian wilderness. Never saw this coming that day while I was carrying the fence posts back to the pick-up. But, you know, I would be lying if I said there weren’t times I still wonder what life in the Canadian wilderness would be like. But, somewhere in the midst of wondering what trees have the best bark for making snowshoes, I start to dream about the future and what strange twists it will unravel in. No, life, I have found, is anything but predictable but the ride is full of thrills and laughs and tears that make it unforgettable, even if you never make it to the Canadian wilderness. It is a wonderful experience no matter what part of the world you live it and whether or not all your childhood fantasies come true. You know, I once read that the bark of birch trees makes wonderful snow shoes.

Lost Post

My last post went missing, so if you find it, please notify me. It wears a blue collar and answers to the name "Fluffy".

Anyway, I decided to retouch one of the photos from the sunrise shots last Sunday morning and put it up. Enjoy!

Morning breaks over a dock and fishing shack.

Sungai Sedim canopy walk and random thoughts

I have been going out to Sungai Sedim in Kedah for the last couple of years and it is still a little slice of heaven.

Let me have a little sidebar here. Malaysians, in general, hate it that some people who have never visited Malaysia think that it is very undeveloped and that people still live in trees. I have never seen a country so fixated on development. It is in lots of patriotic songs and at least two states, Selangor and Kedah, have set dates to be developed, 2007 and 2010, I think. By the way, don’t ask me what they mean by developed, because Malaysia is very developed and I don’t know what the word really means. I am often asked, “Oh, but the US is more developed than Malaysia, right?” How do you respond to that? Mobile phone use here is much higher than in the US. Malaysia boasts the world’s tallest twin towers (Petronas Twin Towers) and one of the world’s tallest towers (KL Tower). Malaysia is a very developed country.

But I don’t love Malaysia because of its massive buildings. I love it for its jungles and rivers and its wildness. I want to see a wild tapir or at least a wild elephant. Concrete and steel are impressive but they are the same anywhere in the world, whether Shanghai, New York, London or Kuala Lumpur. Nowhere in the States can I find the kind of things I see at Sungai Sedim.

I do meet Malaysians who are proud of this heritage and who take every opportunity to enjoy it. I hope this is an attitude that spreads throughout the country so that one day a naïve person can speak to a Malaysian and say “Malaysia, you have a lot of jungles and rivers there right?” and the Malaysian will smile and reply, “You bet, some of the most beautiful in the world!” and be just as proud of the jungle as they are of the Petronas twin towers.

Well, anyway, I did enjoy Sungai Sedim this time but less so. The main reason I didn’t enjoy it was because I was sick. Very sick. In fact, on Sunday I didn’t do much at all but just try to get well for work on Monday.

The second reason is the price of the canopy walk. I used to go out there before the walk was open. The first time the workers invited me to go out on it, so I couldn’t be rude and turn down the invitation. The next few times it wasn’t open so I just jumped the fence and walked around on it. However, now it is “open” and they are charging RM10 (RM5 for kids) to use it. That is more than the price of a movie! I paid it but I think it is a price that will put it out of reach of some people. RM5 with kids free would be a good price in my opinion. Also, they are charging full price and you can’t even use the entire walk due to repair work.

Anyway, I did see my first red-bearded bee-eater! I have wanted to see this species for a long time, not surprising considering my love of bee-eaters. It was just a brief viewing and too far away to photograph.

The best thing about Sungai Sedim is that after you get hot and sweaty on the canopy walk you can cool off in the Sedim river. My current count: Sungai Sedim: 6 visits. Petronas Twin Towers: 1visit.

Part of the canopy walk, which is billed as the longest in the world at almost 1km.