Where walking is faster than a car

This morning was our first in the Cameron Highlands, and oh how pleasant the temperature was. It was 18C, and absolutely beautiful.

After months of hot and humid conditions, where the coolest day was in the low 30's, having a temperature in the teens was amazing. There would be no sweating brought on just from being outside. There would be no need to constantly rehydrate with gallons of liquid to compensate for the sweating. For the locals it was cold though, and while we had on shorts and t-shirts, many other were there in down jackets, with gloves on, especially the children.

Setting out from the hotel, we thought that we would head to Tanah Rata, the biggest town in the Highlands, and about 8km away by car. But first, we had to go strawberry picking.

We went to a place reasonably close to our hotel, and signed on to pick 0.5kg of strawberries. As it turned out, when we went to pay, we had picked exactly 0.5kg of strawberries. The owner was so impressed with us that he gave us another handful of strawberries for the hell of it. In terms of prices, they were some pretty expensive strawberries, but they aren't exactly common in this part of the world, because they are definitely not a tropic fruit. They might like the rain, but they are not great in the heat. It takes the 1.5km separation between sea level and the Cameron Highlands to make it possible.

Walking towards Tanah Rata with our strawberries in hand, we couldn't help but be amazed by the traffic. It was near stationary, and there was plenty of it. We would later discover that we had arrived in the school holidays, hence all the traffic.

As the walk from the hotel to Tanah Rata was all downhill, it wasn't a major that we walked. There wasn't a pavement, which is pretty common in this part of the world, but as the traffic was so slow, there was no danger to us walking along beside the cars.

The walk to Tanah Rata took about two hours, with stops. On arrival though, we discovered that there really wasn't that much there. Nothing that tickled our fancy for lunch. Nothing to see. Nothing to do. So we went to Starbucks for a coffee. Not my idea of wonderful coffee by any means, but around here it is the best we can do.

Once there we also had to deal with our current situation, and the long 8km walk up hill, back to our hotel. As it turned out, there were no buses, and because of the traffic, the local taxis were not going to take us back either. Out options was to walk back, or wait until the middle of the night for the traffic to disappear.

We settled on a long walk back up the hill. If nothing else it was going to be good exercise. And as it turned out, walking was faster. We walked 8km faster than the cars did. We started off behind a big lorry, and after 8km, we finished about 300m ahead of it. It couldn't imagine sitting in a car for that long, to go such a small distance. We did stop to eat our strawberries, but the truck stopped to offload cargo for the same amount of time, so we won the race, fair and square.

And that's if your car made it. There were many cars that littered the hard shoulder on our walk back up that hadn't survived the constant hill starts, and heat. In fact the whole walk up the hill, the smell of the forest was interrupted regularly by the smell of an overtaxed clutch.

Getting back to the hotel and four, we peruse the options available to us for dinner, and quickly discovers that we had very few. Sad at the lack of culinary options for the night, Courtney had a foot massage to ease the pain, before we dined at our best available option, the hotel restaurant.

The food, was okay, but not as good as we had had in Penang. That was a shame.Read more