Day 102: Into the Highlands

Time for some more exploring! Had a hotel breakfast before our rental arrived at 10:30am, personally chauffeured in by the owner of the company, Mr Leeong. I think it's a small company. The car itself is a Proton Saga, a small four-door sedan that's probably about 10 years old. Protons are sold in Australia, and are actually Malaysia's national car! The government set up the company to provide manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, and they're still around today and reasonably successful! The car itself isn't anything flash, but it goes OK and has air conditioning which is enough for us.

First things for today: there were a few sights around the edges of Ipoh that we were keen to see, but weren't really able to access without our own car. So off we went! First stop was the Lang Mountain Recreation Area, which had some nice rugged limestone hills, a large man-made waterfall, and a huge lake with parklands and stuff on the other side. Lots of people queuing up for the shuttle boat to spend their day picnicking and relaxing across the lake, but since we were on fairly limited time we opted not to join them. Beautiful little spot though!

Next up was a group of Chinese Buddhist temples built into hill caves. Each of the three temples had a distinct facade over the cave entrance, and different decorations inside. It's interesting to note how different Chinese Buddhist iconography is from its Thai counterpart: Chinese Buddha is usually very fat, laughing and looking joyful, while Thai Buddha is usually very skinny and very serene in appearance.

One temple had a staircase hewn into the rock of 550 stairs, climbing to the of the limestone mountain where the temple was located. The sign promised a great view of the Ipoh Industrial Area, so we thought we'd give it a shot. 20-30 minutes and many gasps of breath later, we discovered they were right! Factories and warehouses as far as the eye could see. Lovely! Back down we went.

The final temple we visited had a large pond out the front, heavily decorated with rocks and arched bridges, in that very distinctive Chinese Garden way. Beautiful stuff. This cave actually went entirely through the mountain, and on the other side was a large pool of tortoises as well as a large temple-style building that was entirely fenced off and with large drifts of leaves on the stairs. It looked it like hadn't been used in years - very mysterious!

Temples done, we headed off towards the Cameron Highlands, with one final stop along the way. This stop was a large "castle" built by a wealthy Scottish immigrant in the 1890s and 1900s named William Kellie Smith. He moved to northern Malaya in the 1870s and made a lot of money in the commodities of the time (tin, rubber, oil and some foodstuffs), and started using his money to build an enormous castle. Unfortunately for him he died unexpectedly in 1905 and his castle was never finished - his wife and children moved back to Scotland and the house was left to decay. It's since been tidied up and made into an interesting tourist attraction.

We spent an hour or so wandering around the castle - it's not enormous, basically an oversized 5 bedroom manor house with rooms off a central corridor, but it was cool to see the little hidden staircases and escape routes built in for some reason. Apparently there are also tunnels branching out from the house that emerge hundreds of metres away - very paranoid guy I guess!

Back in the car and it was finally time to head for the Highlands. They actually aren't that far from Ipoh, only about 80km, but the road was very steep and windy in a lot of places. A few holdups when we got stuck behind trucks, but I started overtaking them Malaysian style (across double-lines, around corners etc). Not dangerously, but with a fair disregard for whatever the rules might be.

Eventually we arrived in the highlands and we were both dismayed - there were ugly buildings everywhere, industrial plants like concrete factories, terraced farms that were entirely covered in awful grey tarpaulins, crowding and cars everywhere, and a general sense of grime and neglect. For probably the first time since we left Australia I was completely and utterly disappointed with a new place. But we pressed on through the first village, to our hotel in the second village.

We'd booked somewhere about 5 minutes out of town, so we arrived, parked and settled in to the room briefly before heading in for a little wander and some dinner. This town was a little better than the first, but still very heavy on construction sites and dirty shops. It's also quite a bit colder up here, which wasn't helping my mood! We looked at a few menus before eventually settling on a cheap Indian restaurant and heading back to the room early. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day!Read more