Day 104: More Exploration

Second day exploring the Highlands. Back to our favourite food haunt again because why not - the food's cheap and quite tasty! First stop on the agenda today was a waterfall just north of the main town.

We parked the car and hiked the 500m or so out to the waterfall but it was a bit depressing: lots of rubbish floating in the plunge pool, and plenty more garbage in the rapids, so we didn't stick around. Back to the car where we headed further north to another tea plantation, this one just near the mountain road we'd driven up the day before. Very similar set up, with a cafe, a viewpoint and a store, but this one also had the processing factory and a decent museum about the company and the tea-making process. Quite interesting, though the view definitely wasn't as good as the previous day.

Stopped in the cafe for an early-ish lunch of tea and savoury pastries - Shandos liked her spicy sausage roll, but my chicken pie was a bit average. We drove further north to a Lavender farm, where obviously huge tracts of lavender are grown. They also had a lot of other crops like strawberries, grapes, and a few types of flowers like petunias and gerberas. We hung around here for a while and enjoyed a lavender ice cream, which was nice but a little like eating one of those fancy soap stores!

On our way back south to Tanah Rata we stopped at a marketplace designed almost entirely for locals. Lots of fruit and vegetables for sale, and hardly any tourist crap which was nice. We bought a punnet of strawberries for 3 ringgit, and then headed back to the hotel for an afternoon rest, enjoying a cup of tea with our strawberries.

By now it was around 3:30, and we were realising that we'd explored most of what the Highlands had to offer; at least in terms of what we were interested in! So we chilled out in the room for a couple of hours, before heading out to dinner. For a change we decided to have Chinese steamboat, which is basically a large pot of broth on a small gas burner in your table. You get raw ingredients (meat, noodles etc) and put them in the boiling broth, fishing them out once they're cooked. Then you eat the ingredients with the soup - delicious. And just what we needed to warm up on a cold, blustery evening.

Back to the room fairly early for bed - it's our last night here and we're not sure where we'll be sleeping tomorrow night!Read more