Cameron Highlands

Today we took a tour of the Cameron Highlands, which is a picturesque area filled with tea fields planted by the British due to the colder climate and rolling hills in this part of the country.

We left for the tour via private driver who picked us up from our hotel. He gave us some good insight on the area as we drove to our first stop. Sadly we learned that the area is so dusty as Ipoh is mining the limestone mountains in the area for marble. The economy is struggling, so the government has resorted to allowing mining companies to take mountains down in their entirety. Apparently around 11 mountains have been sold so far. We drove past a number of mining operations, and it was bizarre to see beautiful mountains covered in trees that abruptly looked like they were blown in half. The smoke and dust was pretty horrible as well, and it totally obstructed far away views as it looked like smog.

In any case, once we started going up the larger mountains the dust cleared, and then we were in the jungle. Our first stop in the jungle was Hobbitoon, which was a knock off of Hobbiton. Apparently they just added a letter to the name and threw up hobbit holes, and the locals come to visit. We thought this was pretty funny, especially as we just visited the real Hobbiton a few months ago. We met with our larger tour group here(each group had their own driver) and we headed up the mountain in a caravan.

Our next stop was Cameron Valley Tea, which had a beautiful tea field. The area around the tea field was basically shanty towns with migrant labor. The guide told us Malaysians don’t work in the fields anymore, and 80% of the labor comes from Bangladesh, and many of those laborers are undocumented or in the country illegally- it sounded a bit like the situation with farming in California.

Our next stop was Boh tea, which was an even larger farm with beautiful rolling hills. We did a tea factory tour here, and checked out the processes for both harvesting the tea leaves, and creating tea. Both jobs seem quite arduous, and the pay per kg of harvested tea was .35 Malaysian, which is roughly 7 cents in usd. At Boh our original drivers radiator went out, so we were moved into the main guide’s car with another customer- we weren’t too bothered by this, as we got even better commentary!

After Boh, we went to an orchid garden and petting zoo combo. The flowers were very pretty, but neither of us really like captive animal petting zoos. Interestingly, there were 4 displaced refugees from the Myanmar earthquakes living on the farm who we briefly met.

Following Boh we went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant that seemed a bit on the “dirty” side. Chris passed on the food for the most part, chels thought it was serviceable but not great. There were a LOT of flies as it was indoor/outdoor.

After lunch we went to another Cameron Valley Tea field, which was larger than the first. This one had a huge brown patch where the tea was recently trimmed back.

Next, we headed to an indigenous village, to see how they lived and look at their market. Candidly, they lived in pretty squalid conditions- many had no electricity or running water, and the forest was the bathroom. We both felt very fortunate seeing that. On the topic of feeling fortunate, we were shocked to see packs of feral dogs throughout the jungle. One was around 40 dogs. We couldn’t help but think of Buster, and the crazy contrast in his life vs the MANY jungle dogs we saw.

To end our tour, we checked out a large waterfall and said our goodbyes with our tour group. Our driver took us to a local restaurant we’d chosen in downtown Ipoh, and we enjoyed Muslim Chinese food before calling it a night.Read more