Cameron Highlands

As a birthday month present for Vera, Julie treated us all to a tour of the Cameron Highlands, an area in the mountainous centre of Malaysia, famous for its cool climate and tea plantations.
Our driver, Prakash, picked us up from our hotel in the morning and we had a quick stop for coffee and breakfast before we started the drive out of Ipoh and up into the hills. The first stop was at a small tea plantation where we could walk around in between the bushes and we tried some iced tea with honey and ginger.
Next we went to a Lavender farm. This was quite a strange place, a cross between a garden centre and a novelty tourist attraction. Although there were some unusual flowers the main focus seemed to be selfie opportunities, those were very popular but not really our thing so we moved on quite quickly.
We also saw a bee farm with lots of hives and different types of honey to try and a much bigger tea plantation where we could walk through the processing factory and look out over the tea plants from a high up balcony. The views of the plantations are really interesting because of the way the tea is grown, with space to walk around each plant and to reach over to pick the top leaves.
The plantations date back to the British colonial times and there are clues to the history dotted around, like scones with jam on sale in the cafes. At the last plantation we did stop for dessert but went for chocolate cake instead of the scones.
Some other, more unusual foods which we tried were deep fried pumpkin leaves, some orange and purple roasted potatoes, and wax apples which tasted like melon.
In the afternoon we started heading back down the mountains on the other side and we thought the tour was pretty much finished. However, we still had time to visit an aboriginal Malaysian (whose brother was called Michael Jackson apparently) who demonstrated his poison dart blow pipe for us and let Tom have a go (not very successfully).
One last stop off at a waterfall which was way more impressive than we had expected and then Prakash drove us back to Ipoh to a pub for some well earned drinks and dinner after a long, eventful and brilliant day.Read more