Day 8 – Tea, Tea and More Tea

We began our morning with our free breakfast; somehow the waiter got confused and brought us a traditional Indian breakfast, a roti type thing with dahl and curry sauce. 

Luisa soon asked for some strawberry jam to try make them taste like pancakes but I decided to give the curry sauce a try – bad mistake! We jumped into a Land Rover Defender and took off for our tour and within in 10 minutes I started having bad stomach cramps and it felt like there was a rock in my belly. I cursed the Indian waiter the whole day! 

We had two lovely Polish girls on the tour with us that were friendly and spoke excellent English. We have actually been quite ashamed because all the Europeans that we have met and chatted to speak really good English and probably one or two other languages and all we can speak is English and some poor Afrikaans. Our first stop on the tour was the BOH tea plantation. It was started by J.A Russel, a British entrepreneur, in 1929 and is the largest tea producer in Malaysia. The scenery was beautiful and the pictures we took do not do it any justice. 

The valleys stretch into the distance and are covered with well groomed tea bushes which are several shades of green and at the peaks of the valleys a mist settled. Despite the fact that we were surrounded by another 20 tourists it was still a serene moment. Our guide gave us an informative talk about the history of the tea plantation and the process involved in making tea. We spent some time taking photographs and another guide took it upon himself to try artistically capture Luisa and myself in the Cameron Highlands by making us stand behind flower bushes much to Luisa’s irritation. 

We headed up to the factory and as we stepped out of the car we were hit by this amazing smell – roasting tea. We had a quick tour around the factory, most of the machinery they use is the same they used in the 1980’s. It is a compact factory but they still manage to produce millions of kilos of tea each year. We wandered around the shop and café that looks over the tea plantation and decided to buy some loose tea leaves as a keep sake.

Our next stop on our tour was Gunung Brinchang – the highest point in the Highlands. The Land Rover crawled up the road – mainly due to the fact that its gear box was not 100%. When we eventually arrived I was a bit disappointed to see a big cell phone tower on the top. We took some pics and then moved on to the “Mossy forest trek”. Basically they stop on the side of the road and you take off into the bush, all the trees are covered in moss because of the moisture and you walk around getting dirty for about half an hour so not really a “trek” but fun nonetheless. Our last stop was a butterfly farm and reptile park. We strolled around and enjoyed seeing the butterflies but after 20 minutes we were ready to get going as we had a bus to catch.

Our bus to Penang was pleasant and the road down was wider and less windy that the one we had taken up. We arrived in Penang at around 19:30, jumped on a ferry to Georgetown (the main city on the island of Penang) and then had to walk the streets looking for accommodation. We headed for the backpacker street and managed to find a cheap clean guest house called Civilians Inn and it had air con! What a treat! We headed out for some dinner; the cart we decided on did a noodle dish with prawns and what looked like chicken hearts, our weirdest ingredient so far (that we know of!). It still tasted really good. 

Phil