We are now in the Cameron Highlands, staying in the town of Tanah Rata. The Cameron Highlands is Malaysia’s largest hill station - a string of towns surrounded by tea plantations and small farms. We showed up in Tanah Rata with nothing booked, as usual, and found all of the hotels to be full! We were eventually pointed to the Twin Pines hotel who were also fully booked, but had a RM50 room in the retirement home just up the road. We offered RM40 and he agreed so we went to see the place. Turns out this is one of the nicest rooms I’ve stayed in yet! Its clean, has a private bathroom with a hot water shower (!) and there’s even free laundry facilities.

The highlands are a nice change from the coastal towns. The temperature is much cooler and the town is surrounded by beautiful greenery. There are a lot of other travelers here as well and a good range of accomodation and touristy stuff to do.

Today we hired a guide to take us to one of the plantations and on a couple short jungle walks. First we visited the Boh Teh plantation and enjoyed a great cup of tea in their tea room overlooking the fields, then took a walk up to a viewpoint with a couple jungle detours on the way to spot some pitcher plants…

The plan is to stay here for a couple days and then continue south towards Kuala Lumpur…