Cameron Highlands

One of the great things about Malaysia is that there is a variety of everything.  Variety of food (of course, or we wouldn't be here), variety of people, variety of climates, even.    For the last few days we have been in the Cameron Highlands, checking out the tea plantations and the jungle, and practically freezing our asses off!  It went all the way down to about 20 degrees Celsius up there at elevation!  We didn't even need a fan and the mosquitoes were too cold to bother with us.  We needed TWO blankets and I had to wear my T-shirt AND my fleece to bed at night! I am in SSOOOOOOO much trouble when I get back to the Yukon.    The Highlands are about 2000 metres above sea level and it's a real agricultural area.  Lots of gardening up there, not only because the soil is good, but also because it's not 40 degrees all the time.  The hills are covered with gardens and plasticated greenhouses..  Lots of fresh produce, and they even grow strawberries, which we would have eaten, except the lady at the front desk of our guest house said that not only are the strawberries heavily laden with pesticides (as are most strawberries, unfortunately), but that they actually pump COLOURING into the berries to make then redder.  Her doctor actually breaks out in hives when she eats these strawberries (but not organic ones, so it's the berry per se). So, we passed on the berries, though they certainly smelled delicious.  We found other good things to eat, among them a great chocolate banana cake that I'm going to try to emulate when I get home.   And ah, the tea plantations.  I'm not really one for tea (real tea, that is), but picture hills and valleys covered with a patchwork quilt of tea bushes in vivid greens and browns, with people cutting tea from the bushes and throwing it into a basket on their backs.  Very picturesque...though as this was not an organic operation, the tea bushes were probably covered in pesticides too...but they certainly looked lovely.    It was cool enough in the day time to go on hikes up into the hills, something that I tend to avoid when we're at  sea level, since I tend toward heat prostration in the afternoon.  Beautiful orchids and other flowers in the forests, and though we did see a huge blue and orange caterpillar, there were no other big bugs (except loads of huge spiders which were content to stay in their webs, thank god), so I was quite happy.    The Highlands were a nice sojourn, but now we are  back at sea level in Kota Baru in the north east (enjoying our fan and back to wearing as little as we can get away with in a Muslim country without offending the locals), on our way back to the beach of the Perhentian islands, where the fish are  purported to be numerous and the snorkeling spectacular.   ACDB