After the busy city life in KL our next stop was Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands. Malaysia's largest and highest hill resort is home to the nation's fruit and tea plantations so naturally we set ourselves up for lots of tea, scones and jam. And we weren't disappointed! We stayed at Father's Guest House, a laid back, friendly place just outside the centre of town, with 4 dogs (who were almost patted to death by the end of our stay) that had great gardens, a vegetable patch, their own cheap cafe and movies on their big screen in the evening. The coolness (we had to sleep with a blankets!) of the resort was a really good escape from the heat at sea level.

We decided to check out the Cameron Higlands plantation of Malaysia's biggest tea company; "Boh". We took the local bus (due to the hills it never got out of first gear, I think that the driver was well and truly deaf) to the road-side drop off and walked the rest of the route to the factory. We got some amazing views for our troubles, the tea plantations looked amazing and they covered almost all the hills in sight. The factory was good to look around too, tea only takes 5 steps and about 6 or 7 hours to prepare once picked. The visitor centre was really busy with all sorts of tour groups there, so we left without sampling their tea and inflated prices.

On our way back to Tanah Rata we stopped at the town of Brinchang where we had been told there was a Hindu festival taking place. We saw a small procession of people, headed up by a man carrying a large, decorative structure on his soldiers with a deity on top. Behind him was a band and then behind that was a man with about 30 hooks pierced in his back. There were men pulling on ropes attached to the spikes and holding him back, so he had to tug against them. It looked pretty damn sore to be honest!

-B