After a very rocky bus ride through the mountains we arrived in Cameron Highlands, the 'bread basket of Malaysia'. On the way we passed lots of farms on the hillsides - vegetables, flowers and tea are the three main industries here and they export vegetables throughout Malaysia and flowers all over Asia and the Middle East. The strawberry trade in particular seems to have become a local obsession - there are images of strawberries and strawberry souvenirs all over the place.

I took a trip to the BOH (Best of Highlands) Tea Plantation and was lucky enough to have a taxi driver who had grown up there (his parents had worked there and employees are provided with housing, healthcare and schooling for their children) - he was able to explain many aspects of the tea growing process and gave us a guided tour of the factory. We finished up with tea and scones at the cafe overlooking the plantation. On the way back we visited a strawberry farm but the fruit wasn't ripe so we coudn't pick any.

After having watched the horror film Mirrors in Penang, set in a fire-damaged department store, I was spooked by the half-built shopping centre in front of our guesthouse - it was abandoned during the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s and, in it's run down state, it was eerily reminiscent of the building in the film. And then it turned out that in our next stop, Kuala Lumpur, we were staying in a building that had been designed to be a department store but never used as such and turned into a hotel, eeek!