Firstly a huge thankyou to everyone who sponsored me in Sweat to Smiles 2007. It was a really good event raising RM 10,000 (about 1500 pounds) of which I managed to raise RM 840 thank you very much! I even won a prize as one of the people managing to raise the most although I cheated a bit by getting people in England to sponsor me!

I've just finished a couple of days in the Cameron Highlands to recover from overexerting myself at aerobics. It's a huge area about 1500m above sea level and so is about 10 degrees cooler than the rest of Malaysia which was a very welcome change. It was still sunny most of the time but like England on a nice summer day so you could actually be out and about in the sun and not feel like you're about to collapse which makes a nice change from the rest of the country! And I was even cold at night although the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly!

Cameron Highlands is famous for its tea production and even though I'm not a tea drinker it seemed rude not to go and check out the main attraction. So a group of 5 of us from my hostel went off on a guided tour to learn all there is to learn about tea...

We went up to look at the plantation which is amazing, it just goes on for miles and miles. Apparently they produce enough tea every day for 5.5 million cups which is pretty impressive even to a non tea drinker. Everything is still picked by hand, sort of. The workers are out in the field all day with mechanical cutters picking everything and then take it back to sort by hand so that only the young tea leaves are sent off to the factory. Even in the cooler climate it looks like incredibly hard work.

Unfortunately the tea factory was closed for refurbishing so I can't help anyone who's desperate to learn all about the tea-making process but by that point I was a little bit tea'd out and very tired of explaining that I didn't like the stuff and yes it is very strange for an English person not to like tea...

So instead we went off with our guide Kumar to the Mossy Forest which runs up the side of Gunang Brinchang, the highest point of the Highlands (2000m I think). We climbed up the watchtower at the top of the mountain to get a view across all the Highlands which was amazing. It's so high that you're in or above the clouds most of the time. We were really lucky to get some good weather and could just watch the clouds rolling in below us which was fab! Then we headed into the forest which lived up to its name being incredibly mossy and wet! I wasn't too keen on another jungle trek having just come from Taman Negara but it was amazing how different the two forests were. Mossy Forest is just that, mossy! Because it's so much cooler and at a higher altitude the mosses have pretty much taken over everywhere so everything's very wet and drippy, not at all like the jungle in Taman Negara.

The walk was great, in spite of the mud! Kumar is probably the most knowledgeable person I've ever met. He knew what every single bird call, plant and insect was and had hundreds of stories about all of them. Apparently almost every plant in the rainforest has something to do with sex - most of them were being advertised as natural viagra! So as well as tea I now know all about pitcher plants (they're carnivorous and survive by trapping and drowning insects), orchids, moss, ferns and elephants to name a few! Not that we saw any elephants but I'm assured they do have some in the forest if you know where to look...

Then it was time for me to trundle on to Penang on probably the worst bus journey of my life. It didn't start well, I was waiting in the wrong place and had to race across town with all my bags terrified that I had missed the bus. As it turns out I needn't have worried as it was an hour late leaving and then spent another hour winding down the scariest, narrowest little roads only stopping to avoid running over dogs, monkeys and at one point a local guy on a motorbike who then took over driving the bus and sent the original driver off on his motorbike! Because it was the day before Deepavali (a public holiday) there were hundreds of people trying to get on the bus and hundreds more jamming up the roads so it took me a good 8 hours to get to Penang feeling very sorry for myself!

I'm now in an internet cafe desperately trying to shelter from the rain, rainy season seems to have finally started! I tried to take the Malaysian approach and just wait in a shop doorway until it stopped but 45mins later it turned out I had chosen the downhill side of the road and the water was a foot deep all around me as the streets all flooded. So I waited a bit longer, trying to avoid all the rats and cockroaches sharing my shelter as their homes all got flooded and eventually when it stopped raining I could paddle across the road! Unfortunately it keeps starting to rain again and the street with my hotel on is very very flooded so I'm not entirely sure how to get back there without a boat or wellies at the very least...