Squishy feet

When you say you’re going to the Cameron Highlands, the first thing out of people’s mouths, traveler and Malaysian alike, is ‘tea plantation.’  That’s usually followed shortly by ‘bring a sweater.’  The Cameron Highlands are in central Peninsular Malaysia at an elevation of over 6,000 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level at the highest peak.  Although you get away from the pervasive heat of the lowlands, the moisture in the air makes the chill at night even worse.  My nights were spent in thick socks, jeans, a t-shirt and a sweatshirt, covered by two blankets, using my sarong as a sheet in a dorm room that looks like a cross between an airplane hangar and summer camp cabin and some protruding parts of me were still frozen by morning.

The largest flower species in the world, rolling tea fields and a mossy forest

Although traffic isn’t as bad as Indonesia, I still don’t trust myself to drive in Malaysia so to get a tea plantation my choices were to hike, get a rickety local bus halfway and hike or take a tour.  The afternoon of my arrival I heard at least two comments about not being able to find the trail heads around Tanah Rata (the budget center of the Highlands), so I thought I’d save myself the headache and just get a tour.  Once that path was chosen, I still had to determine how far I wanted to walk through the spectrum of available options.  In the end, I splurged on a jungle walk through a bamboo rainforest to the world’s largest flower as well as a tea plantation.  Of course, the afternoon and night before the skies opened up and unleashed a down pour so I went to bed assuming it would be a very muddy walk.

I was pleasantly surprised that the trail wasn’t ankle deep in mud like I expected, but we had already gone through the worst of the rain’s effects on the road in.  There were roads in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia that led to out of the way waterfalls that sent the backseat occupants sprawling if they weren’t holding on tight enough, but that had nothing on this. For one, this path was very steep in parts while Kakadu had rolling hills.  Secondly, although I visited both places during their dry season, the rain the night before left little lakes in the three foot deep ruts (in parts) while the rest of the road was pure mud packed into light brown planks.  We nearly got stuck at one point, showering the front of our 4WD vehicle in mud before I could put the passenger window up.  Looking out the windshield was like looking out from the first layer of a splatter painting, the base color a yellow brown.

Whenever I go into the rainforest all I end up writing about is the plants and this story is no different.  The greenery was thick, a mix of bamboo and ferns alongside some more exotic species like the Rafflesia flower, which was the main purpose of the trip.  The flowers are not actually found in the Cameron Highlands, but close to the border in a neighboring state.  Once in the jungle, the length of the trek depends on where one of these rare flowers has been found. 

Every aspect of the flower’s life stage illustrates why it is so rare.  For pollination a male flower and female flower both have to be in bloom at the same time in close proximity.  Once that happens it takes over a year to grow as a fungus rather than a fruit and only about a quarter of the fungi succeed in growing into the bright orange buds about the width of a basketball that eventually unfold petal by petal into the flower itself.  Although the blooms became more common once the local people were convinced to stop logging in favor of tourism, they are still rare enough that the Orang Asli (original people of Malaysia) called the Senoi tribe are still employed to scout for new buds. 

You could hike the three hours return to the new bud each day of its five to six day lifespan and it would look different every time.  The blooms start out a bright orange like the bud on the first day, deepen into a dark orange on day two, turn into a red on day three, then a reddish brown on day four (my day) and into a full brown on day five before rotting black in color.  The bloom we saw had a color in between day three and four, not having turned completely into the reddish brown.  After our photo op we returned down the same path, past the Black Lillies that only bloom one month of the year themselves, the cicadas, the towering bamboo of various thicknesses, the vibrant red snails with black shells and the centipedes with their wood like skin on a mushy path where mud seeped through the slits of my Teva hiking sandals to squish in between my toes.

We returned our machete toting Senoi guide (every group takes local guide into the forest) to his village where we were encouraged to try a blow pipe, which is till the Orang Asli’s weapon of choice for hunting because the only noise it makes is the pop when it hits its target.  You need steady hands to hold the five foot long version they use.  Whatever you do, if you get to try it, take your breath before you put your lips to the pipe or you risk inhaling the bit of cotton that covers the dart giving the pressure seal needed to send the dart flying as far as it does.  Trust me when I say it’s not tasty.

A cup of vanilla tea and butter cake for my afternoon tea/lunch left a much nicer taste in my mouth.  However, we spent more time enjoying the tea than seeing how it was made during our whirlwind tour of the tea factory.  There are several plantations in the highlands you can tour, but according to Francis, my guide, the Boh plantation on Gunung Brinchang is the only one that hasn’t gone to a computerized process.  You can watch the tea make its way through the drying, fermenting and separating processes in machines that look like they’re from the 1920’s.  The processing is what is most important because it determines whether you’re drinking black tea or green tea.  They both come from the tea trees that cover the hillsides around the plantation in rows that allow the pickers to fit in with their baskets.  If left on their own, the tree will grow to 15 or 20 feet, but in the plantations they’re pruned back to an easy height for the pickers to reach with what looks like a cross between a garden shear and bucket that after cutting holds the leaves until they’re dumped over the picker’s head into the basket hanging to the bottom of their knees.  Unlike in India, here the plants here grow fresh shoots every three weeks, making the hillsides bright green.  The areas that have been recently picked are a dark green instead and the purplish brown rows were just pruned. 

Francis went over and above the call of duty, aka itinerary, by continuing up the mountain to the tallest point of the Highlands.  If the top wasn’t shrouded in clouds, I’m sure it would have been a beautiful view, but as it was I could have been looking into a whiteout in Iowa.  Francis considered the Mossy Forest as the highlight of the Cameron Highlands, so he brought us for a walk into a completely different type of jungle than that morning.  It is named, not imaginatively, because of the moss that is the foundation of the ecosystem.  It covered the tree trunks, the rocks and was composted so that the forest life itself could spring from it.  The moss in one acre of the forest, we were told, holds over a hundred thousand Liters of water at any time.  As a result, the path was even squishier than the mud covered Rafflesia track.  Every step in the wrong place here filled my shoes with what looked like tea seeping out of the ground.  Orchids grew along the path, but were much smaller than the kind you would see at a florist.  The smallest fully grown orchid looked more like a small mushroom cap, until I looked close enough to see the delicate purple pattern tattooed on the lower petal, the whole flower smaller than my pinkie fingernail. 

The highlight of the walk, however, was the Pitcher Plants, which I hadn’t seen except in picture books.  The plants are carnivorous, dining on centipedes, insects or anything that is drawn to the sweet smell of the syrupy liquid that sits in the bottom of the bloom.  The flower itself is shaped like a rounded champagne flute with a thin handle that grows up along the side rather than a stem and a little petal like an umbrella covering the top.  The mouth of the glass is folded in over top of itself, making a thick rim and is scored like a worm’s back, only much closer together.  The lips give no grip to any bugs that may land on them, nor the sides any footing to be able to climb out.  The sticky sap makes it impossible for any now heavy wings to fly so they have no choice but to be digested by the acid in the liquid, which then passes the nutrients to the green leafy main plant.  If you remove the bloom before a new one is grown, the whole plant will starve to death.

For one whole minute of the walk, the clouds parted, revealing the whole of the tea plantation in the valley below and the plastic roofs of the vegetable farms just outside the Highlands.  Just that quick it was nothing but a white curtain again and we had to rush along the sodden path back to the 1950’s Range Rover as the rain that had managed to miss us all afternoon started to beat down.  So much for the dry season.