| the beautiful but slightly spoilt high lands Posted Thursday, 21 September 2006 | ||
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| Well since the low life of George town I have been living the high life quite literally! I headed for the Highlands Malaysia for some jungle trekking (decided against Indonesia). I was so excited, it is about 2000meters above sea level and is COLD...all those poxy clothes I have been carrying finally came into use...you don't know how excited I was ...really. Me and my travelling compardrez Ellen (a maths teacher from Singapore and map reader extraordinaire) went on a trek with a guide called Yen who was a wonderful softly spoken environmentalist guy passionate about the Highlands. He showed us every clever flower and berrys to eat...he wanted to do something different from the advertised schedule and duly took us up a stream rather than an official path. it was proper stuff... he then took us deeper into the jungle to see small animal traps the indigenous people had set...this was really fascinating and so clever and made from different materials from the jungle (oh and a bit of wire!). We saw flowers and creepy crawlies you really only see on TV and half expected David Bellamy to pop up at some point.. Malaysia is kinda odd in its hang over from English rule..for example the main dishes to eat is Indian food and after your trek you have tea scone jam and cream...hey wot anyone for cricket? We took a tourist tour to the tea plantations which where really impressive and beautiful..I skipped the tea factory as I had seen one in Vietnam and headed to the Tea cafe and drank Coke...surrounded by tea in it's every form I still can't stand the stuff. We went to a moss forest which was like a film set for a fantasy film like Lord of the Bell Ends or is it Lord of the Rings? The butterfly farm had loads of beetles, lizards, snakes, spiders, scorpions and other things to make you feel itchy all day ( oh and pretty butterflies the size of your hands). The creepy crawlies were handled by a guy who picked up scorpions like they weren't evil poisonous things. I got chatting to him asking him what his job interview was like for the job...and what made him scan the papers and pick out the line 'must like handling things that bite and kill'. As luck would have it an American who we went for meal with, was meeting a local Bangladesh guy later for a drink. I went with him and the guy was a scorpion handler from the other butterfly farm...!! all my questions were answered. | ||
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