A Day in the Country

I arrived in the Cameron Highlands last night. The highlands are a mountainous area with a damp and cool climate, making it ideal for year-round agriculture. Today, I went on a tour to explore the local produce. While much of the tour was commercially motivated ("tour our facilities and buy our product"), it was rather enjoyable and I did get to see some great views of the countryside.

We started out at the Sam Po Buddist temple. This was originally a wooden structure, but was upgraded to its current state with donations from Malaysia and Singapore in the 1970s.

Those glowing pillars on either side of the altar are filled with candles for people’s prayers.

We then headed for a rose garden.

The flowers were pretty, but my father has a lovely rose garden, so this didn’t have anything I had not seen from a plant perspective. It did have great views of the hillsides, though.

There was a brief stop at a strawberry farm. You forget how sweet fruit is until you taste it fresh, rather than after it has been refridgerated and shipped 3000 miles.

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We then headed to a tea plantation that has been in operation since 1929. Interestingly, the founder was a Scotsman that owned several businesses, but became interested in tea when he realized that the tea commodities remained stable, even when other commodities fell.

The hillsides offered great views and the tea "cafeteria" had a veranda that made for a nice way to while away some time talking with fellow travelers.

Below, in this picture of the tea harvesters, you can see on the right hand side, laying on a bush, a tool used for trimming the plants. Rather than plucking my hand, a two-person team runs this trimmer over the top of the plant to trim the leaves off and suck them into the baskets on their back. A good harvester can yield about 200 kg of leaves per day, earning a wage of about RM40 ($13) per day. This is considered good money for this strenuous work and the plantation provides family housing, medical facilities, and primary education for the children.

The plants are trimmed every 21 days for 3 years, then are pruned and left to sprout for 3 months. This encourages growth of new, younger stalks, and prevents the bush from turning into a tea tree, which is good for oils, not for tea.

The next stop was a butterfly farm. They started off by showing us the huge scary bugs that can be found natively in the highlands, but I will spare you those pictures so you can sleep at night - interesting, but creepy. The butterfly portion, though, was amazing. At first, it seemed as though there were barely any butterflies, but as we walked around, we began to spot them resting on the plants and fluttering about.

This first one is apparently the "Butterfly of Malaysia". Note my finger in the picture showing the relative size of this insect. The place was covered with these and although they are alive, they rest very still on the plants with their wings open, making it easy to photograph them.

The others, however, were fluttering about and I caught photos of them as I could. Here is one of my favorites...

The last stop was a honey bee farm, which was less than interesting, so we wandered over to the market next door. I wanted to try some fruits that were unfamiliar. This is a picture of the woman who I confused when I asked for a single passionfruit (not one bunch, just one fruit.) I just wanted to try it, not eat it for three weeks. I also tried the Cameronian apple and she made up for the small order by throwing in some oranges to reach a full kilogram.

Here is a close-up of the fruit so you can see it better. On the left are the Cameronian apples, which have absolutely nothing to do with apples. They are more along the lines of melon or kiwi. The passionfruit is in the middle (top). I had never had passionfruit outside of a juice concoction. They are both sweet and sour, with a fragrant scent. And the oranges were just plain good.

I met a woman from the Netherlands, Ingrid, and together we dined on what is apparently a highlands specialty, "steamboat". It is similar to the main course portion of fondue, but with a Chinese slant. The pot over the burner in the center of the table is divided into two sections, one filled with a spicy broth and the other with a plain broth. You are provided chopsticks and spoons, and plates filled with raw meats, fish, prawns, cabbage, noodles, and eggs. You drop these into the boiling broth to cook them to your liking and then try to fish them out with chopsticks before they overcook. While the waitress assured us that we were doing just fine, we were a little distracted by the fact that the Chinese family at the next table kept turning around and laughing at us.