Tea and Steamboats

The next morning we had to catch a coach to Cameron Highlands, until now we had been travelling in a private mini bus which had a/c and a DVD player. Now we were on public transport which was a little less comfortable. The coach ride was endless, but we finally made it to Cameron Highlands. As we got off the coach you could feel that the temperature had dropped, this was because we were quite high. We went to dinner with kit where he told our group of some day trips available to us for the next day. It didn’t sound that exciting a day but we had nothing else to do. After breakfast the next day we met our tour guide for the day, his name was Ravi. All 10 of us piled in to the back of his Land Rover and we headed off to the tea plantations. What a sight, fields and fields of tea bushes it looked like a green carpet. Ravi was a very informed man, telling us all sorts of facts and history about the area. We then moved on to another peak. As we climbed up the stairs of the observation tower we were in the clouds, the highest point in Cameron Highlands. The ‘Boh’ tea factory was next on the trip, where I even tried tea (it was ok with lots of sugar). We saw the equipment used to collect and process the tea and where the workers lived.



We then continued onto the butterfly farm, this was more like an insect zoo. Ravi showed us the way to pick up scorpions and how to handle loads of different insects, he was just grabbing them from the cages it was an amazing place and by this time we were all having a fab time. Just to round up a great trip Ravi took us to a strawberry farm, where we all had strawberries and ice cream. We all enjoyed the day trip out and it was definitely the best trip so far. That evening Kit told us about a dish called the steamboat, this is a soup which you have boiling on your table and then you add raw meats and vegetables to it as you like, but you get a large selection of meats from chicken and beef to jelly fish and cockles. A few of us tried the steam boat and only Paul, Lisa, Hugh and I tried the jellyfish ( never again) it was an experience as Hugh kept telling me.