The way to Cameron Highlands was not easy. There was no direct way to get there from Kuala Selangor, so we had to get back to Kuala Lumpur first. We wanted to catch a bus at 9.30, so we left Kuala Selangor at 6am. When we got to Kuala Lumpur it resulted that there was no 9.30 bus, and the buses leaving at 10 and 10.15 were already full. So we took the bus leaving at twelve. But that was not the end of it, since our fancy bus broke down in the middle of the way. They got a couple of minibuses, but everybody else was quicker to get in those. In the end we waited a couple of hours for the next bus with a Swedish couple. In the end our supposedly 6,5-7 hours trip lasted closer to 13 hours. But we made it!

Cameron highlands was pretty nice despite being a touristy place. The temperature here was milder than elsewhere, about 20-25 degrees during the day. We read that there were some nice self-guided forest walks so on our first day we went for hiking. There were a lot numbered trails and we combined a few of them making the route about 8 kilometres with a lot of ups and downs. The forest was a fun mix of jungle and also some familiar-looking plants as moss, fern and pines (though here these plants looked like they were on steroids). 

At the same time as we were walking in the forest there was an ultra trail run on the same trails. 100 km, 55 km, 30 km, and 15 km. Even the 15 km is crazy distance with in that terrain, not even talking about 100 km. 

Valeria was complaining that we didn’t see any wildlife on the way but almost at the very end we noticed something moving in the grass. A huge black snake. Luckily it went in another direction as fast as we went to another.

The next day we decided to start with a little hike to a local summit to view the sunrise. That meant waking up at six and leaving to the forest while it was still dark. When we were climing up the trail the ultra runners came past us from the other direction. Apparently they had been running all night and they had just a couple of kilometres to run before the finish line. ( Winner’s time for the 100km was 13.44.46. )

Cameron highlands is famous mostly for the tea plantations. Since we were there on a weekend, we couldn’t reach the most popular Boh tea plantation because of the traffic jam. So the taxi driver took us to another one, still beautiful. We had only an hour there because of the taxi driver. On the way back we asked him to stop us in the nearby Cameron Valley tea plantation, where just for 2RM you could take a stroll and have a closer look.  

The Cameron Valley plantation was a couple of kilometres from the town, and since we didn’t want to walk on the road the whole way, we took a little detour on a trail we found on the map. It started nicely, winding between vegetable and fruit plantations. However, at some point the paved trail ended, and it looked like that was it. We noticed that there was kind of a path going further so we decided to continue. The path got steeper and smaller the more we went in. In the end we were just walking straight uphill fighting our way through the bushes till we got to the same summit we had reached in the morning.