Cameron Highlands - Sg Palas BOH Tea Plantation

The place where we ran into the largest group of tourists was the tea plantation. There are few pleasures that can trump sipping tea on a veranda overlooking undulating waves of tea plantations, in the cool morning breeze while the sun has not yet reach its peak.

A closer view of tea-leafs, harvested indiscriminately by machines but handpicked and filter by men.

They were like shepherds sheering rolls of docile green sheep.

The accommodations of the workers were nestled in a valley between the hills, uniformly colored teal houses elevated on white stilts, a beautifully decorated Indian public school, and an Indian temple, head and shoulders above other building there.

The setting was idyllic enough to tourists and passerby like me. But is that really so, for someone swimming in seas of pesticide every day and night?

Cameron Highlands 2 - Kea Farm

Rising early and hoping for sunrise on the mountain, shadows and clouds blocked the east squarely. The open piece of unobstructed sky was an ever lightening blue. A distance to the west, a white anvil fit for Thor's hammer caught the changing colors of dawn.

Here be the highest located village in the Cameron Highlands and also peninsular Malaysia. The town was already stirring with life as the roadside marketplace was being set up. Most tourists were still snug in bed. Through the narrow road where many trucks would pass, bearing the fresh produces, we came across seas of lettuces.

The heart-shaped plants opened like clams, with tiny beads of crystalline pearls skirting the fringe of their inner sanctum.

Flights of green watery steps cascaded down along the hillside like a waterfall with narrow walkways of stone, wood and iron crisscrossing them.

More colorful cousins of the earlier lettuces.

Red beacons beckons the matchmakers from afar.

A local arrayed in similar colors to the fruits.

One of these vermilion beauty followed us into the car en-route to Sg Palas BOH Tea Plantation.

It disappeared from my hand before we arrived, probably while the opening views of the enchanting valleys distracted me.

Cameron Highlands 1

Date of trip: 19-20 March

Some quietness in the spine of peninsular Malaysia.

Ornamental fruits and walking white carrots.

Natural anaglyph splashed by the streetlight outside the hotel.

Sleeping Beauty's bane.

A cornered and cautious tabby.

More highland blossoms.

golden chicken fern. Said to have medicinal values and used as woolly blood stauncher, they are elusive except on the stalls along the old winding road leading up into Cameron.

Long may the gold that grows in tree prospers.