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If there's a Heaven on Earth, it must be Malaysia

Last week 2 good things happened to us - first we were blessed with Borzin's visit (such a great fun to have people over!) And everybody says our Leijonakaupungi is a great place! Of course, Borzin got into a real shopping frenzy, got expensive (but good!) headphones (its a worktool for a DJ, you know), from what I heard, spent hours and hours hanging out it Sim Lim Square (the famous electronics mecca).. However, he could have switched off the gas when he left from our apartment!!! Due to some fatal misunderstandings, we decided to go to Malaysia for a long Hari Raya Haji weekend, so Borzin was left alone for few days. Everything is fine, our apartment is intact, no damage done, but it was a little bit scary to find the fire on...

Your devoted travel reporter is back! We had a great trip to Cameron Highlands over the weekend. The place is about 2km up in the mountains and it is just so unbelievably beautiful!!! Because of the heights, the weather is very refreshingly chilly - about +25C during the day and drops down to some +10C at night. Ideal wonderful weather of a Lithuanian or Finnish summer (if you're lucky..) So we actually needed some long sleeves which was a refreshing concept..

By plain chance we picked the most amazing hotel in the area - Strawberry Park. Yes yes, apart from the most spectacular landscapes, there's lots of strawberry farms around. And you can buy some fresh straight from the field. Wah, my heart melted...

They're also growing lots of vegetables, tomatoes, cabbages, salad, beans, all kinds of stuff in there! In this kind of neat terrace fields high up the hills. We wandered in somebody's tomatoe fields looking for a path to the waterfalls and people didn't seem to mind. Our jungle trekking (on a "family trail!") turned into a massive sweaty 2 hours walk on a narrow path, at the end we used our nails and claws to get up the hill.. It seems that my running and exercising routines don't add much to my capability to handle jungle walking..

And of course, because they grow so much of vegetables in Cameron Highlands, everything is very fresh and beautiful (and lots of stuff!) when it gets on your table. So yes, once again, a gourmet paradise - mostly for cheap Indian food!

Apart from all that, one of the most spectacular things we saw in Cameron Highlands was tea plantations. The pictures don't really convey the magnificence and 3dimentionality of the space that is really in there. For some reason it just looks flat. It is a bit difficult to grasp the scale of things in these pictures. Just imagine that those little trees further up are actually some 10m high, so the hills are actually huge!!! And when you see the sun and clouds running along the hills, you can't help it.. Just no words to describe the beauty!..

We rented a motor bike (which wasn't a very easy thing to do, people seem to take taxis back and forward, if you're planning to got there, ask us, we'll give you some hints where to find bikes) and drove around for 2 days. It was great - the immediacy of experiencing the nature around you when you ride a bike is completely different from riding a car. The air was soooo fresh and clean!

The tea plantations looked just like a green carpet soft and inviting to rest on (ha, but these bushes are up to your knees.. and Kaj was always reminding me that the place may be a paradise for us, but probably not for the people who work in these tea plantations, imagine dragging a heavy basket up and down the slope all day..)

However, the BOH tea is quite famous in Malaysia and aparently quite good (I never knew that Malaysia has a local tea industry and tea brand!) The tea dust on the floor ends up in your tea bags, so next time be cautious - ask for some brewed tea!

We also walked up the Gunung Brinchang (ha, did I spell it right?), the 2.5km peak, the highest point in the highlands. But the weather was cloudy, so we didn't see much, just clouds and fog everywhere. It was very beautiful anyway, looked so mysterious.. The flora aparently is very special in the forest - lots of ferns, they say there's carnivor pitcher plants, orchids and all sorts moss.. I'd really like to climb the hill on a sunny day, there were many view points for beautiful panoramic overviews, but we could see some 4m away from us, the rest was white in fog.. If you come over to Leijonakaupunki, we'll definitely send you to Cameron Highlands for a weekend.. So beautiful!

Apart from all that, as this place was discovered by a British colonizer called Cameron (he saw the "potential" to recreate Europe there, I guess the place was inhabited by local villagers for ages..), there's plenty of "tudor" style old English looking houses. The tradition was picked up and you could see that our Strawberry Park hotel had also some of this black & white architectural influences. I think it makes the place look nice and "cosy" and "romantic".

So we had "high tea" in one of the old houses and it brought the complete decadence of colonialist lifestyle almost over the top..

We've been talking with Kaj (continuing actually on Andrea's and Teemu's personal reflections) that we're such pensioners in our hearts.. Give us some peace, beautiful views, clean air, let us do leisurely walks and we'll not ask for parties and "things to happen".. Waw.. so relaxing it was... The bath picture looks better than it was - the water got cold and started going down the drain in 5min.. But we had some wine and watched a Discovery documentary about Antonov 225 cargo plane.. Could life get any better?..