Malaysia – Cameron Highlands

By Rough Guy’d

My last full day in Penang so I took the time to enjoy as much as I could. One bit of free advertising that I will do is for the famous Penang coconut jelly. This was introduced to me by my cousins and it was simply delicious. The basic product is a young coconut with plenty of coconut water inside. The water is poured out and pasteurised in some way without adding any additional ingredients.

This is then poured back into the coconut and chilled and in the process the liquid turns into a natural jelly. Once bought, it can be stored in a fridge and when you eat it, you need only a spoon to scoop out the jelly and flesh. It’s relatively healthy (as coconut water is very nourishing) and very refreshing, which is great for the hot weather.

With that my time in Penang was over and the next day, I was off to the Cameron Highlands with a large gaggle of my family, including some of the relations who came up from Singapore. With three carloads of us, we made our way up to the natural cool mountain ranges.

While strawberries are quite a normal summertime fruit back home for me, over in tropical Malaysia, they are impossible to grow due to the heat, however the one exception is in the highlands where they grow all year round and many of the places up here grow and sell it all around the country. On our way up to my Uncle’s weekend holiday home/farm, we stopped off at a strawberry cafe.

Although I was happy to meet so many relatives and have free food and accommodation, having such a large group was not without its problems. With the ages of us varying from the teens up until the seventies, not everyone wanted to go out and do something and even though the following day saw us up very early, we didn’t get to leave until ages after lunch and by 3pm, most places were starting to close up. So while it was still a relatively fun trip, I missed most of the sights.

Another late the following day but for those of us with a more adventurous side (one carload of us), we learned our lesson from the previous day and we managed to see most of what we had intended to see including a strawberry farm, a cactus farm, what I described as Malaysia’s Lord of the Rings and we managed to climb a mountain in the car, going around crazy one lane roads around blind corners with a sheer drop facing those unlucky or unskilful enough.

Come Monday 6th of July, it was time to head down the mountain range and at this point, I parted with my relatives from Penang . Though there were plenty of other relatives with me, as I was to learn, it was going to be nowhere near as much fun.