Cameron Highlands - The Land of Strawberries

...continue from Part 1

8 June 2009 @ Cameron Highlands

Woke up pretty early in the morning for breakfast. There were soft-boiled eggs, bread, butter and kaya. What a perfect start for a day.


Remember we went to the night market and bought stuffs back? This is it. Lots of sweet potatoes in different colours - orange, yellow and purple. After boiling them, we ate some and the rest were skin-peeled and cooked into bubur cacar.


Our first destination in the second day was MARDI (Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute), not too far from Tanah Rata town. It's quite a huge place to walk around and beautiful flowers can be seen blooming everywhere.


There's a mini strawberry farm there to show us how strawberries are planted.


There weren't a lot of fruits on the plants and most of them are either white in colour (not ripe yet) or out of shape. I managed to find a pretty good in shape one though.


Walking further in, there were all sorts of flowers. First up, roses. Red, pink, yellow, mixed... Lovely roses.


Then there're a few rows of colourful daisies. =)


Not to forget the national flower of Malaysia - hibiscus!


Up next, we have fruit plantations! There were many different kind of fruits can't be planted in the tropical hot weather. Lots and lots of tomatoes...


...and we have apples... (do you know that you have to cut off all the leaves for the apple trees to bear fruit?) ... and pears and grapes and etc etc.


There were also some booths set up for exhibition and fruits for sale.


This is something rare that I've not seen anywhere else - Purple cauliflower? Hmm... That's weird.


And also super big chili that looks like a pair of pants.


Other than those, there were flower beds here and there.

the gang: Uncle, Aunt, Mum, Dad, brother and cousins

After visiting MARDI, we decided to take a look at the strawberry farm. Based on the map we bought, there were lots of strawberry farms around. We headed to one that looks big on the map but when we reached, there's nothing much to see.

So we drove around again and saw this sign towards Big Red Strawberry Farm. The entrance to the farm is very narrow, but the area of this farm is gigantic!


The first thing we did was to buy a strawberry flavoured ice stick for each of us. Sucking the stick, we walked around.

The young ones with tomatoes

There were cactus and plants for sale at that place. Walking further up, we can see that they grew a lot of vegetables, using hydroponic method.


Towards the top of the farm, there's a cafe selling all sorts of strawberry desserts. I heard that the waffle was quite good. So, we bought one for each of us and it's yummy! (though the strawberries were kinda sour)


The road to get out of the farm was really really scary. I can see that the road was newly built and it's very dangerous. The steepness of the slope downhill is about 45 degrees!

My dad and uncle have to drive real slow to avoid any unwanted consequences. I can't imagine how people drive up and down that place when it's raining.

Well, let's get back to food. The ladies cooked claypot chicken rice for our late lunch.


And we had bak kut teh for dinner!


After dinner, we decided to go outside and take a stroll. Wouldn't want to waste the chance to enjoy the cool fresh air that can't be found anywhere in KL right? So we drove to Tanah Rata and walked around.

I saw this car that caught my attention. It's a strawberry car!! Every single item inside the car has something to do with strawberry. Gosh, it's funny!


We went back to our apartment after getting tired of walking. Cleaned up, rest and we had to head home the next day.


9 June 2009 @ Cameron Highlands

The final day in Cameron Highlands, we checked out and moved everything into the cars. We actually wanted to visit the Rose Garden, but we need to pay to see roses. Seriously, we stopped by a few of them and all of them need to pay for the entrance fee.

So, what the hell, we just stopped by at a nearby market and bought some stuff to bring back KL. On the way downhill, we also stopped at one of the shops to buy stuffs and pinjam toilet.

At the back of the shop was like a little plantation. One little corner was plated with a lot of daisies, colourful daisies. There were quite many bloomed flowers there, which makes the place quite nice to see.


Before driving back to KL, we went down to Ipoh for their famous Bean Sprouts Chicken.



Then, we also dropped by Kampar to pay my second brother, who's studying there a quick visit.

It was a pretty fun and relaxing trip with my family. It's been almost 2 years since I last had a trip with them, I think. I hope we can do it more often in the future. Billy, out.