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.

Cameron Highlands - Inhale the Cool Fresh Air

7 June 2009 @ Cameron Highlands

Finally, yes finally, I was able to set my foot at the high grounds of Cameron Highlands. Woot! It was a family trip with my uncle's family.

We had to depart 7.30am in the morning in order to reach the top at around noon time to check in. So my family drove through McDonald's for the McBreakfast set. I had my all-time favourite Fillet-o-Fish with hashbrown and tea. Yummyz!


We waited for my uncle's car to arrive at the highway. Then, they tailed us all the way up north.

After driving for around 2 hours, we stopped at Bidor for brunch and we had duck noodles at a very famous and people packed shop there. We had to wait for quite some time before getting a table to sit down.

No photos taken here as I was still in the half-sleep-half-awake condition, moreover, I was hungry and can't wait to feed my poor tummy. My dad bought some guavas too - Bidor is famous for its sweet juicy guava if you didn't know.


The road up the hill was very curvy. There were turns left and right all the way up to the top. It's preferably to take the new road which is also a longer route to reduce the feeling of carsick.

Both cars stopped at the very first shop we saw. It's selling a lot of fresh vegetables and strawberries products but most of us were interested at visiting the toilet god only.


We hopped onto our cars once again to head to our rented apartment. The traffic condition was much worse than I thought. Traffic Jam?! The air was also quite polluted as there were lorries transporting stuff everywhere.

Nevertheless, we managed to find our way through and reach safely at Desa Anthurium Apartments just before reaching Tanah Rata town from Berinchang.


We got our keys, checked in and moved everything from the car to the apartment. It's not only luggages, but food, utensils and even a big rice cooker! You will be amazed by what we cook throughout the 3 days there.

the balcony - can see a playground with few bbq pits

Our apartment has 3 bedrooms and 2 toilets. It is quite spacious though. The living room is equiped with a sofa set and TV with astro channels. The kitchen is also quite complete with a refrigerator, stove, rice cooker, cooking pans and other utensils.

the most holy and important place - the toilet

After settling our stuffs, we wanted to drove out for makan. We drove towards Tanah Rata and got jammed up not even 1km away from our apartment. We waited for a while and decided to head back to cook something light for our tea time.

Very quickly, my mom and aunt steamed some chee cheong fun for us. They even have time to boil the fishballs, meatballs and fu zhuk. Topped with the sweet sauce and sesame seed, the meal is heavenly, especially when everyone was super duper hungry.


After eating, we decided to take a stroll down towards Tanah Rata to look see look see. We walked and walked and walked and felt that if we continue walking downhill. We'll be having a tough time walking back up to our apartment.

That is when my uncle and I walked back to get our cars while the rest waited at us near the town.



We picked the rest up, drove a little bit more to town, parked our cars there and started walking around the Tanah Rata town. There weren't much to see as the sun is still hot in the late afternoon.

I saw a fruit stall selling different kinds of fruits and very curious at the types of fruits that I've not seen before.

1. Sea coconut if not mistaken

2. Forgot what's this

3. Some little chick-look-alike thingy plant

Then a familiar sign caught my attention. Jeng, jeng, jeng.... It's the TM logo!! Ah, I heartz TM!


The sun was literally burning our skin. We headed back to the cars and drove further away from town to reach this place - Cameron Valley tea plantation.


This is the first time I get to see a real tea plantation. Usually, what I see is only on TV commercials, where some ladies plucking tea leaves happily at the plantation. Then the leaves plucked will turn into some B-brand tea or L-brand tea. Haha!


Since the rest of the people are not adventerous enough to climb down to the plantations, Wei Xin (my cousin), Wei Si (my brother) and I went down to snap pictures with the greens. The plants don't look that "Wow" from near though... Think I'd prefer the view from higher.


We walked at the cafe that serves tea, then to the shop that sells tea leaves and then to the shop that sells souvenirs. We didn't buy any tea drink or tea leaves, but my cousin and my brother bought a toy gun each. Speechless...

It's dinner time! Once again, the chefs made a sumptious meal for dinner - Nasi Lemak! We had lemak rice, sambal sotong, anchovies, peanuts, eggs, cucumber and tempe. It's unbelievably great. I had a few servings myself.



After dinner was the relaxing time. We took turns to take bath, jumped around on the beds, watched tv and SUDDENLY, a bug flew into our apartment. A big green buzzing bug! It's time for some action by the kids who just bought their toy gun.

So they try to shoot the bug from far, from near, sideways, lying on floor, etc etc. Then I forgot who but one of the adults pick the bug up and threw it out the balcony. Cheers!


The moon that night was very bright. Covered by the fast-moving clouds. My 2 cousins were amazed by the scene and quickly used their cameras to capture the moon appearing and disappearing from the clouds.


We headed down to the night market to get some good deals. The market was quite packed with people and even the road is full of cars. But most of the stalls I see are selling the same same stuff. Vegetables, strawberries, vegetables and more strawberries. Well of course there were stalls selling clothings, toys and other types of food.



We bought something to eat, and also a big bag of vegetables. Thought that we can have fresh salads right from Cameron itself the next day.

It's late at night and it's getting cold. All of us cuddled in the living room watching tv while my aunt prepared supper.


Ingredients: a block of cheese all the way from US (courtesy of cousin Mindy) and some jalapeno sauce. She melted the cheese and add in the sauce for a gist of spicy taste.


A few packets of corn chips to go with the cheesy sauce.

I'm a cheese lover and no doubt I love our supper.

It's been a day full of food, food, food and it's also a very relaxing day with the cooling weather. Off to bed after supper and more food and strawberries to come in the next day. Billy, out.