Steve and I visited the Cameron Highlands over a public holiday weekend in January. It is much cooler and less humid than other areas of Malaysia due to its higher altitude. It is, therefore, a great place to grow tea and strawberries. We certainly took advantage of this, visiting several tea plantations and pick-your-own strawberry farm. This is one of the locals telling Steve about the tea plantation, and me enjoying a nice cup of tea after a rather chilly walk around the plantation.
On our last day, we got up early to walk up one of the hills with a fantastic view over the highlands.
We have been looking forward to the arrival of our first visitor, Steve's brother Chris, and had a great time showing him around Penang and visiting some new places ourselves. This is the view from one of our favourite little cafes, right on the beach at Batu Ferringhi. It's a lovely spot at sunset and has relatively cheap beer so it ticks all the boxes!
We had a very hot walk through the jungle in the Penang National Park, ending up at Monkey Beach. We did rather fear for our lives on the boat going back though - driver seemed to be making up for lost time after turning up late!
This is the Blue Mansion in Gerogetown, originally owned by a chinese businessman and only recently restored, making it a popular place to look around.
For the last few days of Chris's visit, we took the ferry over to the island of Langkawi for some relaxation, beaches and duty free (Malaysia's heavy tax on alcohol makes it disappointingly expensive everwhere else).We had a really fun day on mopeds, driving up Gunung Raya and exploring quieter beaches. We also had a surprisingly nice lunch at 'Scarborough' fish and chips. It's a bit more expensive than Penang, but has some lovely scenery and it was great to escape the heavy traffic of Penang for a while.
Our last evening was spent at the Bon Ton restaurant, which is also an animal sanctuary so as well has having wonderful food, there are lots of very tame and well fed cats around to keep you (or rather me) entertained. It also has a fantastic view over a lily pond at sunset.
We've also been experiencing our first Chinese New Year (a little different to the KNGS outing to Chinatown last year!). It was complete with dragon costumes, drumming, lanterns and fireworks for a full two weeks. The temple of Kek Lok Si is lit up at night in celebration and people come from all over Malaysia to experience it. It made us laugh how they add on 10% to the price of everything during that time, even hair cuts!
Well, that's about it for now. The next few months are not quite so busy, though we're hoping to fit in a few cheeky weekends away soon. We're also starting some new things over the next few weeks. I've recently started teaching maths at an orphanage for one evening a week, we're also both going to have a try at dragon boat racing and may even join a team for some competitions. I've also got a month pass to 'warrior bootcamp' which hopefully isn't as scary as it sounds, but is definitely needed after the excesses of the last few months! Steve's joined a squash tournament and is heading to the Malaysia Grand Prix next month. So maybe it's not a quiet patch coming up after all...
