A Cameron Highlands Week-end

We just rode off into the sunset ... Well, that's not exactly how it was, but as we drove the 4 1/2 hours on Friday afternoon (4/17) from KL to our hotel at Tanah Rata we were blown-away by how beautiful the sunset was! We obviously arrived after dark but had nice accommodations and finally were able to get kids to bed -- Reeve and Rania with Doug and Tracy, Gabi in our room. Since we really only had one full day, we drove first to a Boh Tea Plantation where we had tea and got some good views of acres and acres of tea! One of the highlights of Cameron Highlands, an old Colonial "hill station," is that it's cool at 5000'!

Also -- entirely by accident -- we learned that Saturday was an annual Hindu "New Year's Festival" just a couple miles on down the road. So, we drove down to check it out, but discovered that in order to see some of the men walking barefooted on hot coals we'd need to wait almost 2 hours (which we did).

It was definitely a fascinating experience. Of course, we didn't understand the full ritual, including the reason why "hot coal-walkers" first received three hard lashes across their raised forearms. But the pageantry was impressive. Since Tracy was still on crutches, unfortunately she missed it all since the experience required quite a walk after we'd parked our vehicles. (She stayed with the car which was kind of a bummer on a warm day.)

(Notice that the kids really "took" to Court Walters and Susan Stewart who were with us for the week-end.)Some of the other scenes at the festival are pictured below, including women with baskets of fruit which were part of the ritual.
(The bed of hot coals on which he's walking is barely visible at lower right of picture)

One of the other major events of the trip involved picking ripe strawberries -- all in plastic greenhouses -- at a couple of the hydrophonic strawberry farms. - rw