Cameron Highlands & Georgetown

Our time in Malaysia is just breezing by. I'm happy to report that we were able to do plenty of relaxing in the Cameron Highlands. We stayed in the small town of Tanah Rata in the hills. It was absolutely beautiful there, as lush and green as you can imagine. There are many things to see in this area - tea plantations, strawberry farms, rose gardens, butterfly sanctuaries, waterfalls, and more. We mostly spent our time hiking through the jungle, relaxing at our hostel, and eating Indian food.

Unfortunately for us, most Malaysian food is not vegetarian. However, historically, many Indians came to Malaysia from Tamil Nadu (southern India) to work on the tea plantations. This meant jobs for them, and today, it means Indian food for us (yum!) They are always so impressed when Heather greets them with "vanna kam" (hello in Tamil). They probably don't hear it much from foreigners and they really appreciate it that we know just a little bit more about their culture than the average tourists.

After our super-relaxing stay in the Cameron Highlands, we headed to Georgetown loaded with energy. In the past 24 hours seen all the major sites we hoped to including churches, mosques, Hindu, Chinese, Thai, and Burmese temples, a sleeping Buddha, the national museum, the clock tower, and Fort Cornwallis (from the outside). We also managed to go to the hospital to get our second vaccination for Japanese Encephalitis. All that and I've still got the energy to write about it all on my blog.

As usual, the highlight of the day wasn't the sights. The longer we travel the more we value the truly unique experiences, whatever they may be, over another temple or museum. Today, that truly unique experience took its form as a refreshing street snack we heard about from some locals, called ice kachang. The dish is made only on this small island and thanks to some excellent directions we were lucky enough to sample it at the stand of its inventor. Ice kachang is shaved ice with sweet syrup (sounds good so far), beans, corn, slimy gummy worm type things, milk, some kind of green jelly balls, and maybe a little rambutan (tropical fruit)? As you can imagine, it was....interesting. I don't have my photos uploaded yet, but here is a picture I found on google images that looks about as close to ours as I could get. Mmm....tasty.