6 July 2008 - Our countryside tour

30th June

Dan and i had booked ourselves up for the "countryside tour", we could have taken ourselves around the attractions but thought it would be nice to have the extra information and background knowledge.

We had breakfast at the guest house as we were being picked up at 8.30. We had baked beans with real cheddar cheese, it tasted divine...such a treat, its been 4 1/2 months since we tasted the proper stuff!!!

After our very pleasing breakfast we were set to go!! As it happened we were the only people on the tour...so we would defo get our moneys worth!!

Our first stop was a rose farm, which is run purely for visitors to admire the plants. We had a bout an hour to walk round and look at the plants, although its called a rose garden they have orchids, sunflowers and many other flowers.

Next stop was the strawberry farm, we indulged in some cheesecake (not as goods yours grandma) and a strawberry shake!! The strawberry's here are only sold to people and visitors in the Cameron highlands. Very tasty, we also left with a punnet for later!!

All these attractions are within about 5 mins within each other so just across the road from the strawberry farm was our next stop the butterfly farm!! Here they just had one netted area with lots of butterflies although most of them were the native Malaysian black with a jade stripe...sorry i don't remember the name. Apparently in some areas they frame them and sell them to the Japaneses at a high price!!

They also had a variety of insects, snakes and scorpions here, we had the opportunity to hold a number of them. I have to say i cheated as all the bugs i held were on bamboo so i didn't actually have to touch them. Dan however braved a scorpion, he got a little nervous when the sting started to move and promptly gave it back to the guy!!

At last we headed to the tea plantations, we had seen some really stunning pictures of the place we were headed to so we were quite excited. It really was a beautiful sight, yet again we wished we had an SLR as our digital cameras just don't capture the scene!

We had our tour of the tea factory which smelt amazing. We were ready to sample the tea afterward! Before we had our chance to get some great shots it started to rain with avengence, we decided it would give us an excuse to visit another factory before we left!

We had 3 stops left on our tour but due to the down pour we skipped the market as to be honest we had seen enough before and we weren't going to buy anything so it was worth getting wet! A bee farm was next on the agenda, we did put our ponchos on but made our visit brief as all you could see was the hives (in boxes) and not a lot else. Lastly was a temple, again we have seen so many of these now it was quite samey so it was only a brief stop.

Dan and i dried off and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the common room at the guest house. Our driver on the tour had told us about the local market, so we headed down there for some food.

We bumped into john and Rachael who were also staying at fathers guest house so we spent the rest of the evening with them and planned to meet in the morning for a walk.