Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

When you arrive in this little hill station the first thing that hits you is the cool, fresh air. It's quiet and calm compared to intense KL and the town basically consists of a main road, a couple of restaurants and hiking trails that takes you all around the mountains, fields and jungles surrounding the village. The days are spent walking, sometimes easy strolls and sometimes you feel more like Indiana Jones climbing up and down muddy hills and over fallen trees hanging on to lians. (Make sure it's not a snake hanging about that you're about to grab!) At the end you'll find Buddhist temples, strawberry or fruit farms, waterfalls and even tea plantations! It's fantastic to finally sit on the top of a hill you've been working your way up on, eating an orange in the sun and just enjoying the amazing view of tea bushes as far as your eye reaches. BOH teaplantation produces tea equivalent to 5,5 million cups of tea every day, so imagine the size of this plantation!

For eating the village offers some nice Indian restaurants (amongst others), where you can enjoy different curries and vegetables served on a banana leaf! Or how about Chicken Tandoori with Naan bread, or Roti filled with egg and dipped into a spicy lentil curry? You eat with your hands and mix it as you want and it's both fun a delicious! The nights get a bit cold but you can warm yourself up with a cup of locally grown green tea or have a beer close to the nightly bonfire in the bar next door. Cameron Highlands is an old English Colony and this really shows by some of the architecture and the big supply of scones with strawberry jam in about every little tea house. In the streets you can watch the old cars like Beetles in tip top shape that seem to be pretty common here. All in all it's a very calm, relaxing and refreshing atmosphere where you could easily spend a great week keeping yourself busy enough without doing that much.
At least that's the way we did it.