With a name like The Cameron Highlands we should have guessed that the impact of colonialism on this hilltop area would still be profound, but we were somehow unprepared for just how western the place would be. Swiss-style chalet hotels cheek by jowl with half-timbered woodland cottages told of homesick Europeans who settled here more than a century ago keen for the cooler climate.
I am sure they were more appreciative than us, whose bodies were more than acclimatised to the heat and smog of Malaysia’s cities and who were disappointed with the soggy highlands. It was beautiful, to be sure, but for all the rolling tea-covered hills and rainforest trekking, the place was damp and dreary and had somewhat of a neglected air.
The main town, Tanah Rata, looks, as one British woman put it, like Cheddar Gorge, with all the shabby tat and tourism that that implies. There are 15 or 16 souvenir shops in a row but little to excite in them unless you’re looking for plastic keyrings in the shape of strawberries or tea bushes. Safe in their position ‘on the tourist trail’ for many years, Tanah Rata’s hawkers, hoteliers and hoosiers have done little to improve the place; there is little nightlife, or day life at all for that matter.
The one light in a dreary three-day trip for us was a walk through the Boh tea plantation, where little has changed in 80 years, since tea was first planted here. The hills are still covered with thick wavy lines of tea bushes, so that bush and hill form a network of green undulations stretching the length and breadth of the valley and beyond. A single lane track still brings visitors to the tea house, where they can watch the colourfully dressed pickers still bowing low over the tea as they pick.
You cannot help but remember the colonial sir and miss who must have sat and sipped on the veranda, much less the Scot J A Russell who dreamt up the plantation in 1927, shipped in Indian workers (who still have their own village, temple, school here) and ruled the place for the last 30 years of his life. His family still run the company, which sells tea to most Malaysian homes and for export.
Malaysian museums and corporate presentations have a particularly effusive turn of phrase, as we had learnt at the Petronas towers in KL.
Here we were invited to ‘Imagine a world’ where people drink 5.5 million cups of tea annually, and where Boh ‘brew passion into every cup’. A world where tea is ‘the glue that binds relationships’. A load of bollocks basically.
It was pouring with rain by mid-afternoon so we just took a cursory glance at the factory, downed a cup of admitedly lovely char and grabbed a taxi back into the uninspiring town.
