My next stop is Tanah Rata in the Cameroon Highlands. This is an area where vast swaths of hillside are cut out for farming; fruits, vegetables, tea. Since the elevation is higher, the weather is less of a raging inferno and more of a pleasant hillside breeze. I will even get to wear my fleece at night!
I get into town and my first order of business is to find a laundry place. After the jungle trek everything I own is damp. I don’t think it’s even possible to get clothes completely dry in the jungle. Even if you do, they will be wet the second you put them on and start walking, chewing gum, or even thinking too hard.
I wander through the town to get my bearings. Local hawker stalls here, convenient store there, laundry place here, bus station there, fruit stand here, Indian restaurant there, group of tourists here, local family of 4 riding a motorbike (one motorbike) there, etc. etc.
Back at the hostel I meet a couple of people hanging out of the front porch. We talk and a German girl and I decide to go to a Buddhist temple and check out some waterfalls tomorrow. I go out on the town to search for something to eat for dinner. I find a Tom Yum soup (spicy hot Thai soup) place and dig in. The food in Asia is cheap and amazing…all of it. Afterward I shoot back to the fruit stand and get a couple different ones. My criteria is to simply pick the weirdest looking ones. I give them to the woman at the front who then proceeds to help me find ripe ones. I thank her. Back at the hotel I cut them up and offer some to the folks out front. They ask what they are and I respond with ‘I have no idea but we should try them out…for science of course.’ All of them are good.
I realize that one of the best parts of exploring the world (I hate the word traveling) is that everything is new again. The food is new, the people are new, the places are new, the languages are new, the environment is new, the customs are new, the cultures are new, and so forth. It’s almost like being a kid again because you constantly have to figure out how everything works.
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| The countryside |
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| The town |
Temples, Waterfalls, and Crazy Malaysian January 5, 2012
I get up around 9am and meet Charlotte (pronounced Shaw-lot-tuh in German). She has been volunteering in Indonesia for the past couple months and is now exploring a bit of Malaysia.
We wander down to the bus station to catch a bus to the next town over. We talk to about 6 people trying to first find the bus station, then trying to find the actual bus, then trying to figure out where we need it to stop. This is the most efficient way to get information almost everywhere. We get off the bus and rack up another 2 people worth of questioning and finally find the temple. We walk up to a door and an older gentleman tells us that the main entrance is around the corner, but lets us walk in the back way through a kitchen. We look at one another with a ‘ok, cool’ nod and go through the door.
The temple is pretty neat. The smell of burning incense (sp?) fills the air and we walk around in a slow, respectful, and quiet manner looking at the Buddha’s and candles and paintings. A monk walks past, does some ritual, and rings a big gong-type thing. I’m glad there wasn’t but a couple people in the temple…I always worry that the local people think they are some type of zoo animals when the tourists walk in and start taking pictures. I buy a book on Buddhism for 5 Ringet (1.5 dollars) and we leave.
We grab lunch at a Chinese place and proceed to walk back to the bus stop. A couple taxi drivers try to temp us with a 6 Ringet ride back to the town; the bus only costs 1 Ringet. We decline. After about 30 minutes of waiting for the bus, we realize that splitting a cab was only going to cost 66 Dollar cents for me and even less of Charlotte’s Euro cents. We get the cab.
Back at the hostel I read up on Buddhism via my newly purchased book and relax during the hottest part of the day. At around 4, we meet up and go out to find a waterfall close to the town. At the waterfall we meet a local banker who is getting some peace and quiet at the waterfall. When we arrive he is excited to talk to us and show us pictures on his phone of the waterfall when it was flooded. He offers to take us to a local village but we decline because Charlotte needs to meet some friends for dinner. I am a gentleman and don’t let her walk back to town alone. I think he wants Charlotte to go more than me anyway for obvious reasons. He gives me his business card and tells me to meet him tomorrow if I want to go to the village.
On the walk back we talk about the motorbikes because we see someone texting while motor biking. People here do everything on motorbikes, carry everything on motorbikes (including babies), and ride everywhere on motorbikes. We talk about crossing the road because we see quite a few people who are hesitant. You have to just make your move and commit to it. If you wait until both sides are completely clear, you’ll be waiting for a long time.
I grab dinner at an Indian restaurant and grab a banana juice of the way home from the fruit stall.
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| Dinner! |
A Lesson in Tea January 6, 2012
The most popular thing to do in town is to take a guided tour of the area by Land Rover, so I do it on my last day here. The itinerary is tea fields in the morning, trekking through ‘mossy forest’, tea plantation, local animal farm. I am most excited about the tea parts!
We take the land Rover out of town and around some hilly dirt roads. At every turn the driver beeps the horn to let other vehicles coming down the hill that we are there. I wonder what happens when both vehicles honk at the same time. The tea fields are massive. We see workers picking the leaves and get a lesson on how they prune the trees, when they prune them, everything you would want to know about the process of growing tea. I find it thoroughly interesting.
Next we do a small trek through the ‘mossy forest’. It is basically what it sounds like; there is moss everywhere, on the trees, on the ground, on the rocks, everywhere. We see some of those pitcher plants as well. The guide tells us about the other local plants.
We pile back into the Land Rovers and head to the tea plantation where they actually make the tea. Briefly, they first dry the leaves and then crush the leaves to break them apart. The older leaves are harder and thus break up into finer pieces than the young small leaves. This is why the tea you buy in bags is the lowest quality: It contains the finest particles from the older leaves. The tea is then left to ferment or oxidize. This basically means the tea is left to sit and the oxygen in the air changes the composition of the leaves. The longer you ferment, the darker your tea is (i.e. english tea is fermented longer than green tea). This is the conclusion of your tea lesson for today.
After the tour I eat lunch with a couple of Americans from Colorado who were on the same tour. Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone from home. I relax the rest of the day.
At night a group gathers outside. A couple Canadian girls join with beer-in-hand and a guy from Germany walks over a well. We talk about the oddities I will encounter in Vietnam; eating bugs, killing a live snake on the table and drinking the blood, eating dog. The Canadians tell a story of a bus ride in Indonesia where they rode with a crazy woman and her chickens. They talk about teaching English in Korea and the funny questions they encounter. “Hey teacher, why do you have yellow hair” was a funny one. Obviously the kids only see people with dark hair and dark eyes.
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| Tea Fields |
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