Jungle Trekking

I had a wonderful day trekking around the jungle in the Cameron Highlands with a couple other travelers. It all started with a group of us talking over breakfast about the various trails through the hills and jungle and our desire to see one or two before we moved on. With little more planning then, "ok, I have a map out of my guide book" we headed out. We stopped off in town for a couple bottles of water and headed to the trail head.

The path we chose started out quite nicely, from a garden of a local couple that had landscaped and terraced a large section of their property. It quickly turned into an easily distinguishable jungle path that was quite a bit more up hill than my poor, recently ill body was happy about.
The signage for our pathway also left a bit to be desired.

Once we reached to top of the climb, the views were impressive and well worth the effort. Plus, it felt good to finally be healthy enough to do some actual physical exertion, even if it did feel like I was dying. After taking in the views, our day took a turn for the interesting. We decided instead of backtracking down the path we came up, we would follow a different route home. The problem was there were absolutely no trail markers or signs, and several potential paths to take. Looking at our trusty torn-from-a-guidebook map, we chose a path and headed off.
What followed was an interesting adventure of slipping down jungle hills, wading through streams to find lost trails, backtracking numerous times, hacking our way through spiky vines and huge bushes and following a concrete drainage ditch for a while. We were finally able to see a road and started heading that direction along any trail we could find.

We eventually ran into a power station and we so excited to see civilization! We were on the opposite side of the station from the road and could see someone inside the fence, so we waved and waved trying to get their attention so we could ask directions. All we wanted was to confirm how to get back to town, but he would not come near us, just waved us away and indicated we had to walk around the power station. So we had to shimmy our way around the fence of this huge power station, with the jungle grown in right next to the fence. So much for those really helpful Malaysian folks! We finally got around and headed up the road looking for a sign indicating where the hell we were. After walking about 20 minutes we got to the main road and were able to hitch a ride back to our guesthouse. After a hot shower, copious amounts of soap and the few cuts and scrapes we had gathers were fixed up we all enjoyed a round of beers and a good laugh over our jungle adventure.

On the docket for today: tea plantations, honey bee farms and strawberry picking...lets see what sort of adventures we can get into today!