Peninsular Malaysia: Giant Flowers and Old Ports
We arrived on the Malay Peninsula last Friday night with a week to spare and a few different choices of places to visit. After much discussion we headed first for the Cameron Highlands, a tea-planting hill station north of KL. Though we’ve seen tea plantations before in Sri Lanka (around Ella) and India (Darjeeling), it turned out to be a good choice and, aside from a huge downpour on our first afternoon, we enjoyed three days of beautiful (but refreshingly cool) weather, nice scenery and delicious tandoori food from the local Indian restaurants.
On our last day in the Camerons, we went on a ‘Rafflesia Tour’ to see the world’s largest flower in bloom. The Rafflesia only blooms for about one week, so it’s quite hard to find; it was only discovered near the Cameron Highlands 10 years ago for the first time, and now local villagers track blooming flowers and, when they find one, alert the travel agencies in Tanah Rata. We first learned about the Rafflesia at the very start of our first trip in Southeast Asia nearly six years ago, and now to finally see one in bloom in the last days of our last trip in Southeast Asia has a nice symmetry to it. The one we saw, after about an hour of hiking through the jungle, was in its sixth day of bloom, which meant it had already lost its bright red colour and the petals were drooping a bit, but it was still interesting nevertheless and the amateur botanists in us (or, more precisely, in Wendy) are happy that we can now tick off the Rafflesia box.
From the Camerons, we journeyed south to our final stop in Malaysia, a place we’ve wanted to visit for a while: Malacca, once perhaps the most famous port in the world and, during the age of the great European voyages of discovery, one of the most sought-after cities in Asia. It was successively conquered by the Portuguese, Dutch, British and ultimately the imperial Japanese in WWII before Malaysian independence in 1957.
Today, Malacca (officially written Melaka these days to conform to Bahasa Malaysian spelling) is a UNESCO World Heritage listed town containing remnants of all periods of its colonial history, from a Portuguese fort to Dutch churches and British cemeteries. It’s a very pleasant (if hot) city to walk around, one of the nicest in Southeast Asia. For travelers like us, who have an interest in history and architecture, Malacca is a good note to finish the region on. We’re now heading to Sydney to rest for a week or so and plot our next adventures.
Tags: Asia, Cameron Highlands, Malacca, Malaysia, Rafflesia, Southeast Asia
Nick