The six-hour journey in a first-class coach came complete with Tom and Jerry videos and hostess service. Complimentary cake and soy milk were handed out to start the day and Tom and Jerry hit the screen shortly after we crossed the causeway onto the Malay Peninsula.
For a fraction of the cost we shared the same views although, regrettably, not the same champagne. It had been many years since I clipped photographs of the Cameron Highlands from a travel magazine and tucked them away for future reference. One was of Ye Olde Smokehouse, a Tudor-style hotel, where dahlias dotted the grounds and ivy clung to the walls.
I recalled another showing a perfectly manicured golf course topped by clouds that scudded over the tops of the encircling hills. It looked just like the Scottish Highlands. They intrigued me. Would there be strawberries and cream on lazy afternoons, or single malts to lift the chill from wintry nights? Would it feel like home to me, this foreign spot with. But Kuala Lumpur, with its six-lane highways and busy shopping plazas, could wait. After a night in town, we clambered aboard the express bus to the town of Tanah Rata for a wild five-hour ride to the Highlands.
The serpentine stretch of road between the village of Tapah and Tanah Rata, I had read in a guidebook, had more than corners. Not that I counted, but our driver had a penchant for passing on almost every one, all the while chatting with a passenger three rows back. With temperatures averaging 70 degrees by day and 50 degrees at night, the British were drawn to this temperate zone and its familiar landscape, and began to fashion a home away from the heat and humidity enveloping the lowlands below.
Local people were drafted to clear the land and Tamil laborers familiar with tea cultivation were brought over from southern India to work. Flower growing also blossomed and soon the Highlands became an important source for the produce markets of Malaysia and Singapore. The Scottish link grew when a five-hole golf course was completed in The tea plantations flourish and the mock Tudor hotel, Ye Olde Smokehouse, that had first caught my eye, has 13 suites. Although the area encompassed by the Highlands is rather loosely defined by a series of tiny villages at an altitude of 4, to 6, feet, there are three major towns: Ringlet, Tanah Rata and Brinchang.
