High time for high tea

We are now in the Cameron Highlands, first mapped and charted by a British dude called Cameron, and thusly named.

It's VERY British here. We're staying at the Hill View Inn, which is run by Indians, but bears resemblance to so much bad fake-Tudor architecture. The Inn is a basic B&B and reminds me quite a bit of Fawlty Towers, what with its chintzy English decor and gloomy corridors.

After the beach, where we spent another pleasant day with bouts of rain and sunshine, we crossed the border to Malaysia and spent two nights in Georgetown, on the island of Penang on the Western coast. Penang also reeks of colonialism, mostly in the architecture. Lacey and I had amazing Indian food, toured a nineteenth-century mansion where Catherine Deneuve filmed IndoChine, ate some seriously weird dim sum, were awakened at 5 AM by Ramadan prayers being broadcast throughout the city, and I caught a cold. The tour we're on moves quite quickly, which is good and bad. Bad beacuse its exhausting and my immune system gets mad at me, good because we're getting to see a great deal.

In Penang, we visited Southeast Asia's largest Buddhist temple which was a labyrinth of huge golden Buddhas, pagodas, swastikas, kiosks selling everything from Jesus wall-hangings to incense to t-shirts, and a huge concrete bowl called the "liberation pond" containing hundreds of turtles. Apparently, turtles are good luck, but these turtles were piled on each other, and sort of sluggishly moving around looking for vegetables people dropped for them. There was a guy picking his way across the turtles collecting rubber bands that people dropped with the vegetable bundles, and also collecting dead turtles and depositing them in a plastic bag. Cultural differences indeed.

Today we had a psycho bus driver take us from the straits of Melaka to the Cameron highlands. First off, he was a just a terrible driver-- but he compounded this by reading the paper while he drove, taking his hands off the wheel and stretching deeply whenever he felt like it, and chain smoking all the way up the windy mountain highway. I haven't been this terrified on a bus since Mr. Machen kept dozing off on the way to the Gila in 10th grade.

Tomorrow we're going to tea and strawberry plantations, and to a butterfly farm, all of which the highlands are known for. It's quite cool here-- I almost don't have enough clothing and will probably sleep in my socks. We're here for one night only, before heading to Kuala Lumpur, the capital. We're going to have dinner in the second-tallest buildings in the world. KL, as it's called, is supposed to be a lot of fun.

Off to nibble on the rest of my Cadbury bar and take more miracle Asian cold meds before bed.