Day 54: In the jungle, the mighty jungle...

Mood: Soggy
Music: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
Ice cream: Strawberry
Pringles: Lemon and sesame seed
Clothes: Muddy
Brought to you by the number 7 and the letter t

Firstly I'd like to apologise for the photo bonanza that is today but lots of things were seen and done!

This morning we piled into a minibus that was going to be our transport for the day. The bus was full, mostly of a group of GAP year students fresh out of school on a round the world jolly.

Our first stop was a BOH tea plantation. The plantation has 200 manual labourers who work for 3 months at a time clipping the tips of the leafs buy hand shears or with motorised shears and bagging them. They get paid based on the amount of tea they collect, about 4p per kg of tea leaves. A good worker can collect almost 200kg of tea in a day and as such will earn up to £8 in an 8 hour working day!

The scenery of the site was simply stunning as the shape of the hills in the cloud forest were as they have always been, but the ungle has been stripped and in its place are row after row of tea plants/trees, all trimmed to about 3 feet tall for ease of working. At the centre of the site we saw the factory which ferments, rolls and crushes, drys and sorts the tea leaves into bags of differing size pieces for processing elsewhere. We then got directed into a tea'ria for a cup before heading onwards.

Our second stop was an aborigine village a few kilometers further down the road. From here we got a blowpipe demonstration and each got to fire at a target and were then marched for 90 minutes into the jungle to see a flowering Rafflesia plant. The path was initially quite steep uphill, following a jeep track, and it was quite muddy but we attempted to keep our footware as clean as possible.

At the end of the jeep trail we crossed a bamboo bridge...

and sludged on through a much smaller trail leading into thick jungle. At this point we realised there was no hope of keeping our footware anything other than caked in thick red or orange mud and as such gave up caring. The trail featured a number of natural obsticales, from steep rocky descents to fallen trees and smaller slippery bamboo bridges. Eventually we reached the place where the Rafflesia was flowering. On the way there we made a joke about this being rain forest and it being dry... obviously within 30 seconds of saying that the heavens opened. This drenched everyone and although I had waterproofs, this just meant I just got wet on the inside as we were working quite hard and it was still pretty hot.

The treck back was made mudier by the rain and come the end we had mud caked over our shoes and up to our calves on our trousers. Eventually we made it back down the hill and were whisked to a local Indian restaurant for lunch.

The last two stops on the tour were a butterfly farm, where Rolf is pictures with butterflies as big as himself. They also had a number of snakes and insects such as spiders, stick insects (up to a foot long!) and chameleons. I managed to wrap Rold up in a whip snake to have his photo taken...

The final stop of the day was a strawberry farm. Many vegetables can be grown here all year round due to the steady temperate climate and constant rainfall. We picked our own strawberries and ate a few en route. We also tried some of the strawberry ice cream they had on offer which was rather nice.

After this it was back to the hotel to try to was the mud off everything in preparation for the trip back to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

I think that'll do for now!