Another trek day on tap! This time we were going to tackle the one way route up to the top of one of the highests points in peninsular Malaysia, Gunung Brinchang. Again, we'd gotten a lot of mixed time and direction information, but it sounded more straightforward than others.
After breakfast, Selvam picked us up and dropped us at the roadside near the start of the walk. I was surprised to see a big yellow sign at the start with "jungle trek no. 1, 3.5km" - so far so good. We hiked about a kilometer up a paved road, then came to a fork in the road with no obvious path to choose, with this sign in the exact middle of the fork.
We chose left, then a man up on a farm in the hill above poked his head up and yelled "other way". Thank you sir! Soon enough we were on a proper pathway leading into the jungle.
Soon, we reached a bit of a dead end - a deep dip down to a small river bed, with a rickety 5 step wooden makeshift ladder leaning up on the other side of the bank leading to a sliver of a path. I tried it out and sure enough at the top of the ladder, the path continued.
We continued along a meandering path that gradually crept upwards until we reached a wall. The path rose steeply up, and was really a set of roots and stumps that you had to climb with hands and feet for a couple of hundred meters. It was fun, but pretty challenging. Compared to yesterday where we were getting a pretty good cardio workout because we were moving non stop upwards, today was more technical.
The way was also getting very wet. Every time we reached any semblance of flat land, the path opened up and was really muddy. We saw the occasional sign, and after a time, reached one that said it was 1.74km to the top - halfway! We reached a point shortly thereafter where we were moving along what seemed like the ridge of a mountain. Occasionally we would get views out over the valley - we were getting pretty high and could see mist or low lying clouds at our level.
We reached another sign - 0.64km to the top of Gunung Brinchang (Gunung means Mountain). Abby said, "oh, 640 meters, that's not too bad". Actually, it would be longer than she thought, as there was a lot of climbing and mud to go, but I was surprised with the kids - they were plowing through this trek with nary a complaint. I was playing music on my iPad, maybe that helped. First Moby for some chill jungle walking, then Foo Fighters "Wasting Light" for what I called "summitting music" - Abby got a kick out of that.
We came to one section that was a wide clearing that was completely covered with mud. Do we go left or right? Robin tried left and found a narrow root to balance on to avoid most of the mud. Abby followed and proceeded to step both feet firmly in mud up to the top of her ankles - she immediately shouted "daddy, you told me to step there!" - I laughed, then she laughed at herself. I give her total credit for not following through on the blame for too long. We continued to climb and climb after that, getting into some pretty tough sections. Eventually, we came to a clearing and saw the radio transmission towers at the top of the mountain. We stumbled out of the forest and on to the end of the road that leads up from Brinchang. There were a ton of tourist jeeps and mini buses up there to check out the view and to go through a short nearby walk called the "mossy forest". We'd seen enough moss for a while, so we started to walk down the road.
The road we were on was 11km downhill, and would eventually merge with the Boh plantation road we visited on Tuesday, and then the main road. We pushed on downhill, keeping the kids distracted as long as we could. The pavement going downhill was starting to bother some of the group after about 4km, so I called Selvam and he arranged to send a taxi to pick us up. Instead of waiting, we kept walking down the road - and we were glad we did. We came to the top of the plantation and enjoyed a beautiful view.
The taxi picked us up shortly thereafter, right before it starting pissing rain. Good timing! By the time we arrived at lunch (not Kumar... A place called the Barracks near our hotel), we all had that after-excercise glow on and were ready to eat. It feels good to push the body a bit - there've been relatively few opportunities to do so on the trip.
Abby and I did three hours of math - impressive - while Robin got a bunch of reading done. We had a late dinner at a place the girls had seen - they reported visions of amazing looking pizza. We shamefully ducked past Kumar's (on the opposite side of the road no less) and sat down to what would be one of our worst meals of the trip - Robin got a thin, pink dyed beef burger that she returned, Abby got rice noodle spaghetti with gross looking sauce (it's bad pasta if Abby does not eat it!) and Beth and I had tasteless, cardboard crust veggie pizzas. We were right to sneak shamefully past Kumar's.....
We spent a couple of hours at Starbucks, drowning our sorrows in tea, coffee and cake. The girls managed to FaceTime their friends, so that was nice. The Internet has really sucked in Malysia - like going back to the early 2000's but at least then we didn't know any better! Cameron Highlands has really been a good rest for the family.... Hikes, nice weather and Kumar's.... What more can one ask for?
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