Great fun today! I started at about 8 at Starbucks with a latte. The plan was to be picked up for the half-day tour at 845. It seemed too perfect, 45 minutes to just read the news have a coffee and then take off for a fun filled extravaganza of a day.  I had signed up for the tour where we were having lunch yesterday. The price was less than what the hotel was charging, nevertheless when we got back to the hotel, the rest of the people I’m traveling with purchased it through the hotel. That’s okay.

So the van picked me up a little bit late and at one point I was worried that they were going to pick me up at all, so late was okay with me when they did show. The rest of the tour went fast and to be honest nothing spectacular happened, that is except for meeting some great people. There were two couples and a family in the van and all of them were interesting. The mother of the family had grown up in near Dubai and was now living in Copenhagen. What was funny was that she wants to move back to Dubai. That seems to happen to so many people, they leave and then try to get back. One couple was from Spain, (he was from England teaching English in Spain) and another was from, Slovenia, I think. Everyone on the van was great, even the driver was talkative.

The first stop was to look at some of the tea plantations, just the growing part of the plantation though, not the processing part. Then we went to the highest point in Malaysia, after that then to a moss forest. All of that was okay, the moss forest was more about walking around and that was good, but there wasn’t that much that I was really excited about. Our next stop was to the processing part of the tea plantation. Okay, seeing how tea is processed was a little bit interesting, things were getting better. Then we went to a strawberry farm. Meh. Finally before we were dropped off we went to a butterfly ranch… or something like that. Then they dropped those of us off that wanted to go hiking in the jungle. That’s where the fun began, and that was the absolute best time.

The trek took roughly about four hours and I know that there isn’t anything that I can say about how great it was at least that will properly transfer over to this blog.

Let me just say that I split with the group (inadvertently) and kind of got lost. I’ve mentioned this before that getting lost is not always bad, sometimes you see more when you don’t really know where you are. Anyway, I was never really scared kind of lost, there were trails everywhere and I knew that eventually I’d find my way to a road. In fact one trail ended into a parking lot or something, so I backtracked to the last turn off, about 1 km, and then went the opposite direction. Now that you know the overall, imagine the actual hiking part. There were parts that were almost straight up, and the only way you continue was by using the roots of the nearby trees as a ladder. There were times that the ground was nothing but mud, and still there were other times where it was hard to tell where the direction of path was supposed to go.

Because I made the mistake of getting separated by the group I had a secondary goal of finding them. I was doing the tracking thing, a broken branch, so I must be on the right path. We all know that it could have been anyone who broke it, but that didn’t matter. There’s a footprint in the mud they can’t be more than a couple minutes ahead of me now.  Not only was the whole experience fun, but it was probably the toughest trekking that I’ve ever done. Seriously, there were parts that seemed impassable, but were obviously not.

So I ran into a family and asked them where the trail ended, they told me what the sign of the trail had said, so that didn’t help. They did tell me that some Spanish people had just passed them, so I knew I was on the right track. Not more than fifteen minutes later the trail ended into a cabbage farm. I followed the trail by some workers, past a tent, and finally down to the road. The group was waiting down at the bottom. It was so nice to see them.