Places I've been in the past 3 days

A huge load of pics to go through! Let's start.... HERE:

Boh Tea Estate, Cameron Highlands

I rode up the hill to try some of the local tea. And here's what I saw:

One of the 8 local varieties you could try, then there's all the others with non-tea flavors added too. It was a fine cup of tea this one.

Tea!

A close up of the tea on the hills.

The non-closeup version.

After the Cameron Highlands it was time to head down into the heat again and visit Ipoh for a few days. The road down the mountain is quite windy, and narrow... And in typical Malay fashion there are drivers trying to speed down and overtake around corners. It's like what the Black Spur in Melbourne was a few years ago, but with cars.

Lots of jungle over the edge of the road.

These little huts are everywhere along the side of the road. And of course, most of them have people trying to sell you stuff in them.

Lata Iskandar

These are some waterfalls I didn't expect on the way.

The bottom of the falls

The waterfall!

Oh right. Yes. Of course, if you absolutely need that giant stuffed pencil toy, you can buy it here, next to the waterfall...

Kek Look Tong

Kek Look Tong is a buddist temple built in a cave here in Ipoh.

This is the entrance to the templ... Hey what's that symbol on the ground! It's the symbol for luck, why, what did you think it was?

I don't know my buddism very well, so I don't know who these three are.

Well I recognize this guy.

Some cave formations.

Don't photograph the monkies!

The Tortoise pond! There were hundreds of the things in there!

It started to rain on me here so I thought it best to go find the hotel. Quickly.


Kellie's Castle

It's hard to find this place, there's no real directions anywhere. I found a website that had a hand drawn map, so I copied that down and set out, only, there is a new road where one on the map is supposed to end, so I got slightly lost. There's only one road sign pointing to this place, but it's not the last turn you need to make either.

Anyway, this was being built by a scot called, Kellie, who died while he was overseas collecting things for the place, and so the building was never finished.

This is the castle. The tower on the left has rooms for guests.

This is the cellar. There was a Tunnel here that lead to a temple somewhere. The tunnel has been boarded up though :(

The Altar

There are info cards all over the place, the one here said that the ghost of Kellie walks up and down here... There was another that said his 6 year old daughter was once seen walking out of her room...

Creepy stairway

This is an escape stairway! Each of the bedrooms had one.

Son's room.

Closet

This was for the elevator. One of the things Kellie was acquiring overseas, when he died.

Bats!

You can get out on the roof. The raised part is meant to be a miniature tennis court

This was his old house, in use while the castle was being built. It was destroyed in WW2 apparently. 

Some of the imported Italian marble in the old house.

Gua Tempurung

This cave is mentioned in all the local tourist information, a must see, while in Ipoh. This cave has four large chambers to look through, however, you have to have a guide. And to get further than the first chamber you need to have a minimum of 5 people. Great. I hung around for a while to see if anyone else was going to turn up, but no one did. So I paid to go look at the first chamber only. The guides here are useless, they take their torch and shine it at different rocks and say things like "This one looks like a dolphin, that one like a crocodile, there's a mans face...". The only informative thing he did was shine it at one rock and said it was marble, the rest of the cave was limestone. I mostly ignored him and took photos.

This was just inside the cave, looking back out. 

The big chamber. Apparently 120m tall. The big formation on the right is called the flowerstone.

Oh I lie, he told me about this... Water has eroded this channel into the stone.

Looking down into the main chamber.

I could hear thunder while I was in the cave, and went we got back out it was raining quite heavy. I waited round for an hour or so while lightning hit the field nearby and then once the rain eased up a little I decided to just get wet and go.

So now that everything is wet, I've booked in to the hotel for another night to let everything dry out, and because they told me I could get laundry done today, but apparently it was too late to do it and get it back before tomorrow afternoon... Great. The day after tomorrow I'll head back down to KL to get my bike serviced, then speed north so I can cross the boarder into Thailand.

Ipoh.