He marched them up to the top of the hill... and they had a cup of tea, which was nice.

OK so we arrived in the Cameron Highlands which is in central Malaysia, we took an extra bus and took an extra 3 hours to save some cash but felt pleased with ourselves as we'd navigated ourselves using public transport rather than hopping in a minibus!

The highlands are named after the British chap who 'discovered' them which probably came as news to the people already living there. It is a popular place for Malaysians to get away as due to the altitude it is a lot cooler than the rest of the country, the Brits built lodges up in the hills and built tea plantations that remain today.

The thing to do in the highlands is to walk around and up and down the hills peering into tea plantations and stopping off in tea rooms for tea and scones, we spent the first couple of days pottering about on the lower slopes before attempting 'Devils Peak' (it's 6,666 ft above sea level). One of the saddest things was as you walked alongside a mountain stream the trees alongside were festooned with plastic, a trip up an observation tower was a little hairy as the first 3 or 4 steps were missing... well it was 4 by the time we left as one didn't survive our trip up... I was grateful for the tetanus shot as I managed to step on a rusty nail.

The walk up Devil Peak was to be the high-light of our stay, it was bigger than any of the other walks we had tried but the chap at our guesthouse thought we would be OK and so off we went! Well the path was perhaps a little more jungle than we had anticipated. We were often clambering over tree roots trying to avoid spiders and imagined snakes at every turn... for those of you who have seen the film it reminded us of the fire swamp in the Princess Bride, we joked about ROUS's and tried to keep our spirits up as the skies darkened and it started to rain.

Our spirits took a bit of a dive when after an hour and half of clambering up tree roots we found that the path was missing up a head... in fact the path was still visible but it was 500 feet below together with the rest of the landslide. A glance between us was enough to decide that unless it was completely impassable we would be going on...we had come too far to give up now! We were not the first to pass that way and by following some scuffed footprints and broken twigs we found a way around but we were beginning to suspect that this had been an overambitious trip for us. We were wet, sweaty, dirty and tired and the path ahead was steep and overgrown. Oh, and our shoes were very wet again. We geed ourselves up and a tiring hour later we emerged blinking into the light to find a sign telling us we had arrived at the top... we turned to admire the view but were shrouded in mist, it had been that kind of day but we were elated to have made it to the top.

After a rest we searched in vain for a bus stop or a taxi rank but finding none we walked down the road in search of tea, it was a long walk but the countryside was beautiful and we were feeling good, the sandwiches and tea when we did find them were consumed sitting out on a deck watching the tea pickers moving along the tea plants picking the tips... we were exhausted but it might have been the best cuppa ever.

We'd been lucky so far on the journey avoiding major weather problems and making most of our connections... well the week after the highlands was supposed to have been spent on a tropical island supposed to be one of the nicest in the world before catching a flight to Borneo... well we won't go into details but we arrived in the departure town late, checked into a hostel to find bed bugs again (we spent the night huddled up on the concrete outside the room) and to find that the boat to the island hadn't sailed in 4 days due to weather and that if we got there we might not be able to get back... we binged on fast food to comfort ourselves and then swallowed the painful costs of changing our flight to go to Borneo early... as we had a day to kill, and had faced bed bugs twice in a week we booked ourselves into a 4* hotel whilst we waited for the flight... and we didn't even feel guilty... well maybe a little... and people did stare as we traipsed across the lobby... but this was Malaysia and everyone stares anyway so we hardly noticed.

All creatures great and small...

Taman Negara is the largest and most accessible of the national parks on Peninsular Malaysia, for those of you that don't know (and we didn't before this trip...) Malaysia is split into two distinct parts, peninsular Malaysia that hangs down off the bottom of Thailand, and Borneo Malaysia that is on the Island of Borneo, educational this isn't it...

Getting to the park involves a bus ride through some amazing mountain and scenery, precarious roads with vertigo inducing drops off to the side and jungle stretching off to the horizon below. At one of the drinks and rest stops we made had a toilet balanced on the hillside 15 feet below the road... Debbie being the more intrepid toilet stopper made that trip whilst I took photos (of the view, not the toilet), I nearly typed a review of the toilet here but whilst people who have made similar trips may understand the obsession we developed with the availability and standard of toilets other readers may just think us strange so we shall move on...

The national park itself is huge but the most visited part is reached by taking a 3 hour boat trip up through the jungle itself and you stay in a village on one side of the river whilst the treks through the park etc are on the other side and reached by river taxi, we intended to stay two nights in the park and so quickly found some beds in a hostel for £2 a night each (shoestringers remember!) and caught a boat across to the jungle.

On our first walk into the jungle we saw a troop of monkeys, a giant colourful pigeon, some jungle peacocks and what we thought was wear and tear to the pathway (broken planks and fallen trees etc.) but what we later found out was evidence of a bull elephant that was seen near the park whilst we were there, it was the first time an elephant had been seen near the tourist area for years apparently but the jungle is so thick that they can be feet away and you'd never know they were there.

That evening we went on a guided night walk in the jungle, whilst initially cavalier about the warnings to keep our hands away from trees etc. we learnt to keep our distance when our guide pointed out some huge spiders sitting on the trees... we also saw stick insects, cockroaches, scorpions, a bright green viper and some termites which we helpfully located by standing on them... they bite. We spent 20 minutes watching a salt lick from a hide but it was a full moon and so the animals stayed away so we headed back to our accommodation... but our night animal experiences were not over...

As we lay in our bunks that night talking about what we'd seen and the jungle walks we had planned for the next day we realised we had a couple of insect visitors, nothing unusual for the jungle... and then we noticed a few more... and then a few more... our room was infested with 100's of bed bugs that were now marching intently across the bed covers... yuck.

We wandered out into the night looking for alternative places to stay but this is the jungle and there are not a great number of holiday inns or places with 24 hour receptions ... we managed to find the chap in charge of where we were staying (who didn't seem surprised by the problem) and he put us in another room but we weren't expecting to sleep much, it was 2am already and we were revising our plans to allow us to head back to a city in the morning, we did manage to get some sleep but not before our night was further disturbed.

Whilst lying awake and obsessively switching our torches on to check for more bugs we heard a growling noise and crunching of bone from the bins outside the house next door... Deb wanted me to see what it was but I mumbled sleepily about it being a dog and tried to go back to sleep...well the noises persisted and sounded more aggressive (from outside although Debbie was getting more insistent too as she hadn't seen any dogs in the village) and so eventually I was persuaded to get up and look outside the window... where we saw a mother and baby tapir who had come out of the jungle to get at the food in the bins, tapir are not common in the park and were on the list of creatures you might be lucky enough to see if you trekked deep into the park... and there they were 6 feet from our window and completely unaware of our presence.

The tapir meant we didn't high-tail it out of there in the morning, we went on a walk through the jungle by ourselves again and went up a treetop cable walk, Deb spotted a monitor lizard and in the trees had a giant squirrel (about 3 feet long) nearly jump on her head and I was buzzed by a flying lizard, despite the bed bugs we had a great time and had seen far more wildlife than we had hoped for but the tapir had been the hi-light, we caught the afternoon bus to avoid the possibility of bed bugs again though.