It is a known universal fact that traveling for a holiday to Cameron Highlands during a festival, especially Chinese New Year is a bad idea. Traffic is going to be horrendous and you’ll be stuck in a crawl for hours. But what is a parent of school-going children to do? It is the only time that the kids are off from school and we are not rich people who can send their children to private schools with a different schedule of holidays. So despite the conventional wisdom, we booked a hotel there and travelled during the recent CNY holiday.
The highway traffic wasn’t all that bad. The actual crawl started when we reached Kea Farm and all the way to Tanah Rata where we stayed. I took us over an hour to traverse that short 10 kilometres route. But after that, we checked in to our nice hotel and walked around the Tanah Rata town in the evening after having dinner at The Box Port Hub nearby. The Heritage Hotel is quite an old hotel and it had been renovated a few times. The facilities are adequate, the rooms are clean enough and the breakfast buffet was pretty good.
It’s been a while since we last been to Tanah Rata and the town had changed a bit. There’s lots of shops, restaurants and eateries to choose from. We walked a bit to the town council clock tower for a bit of photography before walking but to the hotel up the hill.
The next day, we didn’t miss the chance to visit our favourite attraction in Cameron Highlands - the Boh Tea Centre in Sungai Palas. The place also gone through some upgrade since we last visit. There’s a new restaurant section next to the usual one which can accommodate a larger crowd. After having our customary scones and tea, we bought some Boh speciality tea bags as souvenir and leave for our next attraction - a strawberry farm. As expected, traffic from Sungai Palas to Raaju’s Hill Strawberry Farm was equally bad. We inches for 30 minutes before reaching the farm. There we treated the kids to some strawberry picking before heading home. Is it worth it going through that much traffic and stress for a holiday? For your family, probably.
There’s a pretty limited choice if you want to go for a temperate climate vacations in peninsular Malaysia. There’s Cameron Highlands (traffic), Genting Highlands (pricey), Fraser Hill (nothing much to do) and finally Bukit Tinggi which features the Colmar Tropicale Resort which is also rather expensive.
