kampung raja – Adam Teale

Incline is my decline.

What started out as a seemingly cruisy ride up into the Cameron Highlands soon turned into some serious hard yakka.

10km south of Ipoh down Highway 1, after a great breakfast of roti and curry, we headed east along the A181.

After about 10-15km east or so I’d say we hit our first serious incline, dwarfing anything we had previously

rode up.

Unfortunately the problem of having to keep on pedalling up the mountains just didn’t go away.

For hours we battled those mountains with the hope that the next corner would reveal the “highlands” and some nice flat riding once again.

Well it didn’t. We eventually ran out of water and the heat was strangling.

Some guys were selling bamboo on the side of the street and were cool enough to go grab us some water from their supply up the road (i think from the water that was running off the mountain). I would have gone for that water earlier but after seeing the dead nappies in the creek the other day I decided against it.

The water powered us on a few more kilometres but it was just too hot.
I think by this point we’d made it about 2/3 of the way up the mountain – 30km from Kampung Raja.
Nick and I decided we’d best to try hitch a ride. So i stuck the thumb out and managed to get us onto the first truck that past.

Mr S (unfortunately I have forgot his name), was kind enough to tie up our bikes in the back of his truck and take us the 30km Kg Raja.

Mr S delivers the fresh produce from the farms in Cameron Highlands down to the markets in Ipoh. A great man who sounds like he’s had a pretty hard life – moved from India in the 1960’s to pick fruit for $1.20/day back then!

He even shouted us food at Kg Raja and wouldn’t let us pay – it nearly came down to a fisticuffs!

In Kg Raja the clouds opened up and bucketed down. For hours.

The place to stay in town was way out of our budget so we decided to brave the rain and cold (it’s very fresh up here!) and pedal on for 20-30 more km to Tanah Rata.