Cameron Highlands: Tea, a Very Large Flower, and One Lost Flip-Flop

The day’s programme was ambitious even by the standards of the tour: a jungle trek to find the Rafflesia arnoldii, the world’s largest flowering plant, followed by a waterfall swim, a traditional longhouse village, a tea plantation tour, an insect farm, a butterfly sanctuary, and a strawberry farm. We managed all of it, though not without incident.

The Rafflesia is a parasite. It has no roots, no leaves, no stem, and no chlorophyll. It grows entirely inside the tissue of a specific vine in the genus Tetrastigma, invisible until it flowers, at which point it produces a bloom that can reach a metre in diameter and weigh up to eleven kilograms, the largest single flower produced by any plant on earth. The bloom lasts between five and seven days and smells, by all accounts, of rotting flesh, which attracts the carrion flies that pollinate it. The combination of its extreme specificity, the rarity of successful pollination, and the destruction of its lowland forest habitat has made it endangered. The conservation programme operating in the Cameron Highlands manages and catalogues every known specimen. We found one in flower, a deep red structure with thick rubbery petals around a central disc, sitting on the forest floor with the quiet confidence of something that has no interest in being anything other than what it is. It was impressive once I understood what I was looking at, which took longer than I would like to admit.

The waterfall claimed one of my flip-flops. The water was cold in the way that mountain water at altitude is cold, which is to say in the absolute direction rather than the refreshing direction, and I went in anyway because everyone else was going in and because refusing would have required an explanation. While attempting to push Gabby, who pushed back more effectively than anticipated, I lost my footing on the submerged rock and the current had my left flip-flop before I could register what was happening. It moved downstream with the decisive speed of something that has no intention of being recovered and was gone in approximately four seconds.

I spent the remainder of the day barefoot through the tea plantation, the insect farm, and the butterfly sanctuary. The tea plantation, which requires bare feet about as much as any formal occasion requires muddy footprints, was the longest part of this. The looks I received from other visitors had the quality of polite concern that people apply when they have concluded that someone is having a worse day than them but don’t want to be rude about it. I was not having a worse day than them. The tea was excellent.

On the drive back to Tanah Rata we passed the site of a landslide that had happened two days earlier. Seven people had died, including a family of three. The youngest victim was fifteen. The compensation paid to each bereaved family was approximately fifteen hundred US dollars, which is the number that sits in your head for a long time after you hear it. Landslides in the Cameron Highlands are not uncommon, the consequence of the clearing of highland forest for agriculture and development removing the root systems that hold the steep slopes together. The tea and strawberry farming that makes the Cameron Highlands economically viable and photographically attractive has a relationship with the landslides that is not incidental. We drove past the wreckage of someone’s living room, the curtains still hanging on the broken window frame, in silence.