Cameron Highlands

After a brief downpour where I took shelter, I arrived in the small town of Kampung Raja and met my host, Troji’s, sister, a short-haired Chinese woman who took me to the hostel. Anyway, we arrive and she shows me I’ll be sleeping in a 4-bed dorm room which is fine with me, it’s cozy and I’m the only one there for the time being. I meet a British girl who’s been staying here for months studying the local bee populations. She seems fine, but not really too keen for a conversation. So I just make myself comfortable. The place has good cozy vibes and the weather is cool. I can be happy here for some time. There are two cute cats that like to cuddle. That night I met Troji, who was coming back from running errands in Ipoh. He brought food with him and I ate with his whole family in the dining area of the new hotel he had built across from the hostel. Troji was very close to his family, they lived all around him and seemed to be doing quite well financially. They owned a successful flower farm and rented out several apartments to tourists. Troji spent a massive amount of money on the new hotel project, which still isn’t completely finished, and I’m skeptical that it will provide a return anytime soon, but for his sake I hope it does. He told me the marble alone cost a fortune, and the whole hotel is chock full of the stuff. I admire Troji’s attention to detail. He painstakingly designed the place himself and build a lot of the wooden accents with trees he harvested himself. The entrepreneurial spirit is strong with him and he’s spent a number of years traveling the world gathering inspiration. Eating with Chinese people takes skill. Everyone gets a small bowl of rice and chopsticks, and then you have to pick from a whole number of entrees on the table, some close and some far. Of course, a lazy Susan solves this, but they didn’t have a lazy Susan, so if I wanted the extra tasty pork thing on the other side of the table I had to stand up and lean all the way over in front of all sorts of Chinese uncles and aunties whose names I didn’t know and trust in my amateur chopstick handling skills enough to pick up a piece of food that I didn’t have time to properly examine and bring it all the way back to my rice bowl without dropping it. Somehow I got through the night without any major embarrassment. I tried to correct my chopstick form as I have many times throughout my life and gave up just like every other time because at the end of the day I like my technique and it works and I refuse to conform. 

My time with Troji was good overall. He’s a nice guy, and he liked me personality fine. At first I think I was giving a little attitude and being clearly lazy, as is my instinct when starting a new job, but he was cool with it and my humor helped smooth things over. Before long we were buddies. I think I was just a little frustrated by the lack of a clear schedule. With workaway you’re generally supposed to have a worked out schedule with your volunteers giving them no more than 5 hours of work for 5 days of the week. With Troji there were no off days and the work could be spread out at different times from morning to evening. It wasn’t too horrible because I was already in a fairly isolated spot so it’s not like I was missing out on all the activities that I could be doing in town. Still, some more hiking would’ve been nice. My one off day was thanks to the fact that I had befriended a young American named Dobbs and Troji suggested we go on a little hike which was a good day for me. The Cameron Highlands is mostly cultivated land: tea plantations and expansive stretches of greenhouses cover most of the land, but there are a few well preserved patches of jungle left as well, and in the higher elevation it’s quite mossy and delicious. My side project for Troji was to take videos of his new hotel, and he happened to have a canon R6 so I was able to get som pretty good slow motion footage and make a few nice videos for him. Dobbs was only 19 and from Ithaca, doing a rare for Americans gap year before college. He was also obsessed with Chinese and studied it every day, preparing for his impending trip where he’d shock an old friend by his command of the language. As a result, I started getting into Chinese and picked up a fair share of useful words and phrases that never failed to bring an amused smile on the faces of Troji’s family. I finished reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was an incredible book and gave me a renewed desire to live a moral life. Tolstoy was clearly deeply inspired by his Christian faith, and was a genius too. So, I thought, maybe it’s time I came to understand the Abrahamic religions better. And what better way than through the source text?

I’ve started the Bible. It’s insane. There are so many horrible things in the old testament. But worse than that is the tedious listing of rules and offspring. Would it not have behooved the jews to do a little more editing before publish this? Or at the very least a separate book to keep dull records and leave the pretty stories untainted. I trust the new testament will be a bit more entertaining but I’m concerned I won’t make it that far, I think I’m getting lost somewhere between Samuel and David and it’s so boring that I’m kind of losing the big picture here. One theme I enjoy, however, is that the Jews just refuse to get it right. Moses goes up and gets all the rules that tell them exactly what to do, and while he’s gone they’re like let’s worship this calf instead. And then the next thousand years of their history are just them remembering God and forgetting him again over and over and over. It kind of mirrors my own story. Up in the mountains of Dharamshala, Buddhism gave me a framework for living life that I agreed with and I knew if I could stick with it that I could live a good and noble life. But, of course, I wandered, and strayed from the course, and found it again, and strayed again. And now I’m here in Malaysia. A shoulder country in a shoulder season, rambling and ambling, losing God and finding him, searching for what I already know. Are we all doomed to live this way forever? Is there no permanent enlightenment? Who is to say. Either way, I’m going to put the bible to the side for a little while as it’s exhausting me and maybe resume at another time or find a book that just gives me the good parts and then I’d like to do the same with the Quran. I can’t figure out the secrets of life without analyzing what collective humanity has already brought forth to the conversation.