Tanah Rata is the main town of the Cameron Highlands, a long street of shops, guesthouses, cafés and travel agents laid out along a valley at about 1,400 metres, and it hums with backpackers, tour groups and weekending families from Kuala Lumpur. The weather is the first thing that surprises people. It is cool, often cloudy, and on many evenings you will see locals in jackets and woolly hats. A few buildings in the Tudor style recall the colonial days, when the British came up here to escape the lowland heat, and the 1930s hotel on the slope still serves a very English afternoon tea.
What the highlands are famous for is tea, and the green slopes of the plantations around Tanah Rata are the signature view. The terraced bushes roll over the hills in a blanket of green, and a few estates, including the well-known BOH plantation founded in the 1920s, have tea rooms with views over the valley where you can sit with a pot and a scone. Strawberry farms and butterfly gardens round out the tourist circuit, and on Gunung Brinchang, the peak nearby, there is a mossy forest of twisted trees and ferns that feels more like a fairy tale than a tropical jungle.
As a place to ride through, Tanah Rata is slow. The traffic can be heavy at weekends, with buses and cars crawling along, and the roads out are narrow, winding and busy with scooters. The reward is the upper roads to the tea estates and the mossy forest, where bends are tight, the air is cool, and the traffic is thinner on weekday mornings. Be careful in the rain, when the road gets slick and the mist reduces visibility to a few metres.
You will find everything here: petrol stations, banks, pharmacies, cafés and restaurants offering Malay, Chinese, Indian and Western food. Steamboat, a hot pot of broth and vegetables, is a local favourite on a cold night, and the roti canai is excellent in the morning. Book accommodation ahead on weekends and school holidays, when the town fills. A jacket, rain gear and patience are your best equipment.