Cameron Highlands Road

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Ipoh

   Ipoh is Malaysia's quiet third city, a place that was once rich from tin and now lives on its food. Around the Kinta valley, limestone hills rise abruptly from the flat plain like islands, their sides streaked and their caves home to Buddhist temples. Ipoh sits among them, with a colonial old town of shophouses, a grand railway station sometimes called the Taj Mahal of Ipoh, and a famous coffee culture. The white coffee here is roasted with margarine and served with condensed milk, and it is a point of local pride. The city has about 670,000 people, which gives it all the fuel and services you need.

   Read the complete Ipoh write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Ipoh is where the day begins. Next is Ringlet.

2. 2. Ringlet

   Ringlet is a small farming town in the Cameron Highlands, in the cool uplands of Pahang, and it is the first place you reach after the long climb up from the lowlands. The road from Tapah is a famous one: it winds for more than fifty kilometres through tropical forest, with bends that tighten and slow, a vertical green wall on one side, and a steep drop on the other. The temperature falls steadily and the air gets thin and damp, so by the time you reach Ringlet, you have gone from steaming heat to something close to an English spring. A lake lies nearby, held back by a dam for hydropower in the 1960s, and its edges are lined with flower farms.

   Read the complete Ringlet write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Ringlet comes up about 95 km into the recorded legs. Next is Tanah Rata.

3. 3. Tanah Rata

   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.

   Read the complete Tanah Rata write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 107 km into the recorded legs you reach Tanah Rata. Next is Brinchang.

4. 4. Brinchang

   Brinchang is a small town on a ridge at about 1,400 metres, and it is the cool, damp heart of the Cameron Highlands. Developed by the British in the 1920s as a hill station after William Cameron mapped the plateau in 1885, the area is known for tea, strawberries and vegetables, which grow on terraces that cover the hills in intense green. Mist hangs over the slopes, and the temperature is far lower than on the lowlands, often below twenty degrees, so a light jacket is welcome. The nearby settlement of Tanah Rata, about three kilometres away, has a larger shopping street, and the nearest city is Ipoh, over thirty kilometres away.

   Read the complete Brinchang write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Brinchang closes the day.