The serpentine road from Raub to the Gap to Kuala Kubu Baru always never fails to make a fine promenade on a quiet Sunday afternoon. There's always the beautiful mountainscapes of the Main Range, greens everywhere and loads of fresh air to cleanse those clogged up lungs from living in the city -with condition you're lucky enough not to trail any lorries or trucks sometimes plying this route. Or worse, hordes of weekend tourists who had the same brilliant ideas like you...Back when I was still a boy, we were not tuned to moving vehicles like children today (they are practically nursed in cars these days). Since we visited quite often our relatives in Kerling and KKB, we were obliged to use this incredibly winding road -one can actually perceive the next turn and the next from the windshield ahead!
Well, my father had to make sure that we kids don't puke at the back of the car and so he deviced a stop every now and then to let us walk our feet a little, smell the fresh air and even pluck a few nice plants here and there. In between, he even chipped in stories of the British army, the communists known to this part of the country, the wild animals, especially his experience with tigers, the mawas, the plants and their use in hunting and medicine etc, etc and I was totally captivated by this. If one ever wonders how I got to be so observant of plants on the kerbs of the road, there you have it...also, those days were really quite different: less cars, less heat, less pollution, more flowering plants (wild), more animals - especially insects like butterflies and of course, less worries like today. Everything just felt simpler and clearer. Maybe it was the simple vision of a child enraptured by the simple pleasures of the world around him.
Well, my father had to make sure that we kids don't puke at the back of the car and so he deviced a stop every now and then to let us walk our feet a little, smell the fresh air and even pluck a few nice plants here and there. In between, he even chipped in stories of the British army, the communists known to this part of the country, the wild animals, especially his experience with tigers, the mawas, the plants and their use in hunting and medicine etc, etc and I was totally captivated by this. If one ever wonders how I got to be so observant of plants on the kerbs of the road, there you have it...also, those days were really quite different: less cars, less heat, less pollution, more flowering plants (wild), more animals - especially insects like butterflies and of course, less worries like today. Everything just felt simpler and clearer. Maybe it was the simple vision of a child enraptured by the simple pleasures of the world around him.
Flowering Bauhinias spp. This clump is particularly pale in shade as it was growing in a less exposed area under the shades of a tall tree. Otherwise, they usually display a bright yellow-orange bicolour bouquet perceivable from quite a distance.
Tiny fig fruits on a shrub
A terrestrial wild ginger with pink flowering bracts.
Elegant leaf of the Dipteris fern.
Almost an iconic flowering plant previously found almost everywhere throughout this road, it is now reduced to a few favourable locations. The Bamboo orchid with its cattleya-like flowers.
Leaf whorl of a fern, the Paku Resam.
A flowering vine dangling over branches in the open.
Luscious wild rasberries ressembling a cross between the rasberry and the blackberry.
Fragile yellow flower of the daffodil orchid. Used to be very common growing on grass patches along the roadside rest area but now quite rare.
A bunch of unusually coloured berries of a creeper found in the open grassland.
Flowers of a common terrestrial orchid.
Ripe figs dangling from a branch...
A view of Fraser's Hills from the road to the Gap
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