Butterfly Garden @ Cameron Highlands

(Part 4 of Leisure Tour)

Humans who are afraid of creepy crawlies and flying objects should avoid this place at all cost! Unlike the Butterfly Park in Sentosa, there are a lot more live butterflies in this garden.

Due to the colder temperature, they are less active and this makes it easier for itchy fingers like myself to pick them up and scrutinise them more intimately!

The garden takes up a big area and the tour guide will usually give you 30-40 minutes to roam around the place (longer if time permits). Thankfully, the low peak season meant we have the whole place to ourselves.

Oh! Before i forget, you have to pay RM5 per person to enter this attraction! Like the Rose Centre, it's the norm to pay and if you choose not to, you can spend the 30-40 minutes in the pathetic souvenir shop next door.

It's misleading but the butterfly garden has more than just fluttering butterflies! There are quite a few reptiles like the Forest Gecko.

Snakes too!! I had my snake overdose in the snake farm in Thailand so the small amount of serpents here is pretty mild and probably not as interesting comparatively.

Concentration on the many butterflies is more worthy! And you can see live butterflies of many shapes, sizes, colours and patterns. Live, not dead specimens!

Picking them up was as easy as ABC for most of the hu die (蝴蝶)! I bet it will be damn difficult for you to even catch one in Singapore; unless it's breathing its last breath!

They seem to 'hibernate' in the cold weather and this particular one moved only marginally in my one minute rendezvous with it.

I especially love this shot! And in my 30 (coming 31) years of age, i finally realised butterflies eat using this long nose/snout thingy known as proboscis!! It's currently curled up in the picture but at the point of feeding (the nectar); the proboscis flicks outwards and looks like into an elongated stick.

A picture of another species of lizards. Ten years back, i almost bought an iguana after seeing how gentle they are! And i was considering a corn snake despite being ophidiophobic (don't ever ask me to pronounce this word)!

This small iguana was damn aggressive although fun to look at. Separated by a layer of glass, it was seemingly hissing and opening its mouth whenever my hand went near! Animal lovers will hate me!

Tortoises that are nowhere near the size of the giant galapagos tortoise! Since we are on this topic, Singapore has a tortoise museum that i should visit!

Leaf frogs that are kept in a hollow, unkempt enclosure.

Flowers of various kinds were posted in my entry on Rose Centre but this is something new! As you can see, it looked like those fake flowers sold in scrapbook shops and the amazing part is that the petals have a realistic paper texture as well!

Uploaded this for fun. No other meaning or caption required.

Can you spot the leaf insect? Since we had some free time being the only customers for the tour, the Teo family tried to find the supposedly four leaf insects in the cage.

The stick insects were more difficult to find as there were quite a few thin yet broken branches!

Not sure if it's true but i heard that the lower highlands temperature apparently means a faster death for the butterflies. Many of them were motionless on the floor and on top of the plants and flowers.

Workers were even deployed to carefully picked up the dead ones and put them in a bucket. For disposal i suppose. Kind of sad if you ask me.

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Additional Information

There are only two butterfly gardens in Cameron Highlands and they are only separated by the souvenir shop i mentioned in the beginning of my post.

Not sure if it's a matter of school holiday versus non-school holiday season but when i was at the other Butterfly Garden in November 2009, there was a lot more exciting and memorable interaction with insects and reptiles like scorpions, giant millipede, giant beetle etc!

First Part of the Leisure Tour can be found HERE.

Second Part of the Leisure Tour can be found HERE.

Third Part of the Leisure Tour can be found HERE.