The first place we stayed in Cameron Highlands was Peony Apartments. Peony apartments is not in one of those two towns I mentioned in my previous post. Instead it’s…well I’ll use google maps to show you.
Peony Apartments is an apartment complex where we were allowed to rent a furbished apartment for two nights. It was gorgeous and it looked like a lot of fun, with a couple of restaurants on the first floor and a ton of things for kids to do for a small fee like, riding in a train around the complex or a game room.
Our apartment included three bedrooms and two bathrooms as well as a kitchen, living room, dinning room and a small balcony overlooking the stream below. It was gorgeous, just however not the best for us logistically. There wasn’t any wifi except in the office downstairs which was open from about 9am until 9pm. This we hadn’t realized before time. We also hadn’t realized that the reason why there was free parking was because there’s no way to go anywhere unless you have a car. You need a car if you’re staying at the Peony Apartments. Any time we needed a taxi we had to go to the office, hope it was open and then wait an additional hour or so that it would take the taxi to get to us from Tanah Rata, where the majority of the taxi’s started. This ate up a ton of our time and since we wanted to catch the very first bus to Penang on our last morning, it was stressful.
Peony apartments was like the dream of airbnb but without the helpful host. While the people in the office were as helpful as they could be they had other stuff to be doing and helping us figuring out how to get places and suggestions of things to do without a car was limited. This could have been helped if they offered tours, but it’s an apartment complex and what apartment complex offers tours?
Peony apartments wasn’t a good choice for us. It was too far away from anything except for a nice tea garden across the street and the restaurants on the first floor. But if we’d been a larger group with a car staying for longer than two nights it would’ve been perfect. It seemed to me like the perfect place to stay if you were a traveling family and wanted something a bit further away from the noise of the tourist-y main towns, where you could cook for yourself (we couldn’t use the stove, but you could ask about that) and then drive to things at your leisure.