The Mossy Forest is an equatorial cloud forest on the ridge of Gunung Brinchang, at 2,032 metres in the Cameron Highlands of Pahang, Malaysia, where the mist is so constant that moss buries every trunk and branch, and it is walked on a boardwalk from the top of the highest paved road in Peninsular Malaysia. The trees here are stunted and gnarled, their limbs wrapped in cushions of moss with ferns, orchids and pitcher plants growing out of the mat, and they take much of their water not from rain but from the passing cloud itself, combing moisture out of the mist that wraps the ridge most of the day; the forest floor is a sponge, and seedlings root straight into the living moss instead of soil, which is seen kneeling at the boardwalk rail where the growth piles deepest, picking apart the layers of moss, unfurling fern crosiers and seedlings. The trail beyond the boardwalk hauls up a steep pitch where roots and packed earth form a natural staircase, every handhold slick with moss and cold, into a forest that is dim and dripping at midday.
The road to it winds up from Brinchang town through tea plantations, the narrow lane climbing past the BOH tea estate at Sungai Palas, whose bushes cover the hillsides in rows, and it ends at the summit of Gunung Brinchang, where a steel lookout tower rises above the stunted trees; on a clear morning the view runs over the whole highland of tea and vegetable farms, and by late morning the cloud usually closes in. The Cameron Highlands were a British hill station of the 1930s, cool at 1,500 metres, and the forest is what the tea did not clear; entry to the boardwalk is limited and guided, and the temperature on the ridge can drop to ten degrees. The Mossy Forest is a forest that drinks cloud, and the moss is the cloud made solid.