Thursday, September 26, 2025
8:14 a.m. Room 211, Hotel Raja Bot
Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
I did my best to get a good night of sleep last night. It wasn’t easy, and I had to incorporate every technique under the sun, but I think I slept enough to have gas in my tank today. And I woke up to some amazing news. A Planet Doug subscriber and supporter made a substantial donation to Planet Doug this morning (via Touch’n Go) earmarked for my upcoming bicycle trip around Malaysia. He did suggest at one point that with the possibility of bad weather and the amount of time needed to cycle, I might be better off simply picking four cities in which to base myself and then travelling by bus to those places and exploring the city and region in other ways. I could do that perhaps. But a lot of wheels have been in motion with the plan to cycle, so I should probably at least start on two wheels and see how it goes. I’m not such a committed cyclist that I MUST ride very kilometer. I’m all about whatever form of transportation is best depending on the circumstances. But my bicycle is waiting for me down in Port Dickson, and when last I saw it, it was ready to go. So the plan is to head down there in the next few days, spend a day getting things organized, and then pedal towards Malacca as my first stop. Of course, Malacca is not far from Port Dickson. A person in good cycling shape could do that ride in one day. But I will definitely go slower than that. Perhaps I can even circle inland away from the coast at one point to stretch out the cycling and stretch my legs. I haven’t made specific plans yet.
One issue is that once I put feet to pedals, I won’t have the full 90 days of my Malaysian social visit pass anymore. I used up a good chunk of those 90 days with editing videos from Sumatra, getting my passport renewed, car riding on the Malaysia Mystery Tour, and now editing videos from the Mystery Tour. In fact, my current social visit pass for Malaysia expires on November 13, leaving me essentially the month of October and then eleven days in November. For normal people doing normal things, that is a lot of time. On Planet Doug, time works differently, and anything less than three months or six months feels too short. And since I don’t have three months or six months, I have to plan my route and activities such that I’m able to easily leave Malaysia (by land, sea, or air) mid-cycle trip and then hopefully return with a recharged visit pass. I guess that’s not a real issue. I was thinking that it would be nice to be at a land border and just cycle across to Singapore or to Thailand. However, the border with Singapore is too close and the one with Thailand is too far. But there’s no need to get hooked on that idea. When the time comes, I can find a way to zip to Kuala Lumpur and out to the airport.
Another logistical issue is that I now have two passports. The old one is invalid, of course. I can’t use it to exit the country or enter any other country. HOWEVER, I entered Malaysia on that old passport and that passport number is the one on record with Malaysian immigration. That old (cancelled) passport also has the entry stamp for Malaysia on its final page. Therefore, I have to somehow present both my old passport and my current one and have the relevant authorities transfer the information and update my online immigration record with my new passport number. I remember doing this long ago (also in Malaysia I think), and I simply presented both passports at immigration while leaving the country. And I think it was fine. But I also remember it being a bit complicated and people didn’t seem to know what to do. They took me into a separate room and did all kinds of mysterious things on various computers amidst much discussion, and I got the feeling that there might have been a better or more efficient way to get this done. I’ve done some research on this topic, but as you might expect, all the information I found is contradictory. Even my AI buddies disagree. One AI scoured the Internet and told me that I have to go to Putrajaya and go to the immigration offices in advance to get this done. But my other AI buddies said there was no need, and that I just need to hand over the two passports together at the airport or other border crossing. And they take care of it on the spot. I’m leaning toward believing that I can just do this at the airport when I fly out. That would be the easiest option. I do NOT want to get lost in the world of bureaucracy and make several trips out to Putrajaya making various appointments and being sent from one office to another. I can easily see that futile project using up a week of my life. And surely it’s not unusual for people to get a new passport while inside Malaysia or any foreign country. Surely I’m not the first person in history to do this, and the immigration people at KLIA and elsewhere have been faced with this situation many times. There should be a system in place to deal with this. I just have to make sure to go to the airport or dock or land border early to allow lots of time for this transfer process, whatever it turns out to be.
In any event, there’s no need to worry overly about these things right now. Much of this kind of thing just becomes clear over time. I don’t want to plan my life to a degree that I have a rigid schedule demanding that I be at this or that place on a specific date. I could do that, but circumstances will change, and I will likely do something else anyway. It’s just something I need to be aware of – that before my cycling trip is over, I will likely have to somehow leave Malaysia and (hopefully) come back in. For now, I need to focus on the tasks and opportunities that are right in front of me.
Yesterday was an interesting day in that a friend from the United States, Jamie, flew into Malaysia. I met Jamie years ago here in Kuala Lumpur through my YouTube channel. Jamie was on one of his regular trips around the world, and in researching what to do in Malaysia, he came across my YouTube channel. And he reached out and offered to buy me a coffee when he got to Kuala Lumpur if I happened to be here. A hot cup of coffee is the fastest way to my heart, and Jamie and I ended up meeting over coffee, having a great chat, and we explored some of Kuala Lumpur together. Since then, Jamie has become part of my regular circle of YouTube-related friends that either live in Malaysia or drift in and out.
I must admit that I had trouble keeping track of the exact dates of Jamie’s arrival. I’d known he was coming to Malaysia for months. He normally has flights booked months in advance because he is a thousand times smarter than I am, and he plans ahead that way in order to get the cheapest fares. But my brain is so consumed with GoPros and shooting and editing YouTube videos that I often lose track of time and people. In fact, another member of my YouTube social group, Bill (AKA the International Bigshot) was in Kuala Lumpur already and had been for several days, and I didn’t even know he was here. Losing track of Bill wasn’t entirely my fault, I feel I should point out. I lost touch with him when I recently lost my WhatsApp account and ALL my contacts in it. I was able to reconnect with a lot of people, but I had no way to contact Bill outside of WhatsApp, and with WhatsApp gone, he was gone with it. I found out that Bill was in Kuala Lumpur because Daryl (WanderEats) told me. Daryl is a master at keeping in touch with people. He is something of a people-collector, and he is so much better at communicating than I am.
In this case, Jamie had been sending me regular updates on his travels, and I knew he was arriving in Kuala Lumpur on September 25th. My plan was to already be in Port Dickson by then, but with it requiring more time to edit my Mystery Tour videos than I anticipated, I decided to extend my stay in KL to be here for his arrival. And we arranged things such that I would meet him at a coffee shop at KL Sentral when he takes the airport bus in from KLIA. His flight landed around 6 a.m., and he would take the first available airport bus and that would get him to KL Sentral right around 9 a.m. when coffee shops would be opening. The whole thing was arranged, and I would simply hop on the Monorail out of Chow Kit and zip down to KL Sentral to meet Jamie there. One problem is that I had somehow gotten it into my head that September 25th was a Friday. I was going to be at KL Sentral at 9 a.m. on Friday. I planned my whole week around that date and time. Luckily, Jamie reached out to confirm our arrangements one last time, and in his message, he made it clear he was arriving the very next morning, which was a Thursday! I was off by an entire day. Luckily, other people keep track of things better than I do.
My idea was to go to sleep early on Wednesday night and jump out of bed early on Thursday morning. I wanted time to myself before my coffee with Jamie, and I wanted to be full of energy for our coffee meetup. But that didn’t actually happen. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but if I know in advance that I have an appointment in the morning, I can’t sleep the night before. I went to bed super early, and I knew I would wake up naturally at the right time, but just to be sure, I set an alarm. And once I set that alarm, I was lost. After that, I simply could NOT fall asleep. It’s like the knowledge that I MUST be awake by a certain time means than my brain won’t switch off to allow me to sleep. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep at all no matter how hard I tried, and I stumbled off to my meetup with Jamie a bit of a wreck and a zombie from lack of sleep.
My other idea was to record some of this event for Planet Doug. I was even thinking of sitting Jamie down, putting a microphone on him, and then asking him questions about his current trip. I thought it would be fun to hear all his stories about his latest trip and all the countries he had passed through to get to Malaysia. I know that when I first arrive in a new country, I am a talkative fellow. The first person I meet is either very lucky or very unlucky, because they will get a story-dump that could last five hours. I didn’t know whether Jamie was the same, but it stood to reason that stories of the journey would be fresh in his mind and he would be chatty, and I thought it would be fun to record his stories. I’ve learned that when you are a YouTuber, you end up viewing the world through the lens of “content”. Everything is assessed in terms of whether it is content or not. It gets so bad that you end up rejecting activities if they can’t be used as content. The problem is that time is in such short supply that I can’t waste it. I’m happy to meet Daryl for breakfast because he’s another YouTuber and he’s comfortable being on camera. If we were meeting for breakfast, and I CAN’T record at least part of the breakfast for YouTube, then I have this feeling that I’m wasting valuable time. I have to be either editing and uploading video or shooting video. My time and my life are divided into those two categories. And so when Jamie and I made arrangements to meet for coffee, in the back of my mind, I was scheming for how I can bring along a GoPro and record it. If I didn’t, it would feel a bit like I was wasting a morning.
My idea in this case was to at least record a bit of our coffee gathering. I didn’t absolutely have to record the whole thing or do a sit-down interview about his travels, but at the very least, I thought I could record the moment he arrives and use it in a video of a series of vignettes of my life here in Kuala Lumpur. The other night, a Planet Doug subscriber and supporter sent me a meal from a well-known local kopitiam. And I shot a few minutes of video of me enjoying that meal here in my hotel room. That one meal wasn’t going to be an entire video. But I can’t have a special meal delivered to my hotel room and NOT record it. And I figured I could record little bits and pieces of my life in short clips and then string them all together as a series of vignettes. And my coffee with Jamie could be one of those vignettes at the very least.
My plan was start recording video as I left my hotel and got on the monorail. I was going to just talk about stuff going on. This week has been a big week in terms of camera releases, for example. GoPro released two cameras, and I desperately wanted to talk about at least one of them. And I thought I could have my GoPro running as I made my way to KL Sentral and I could talk about these new GoPro cameras and then record a bit of my coffee with Jamie. Unfortunately, I was exhausted. I mentioned that I hardly got any sleep or rest the night before, and my whole idea to happily just “walk and talk” with my GoPro didn’t really come together. I did record a bit. I don’t think I ever did find the time or opportunity to talk about the ridiculous new camera from GoPro: the LIT Hero. But I did talk about other things, such as my patented Chow Kit Monorail travel hack. The thing is that from Chow Kit, the monorail goes directly to KL Sentral. But since this was the commuting hour, the monorail could be extremely busy and crowded. So my travel hack is to get on the monorail as it is going in the OPPOSITE direction to Tititwangsa. Titiwangsa station is only one stop away. It’s the wrong way and wastes time to go there, but the advantage is that I get on the train with all the people going to Titiwangsa. At Titiwangsa, they ALL get off, and I just stay on the now empty train and wait for it to just reverse direction and head toward KL Sentral. The platform at Titiwangsa is jammed with people waiting to rush on the train and grab a seat. But I’m already ON the train, and I just take a seat on this completely empty train before the doors even open. And then I can ride in comfort all the way to KL Sentral with no stress of waiting on crowded platforms. It’s a wonderful Planet Doug KL Travel Hack.
But once the travel hack was done, and I was sitting comfortably on the Monorail, I just rested my GoPro in my lap and closed my eyes. I was so tired. When I arrived at KL Sentral, I walked around a bit to get my bearings. I thought perhaps Jamie would be relying on me to point the way to various LRT and MRT stations and things like that, and I refreshed my memory so that I knew where everything was relative to where his airport bus would be dropping him off. I got a message from Jamie saying that his airport bus had run into traffic and it would take another 45 minutes to get to KL Sentral. And that was fine with me. I decided to go down to the underground area where the airport buses load and unload passengers and wait there. I wanted to be right there when the bus arrived so that I could take video of the moment Jamie got off the bus. It was the perfect plan… Except for how tired and disorganized I was.
The first problem in my plan was that I realized I hadn’t packed my other microphones. I had my own regular wireless microphone. But in all the fatigue and excitement, my other microphones had not made it into my knapsack. So even I DID want to get Jamie on camera talking about his travels, I couldn’t. I couldn’t put a mic on him. The second problem was that just before his bus arrived, I noticed that my GoPro battery was down to 1% power. Luckily, I caught it just in time, and I quickly got out a fresh battery from my orange pouch where I keep all my fully charged batteries. But when I put it the new battery into the GoPro, it read only 18% power! I guess I made a mistake and put an empty battery into the wrong pouch. But I figured 18% was enough to capture the moment Jamie got off the bus. I was tracking Jamie’s bus using the WhatsApp “Share Live Location” feature. I was very proud of myself that I was able to teach Jamie about this feature. He had never used it before. And so I was all ready with my GoPro recording and the bus just about to pull up. And THEN, the battery died and my GoPro shut down.
This has been happening a lot lately, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what has changed exactly, but a battery will indicate it has around 20% remaining, which is plenty of time. But then the battery will go from 20% or 18% to 0% in seconds, and the GoPro shuts down. So I completely missed the key moment when Jamie got off the bus. I was frantically trying to put in a new battery, and Jamie got off the bus and then disappeared up the stairs. I had told him in a message that I was waiting on the platform right where the bus stopped underground, but I guess that information didn’t fully register, so he didn’t even look at me sitting on the bench. He walked right by me and went up the stairs. So now I’m frantically putting in a new battery and putting my GoPro and Media Mod back together and then I go racing up the stairs to catch up with him. And that is a bit of a hopeless cause. Jamie is the ultimate walker, and under normal circumstances, I’d never be able to catch up with him. And fumbling with a GoPro, I’m ever slower. But Jamie was slowing down and looking around trying to find me, not realizing that I was behind him still making my way up the stairs.
The end result is that I don’t think I got any video of Jamie’s arrival and our initial meeting at all. All my plans came tumbling down through my dumbness and some GoPro quirkiness. Unless I’m mistaken, I think this change in my GoPro’s behavior started when I purchased two cheaper non-GoPro batteries. I wanted to save money, but I think these cheaper batteries don’t have the same power ratings and this confused my GoPro. Now when it tries to judge how much power is left in a battery, it gets confused. So that is a lesson for me that you should be consistent with your batteries. Just use GoPro Enduro batteries and that’s it. Don’t mix them with non-GoPro batteries. It confuses your poor camera when you do that.
I was still thinking that maybe I could record my conversation with Jamie even though I didn’t have an extra microphone to put on him. If I stand or sit close to him, maybe one microphone can pick up both our voices. But it had been a while since I’d seen Jamie, and I’d completely forgotten how soft-spoken he is. His voice has a deep register, and he speaks very quietly. The ONLY way to pick up his voice is to have a separate microphone on him. I even have trouble hearing him with my own ears. There’s no way my GoPro would pick up his voice. This was very similar to my travel companions on the Mystery Tour. Habib himself was relatively quiet, and his wife Shahnaz is even quieter than Jamie, so it was impossible to record her voice regularly. You’d have to have a separate microphone on her.
And then things got a bit more complicated, because it turns out that Bill, the International Bigshot, was also joining us for coffee. I didn’t know this, but Jamie had reached out to Bill and Bill had also come to KL Sentral to be there for the big moment of Jamie’s arrival. So even if I had my second Rode Wireless Go II microphone for Jamie, I didn’t have a third one for Bill. So now things were getting too complicated, and I gave up on any idea to record any of our conversation. I said this on video and then I shut down my GoPro just to enjoy a coffee and conversation with Bill and Jamie. Oddly enough, I did have that YouTuber feeling that now that I was just enjoying myself, I was wasting valuable time. It’s like everything in my life has to do double-duty. I want to do things that I find enjoyable and interesting and I want to spend time with people that I like and find interesting. But then I want those people and activities to also be available and willing to be fodder for Planet Doug. It’s a funny world I live in.
As far as videos go, I’m still working on the videos from the Malaysia Mystery Tour. But I’m almost done. I finished and uploaded five videos already. And the sixth video is a big one because I did several things in Ipoh in one day. I put all the video together into one timeline and it ended up being almost two hours long. I guess that will be the Extended Cut. Once the Extended Cut was done and exported, I went back and cut out the two big experiences from that day and made a separate thirty-minute video for each one. So now I have the Extended Cut which covers perhaps five events. And then I have a single thirty-minute video about visiting a famous cave temple and a single thirty-minute video about visiting a tin mining museum. I will post the cave temple first, then the tin mining museum, and then after a few days, I will post the Extended Cut, perhaps only to Patreon first and then make it public. Something like that.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a very fast Internet connection here. Uploading is quite slow for both a mobile Internet connection and the hotel’s WiFi. But I’m slowly getting it done.
And that is about all my stories for now. I have to decide which day I’ll be leaving for Port Dickson to get on my bicycle. That might be Monday, though I have an offer of a ride to Port Dickson on Wednesday. It might make sense to accept that offer of a ride. And today, I’m expecting another package to be delivered. This one will contain the new Ulanzi MT-44 action camera tripod. I’m excited about that. It will be yet another tool in my video toolbox.