Podcast: Indonesian eVOA || 2-Passports & Immigration || Flight to Banda Aceh (November 13, 2025)

Video Description:

When I flew from Kuala Lumpur to Banda Aceh, I decided not to take video of the first part of the journey. I had travelled from Malaysia to Sumatra quite a few times, and I had shot video of going to the airport in Kuala Lumpur multiple times already. And this time, I decided to leave my GoPro in my knapsack untouched until I landed in Banda Aceh and had gotten through Customs and Immigration. Once I was outside the airport and back in Sumatra, I would fire up the camera and start recording.

Therefore, I don’t have an official Planet Doug video about many of the things that happened along the way. And that gave me a LOT to talk about in this Behind-the-Scenes Podcast. I went back in time and discussed the somewhat frustrating process of applying for a new 30-day VOA. And then I talked in-depth about getting through immigration in Malaysia with both my old and new passports. That process was not NEARLY as easy as everyone assured me it would be.

I went to KLIA using the travel hack of riding the MRT to Putrajaya and then transferring to the KLIA Transit system. It’s slower than some other options, but very comfortable and much cheaper. And I describe that in detail in this podcast.

Then I had to face the little issues and adventures that come up in this modern times when dealing with security at airports and then boarding a low budget flight. Add all of this up plus the problems with my arrival in Banda Aceh and finding transportation to my hotel, I was quite tired when I finally arrived. I needed almost the entire next day just to rest and recover. And I took the time to record this podcast in the morning.

Hope you enjoy it!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome back to the Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast for Thursday, November 13th, 2025. It’s 11:00 in the morning and I’m sitting on my bed inside my hotel room at a hotel in Banda Aceh, Sumatra. And I’d like to tell you the name of the hotel, but it’s a real mouthful and I’m not really sure what it is. It’s something if you look on Google Maps it’s like the Hotel O Banda Aceh near the and then the name of the big mosque here in Banda Aceh formerly Wisata Satita or something like that. It’s like the craziest name I’ve ever seen for a hotel. But and when you arrive here the name outside like on the sign is something like Residencia or Tachita I don’t know how to pronounce it. Yeah there’s a whole story behind how I ended up here. I was back in Kuala Lumpur. My visa was expiring for Malaysia. So I needed to leave the country and I had a whole bunch of factors to consider. I’ll talk about that in a minute. And I chose to fly to Banda Aceh. And then once I had my flight booked, I was looking for a place to stay. I wanted to be in the downtown core where all the action is, all the busy streets, near the tsunami museum, near the rivers, near the famous mosque, just to be I wanted to land in a place where I could just step outside my door, be surrounded by restaurants, cafes, markets, convenience stores, all that kind of stuff. I didn’t want to be way out in the middle of nowhere. It can be interesting being out in the middle of nowhere to get your own local neighborhood to explore, but I wanted to be in a very busy active area. And then so I chose this hotel and I swear right up until now I chose this hotel in that area, clicked on it on Google Maps and then it gives you a listing of all of the prices for all the various booking options. So that’s how I normally do it. I end up with cheaper prices that way. So I saw the listing for Agoda. They had the cheapest prices. It was as low as 20 ringgit per night. It ranged from like 20 to 25 ringgit per night depending on what booking app you’re looking at. And then I said, “Okay, I’ll stay there.” Had great reviews. Everybody loved the place. It looked good. I looked at all the photos and I clicked on it and it took me to Agoda and I booked it. But then I was looking at the location on Agoda because it has a little map there and said here’s where it is. So I clicked on that and it was in a completely different spot like 3 or 4 kilometers away from the hotel I chose and it was this one. So even though I chose this other hotel and it was called Collection O Banda Aceh near the big mosque and I ended up at Hotel O Banda Aceh near the big mosque. I just ended up at a different hotel. I don’t know what happened. It could have been it could be Agoda’s mistake. It could be a Google Maps mistake. More likely I clicked on the wrong thing because I wasn’t thinking very clearly and I wasn’t very clear-headed. So I probably just clicked on the wrong location on the map or on Agoda. Whatever happened, I ended up here where I did not want to be. So that’s kind of the story of how I ended up here.

And this place is a very unusual I like it overall. I mean it’s still a low-budget place. I think you can get this room that I’m staying in. If you time it right, you can get it for like 20 ringgit per night. I’m still thinking in Malaysian currency. So, that’s like around 90,000 Indonesian rupiah. 100,000 rupiah basically would be what you would pay to stay here. 90 to 100,000.

And the building looks like it’s an old house, like a mansion that used to belong to a very wealthy family. Huge common areas on every floor. Big open areas. Every room has a lot of open space. But of course, it is a low-budget hotel, so things are broken. The roof is leaking. There’s leaks all over the floors. You got to be careful when you walk around. It’s as hotels go, it’s pretty broken down. Everything is sort of broken and barely holding together. It’s not a luxury hotel in any way. But my room is very spacious. It’s like a lot of open area, high ceiling, two twin beds. I have my own bathroom, but of course there’s no mirrors of any kind. There’s no facilities like they don’t give you’re not going to you’re not coming to a hotel like this expecting to get a blow dryer finding drinking water in your room. You’re not going to get a toothbrush and shampoo and soap and there’s no hot water. It’s just basically a bucket bath. You fill a bucket with water, then you dump bucket on your head and it’s cold water. And yeah, everything is like that. But if you’re comfortable in that environment, and I am, and I’m thinking more about the price more than anything, it’s yeah, a half decent place to stay.

And interesting when I first arrived here I was taken aback by just how spacious it was and I arrived in the dark so I couldn’t really figure out what was going on and I just wandered from floor to floor, shot a bit of GoPro video and recorded some of the place. They have a two or three different rooftop verandas. You can go outside and see the city, things like that. So I’m pretty happy here.

And when I got here, it was late at night. I had no water to drink. So I eventually, it took me a long time to get going because I was so tired after the flight. And I was so I don’t know, disoriented. I was unfocused. I just could not come to grips with what was going on for some reason. But eventually I went out into the streets to go to like a local shop. I went to an Indomaret. Yeah. My idea was to go to the Indomaret because at an Indomaret I know how to put money onto my Indonesian e-wallet and once I have money on my Indonesian e-wallet then I can transfer that money to my Indonesian SIM card app and then with that money I can buy a data package. So I wanted to get up and running if possible with my mobile phone. But I completely forgot that I was starting from zero. I had no money in my e-wallet and I had no data at all. So when I got to Indomaret, my idea was to buy credit for my e-wallet. But in order to buy credit, I needed internet access. But the only reason I was buying credit is because I didn’t have internet access. It was like one of those catch-22s I talk about all the time. In order to get on the internet, I needed to put money on my e-wallet. But in order to put money on my e-wallet, I needed internet access. So, you’re stuck in this loop and it’s kind of like, how do I get started? You have to get one of them before you can get the other. And then you get this feedback loop where you can keep updating one with the other. But when you’re starting from zero and zero on both accounts, you’re stuck. And then you have to find another way.

And I guess what I’m going to do maybe this afternoon, though, I don’t think I will this afternoon. I’m just too tired. I think I need to go to the Telkomsel Grapari office, see if my smartphone is blocked by customs because of the IMEI registration problem. I don’t know yet whether it’s blocked or not. I’m a little bit confused because this is the phone I was using in Sumatra last time I was here and I have an Indonesian SIM card and as far as I can tell the SIM card is still fine. It’s still valid. In fact, when I was looking at it the other day, I think it said it was valid until late 2026. So, I have an Indonesian SIM card. I have the app, but I have no data and no credit. But everything seems to be working fine. But that’s because right now I’m connected to Wi-Fi. So I can still use this phone on Wi-Fi. The problem comes when you try to connect to mobile internet. Then if your phone is blocked by customs, you won’t be able to. It won’t let you. Your SIM card. Everybody gets confused about this. Drives me crazy. I tell these stories all the time and then everybody gives me advice, but they usually don’t understand what I’m talking about. The SIM card is not the problem. The SIM card is fine. The phone is the problem because the phone has a serial number that they call the IMEI number and then you have to in Indonesia register that IMEI number with customs. And I won’t go into the whole story because it goes on forever. It’s too complicated. But it’s only when I try to connect to the mobile internet that the customs block has an effect. I can connect to Wi-Fi. And I don’t know how to find out if it’s blocked by customs until I actually go to buy data. And then once I have data in my SIM card, I’ve paid for it, I have a data package, then I go mobile internet, and then I’ll get a message that says, you can’t do that because your customs is blocking your phone.

And when I landed at the airport here in Banda Aceh, I thought I could get ahead of this problem because at the airport there is a customs office specifically for registering your IMEI number of your phone and that’s what you’re supposed to do as a foreigner. But even the rules there, everybody interprets the rules differently. But when I landed last night in the dark, exhausted, not thinking straight, I really didn’t want to deal with it. I just wanted to go to my hotel and collapse. But I thought, I’m here at the airport and let’s just see what can they do for me. So, I went into the customs office and I was just going to hand them my phone and try to explain to them my problem that I’m not here to register IMEI. The IMEI is already registered, but I think it’s blocked. Can you re-register at the airport and give me a 90-day period of being able to use it? Like can you do something for me to unblock my phone? But of course, that makes no sense to anybody, even at customs, because they’re expecting a foreigner to come in, hand over a brand new, fresh phone, and then they just go from there. Me trying to explain to them my problem. I knew that was going to be trouble, but I thought, “Ah, let’s try and get it done anyway.” So, I go into the customs office and there was about three people in there ahead of me. One man, a very beleaguered man sitting behind a computer at a desk and he had a woman in front of him. These are all Indonesians. None of them were foreigners. So, they must have bought a phone outside of Indonesia and now they have to register the IMEI to import it into the country. And who knows what the rules are for them. But there were these Indonesians in front of me and then the one woman already sitting at the desk and the process just went on and on. Like you’d swear you were in the middle of a Saturday Night Live skit that somebody must be punking you. It’s like come on, how can this be taking so long? There’s the scene in the movie Zootopia where at the DMV, all the DMV employees are sloths. That’s just how it is. At this place where I went, there was this older man sitting behind this computer with his shaking hand on a mouse and he’s got this woman in front of him and he’s looking staring at his lap at his computer screen like he’d never seen one before. And he’s like clicking and then moving the mouse looking around clicking and it’s like oh no this is not good and then he would speak to the woman and she would get out her passport and she had papers and he’s looking at the passport and he’s rifling through these papers and he goes back to his screen and click and it was so slow and was taking so long and she was there were three other people no two others because it was her and two other people. They were both ahead of me and it looked like both of them were going to take so long to complete. I was going to be there for who knows how long, an hour, hour and a half before he could even get to me. It felt like it. But I thought, let’s just do this. So now I’m sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. I felt like I’d been there for an eternity. And the very first person, the woman, was still not finished. Just it went on and on and on. It was so complicated.

And then another man, a customs agent, came in and I guess he was going to sit down at a new computer. So, there were going to be two men working. So, I was thinking, “Excellent.” But he came straight up to me and said, “So how long are you going to be in Indonesia?” And I said, “30 days. I have a 30-day visa.” And he says, “Oh, you don’t need to register. If you’re only going to be in Indonesia for 30 days, for less than 90 days, you don’t have to register the IMEI.” And so I’m like, but but but but but that that’s not my situation. And I went into the whole song and dance about how my phone I used it in Sumatra before and now I’m back, but my phone has already gone beyond the 90 days. It has been blocked by customs, I think. Like I’m here. Can you check my phone? See if it’s blocked because the IMEI is already registered. But before I even got five words out, his eyes just glazed over. And he says, “No, no, no. Not necessarily. You don’t need you don’t need. Go, you’re done. You’re done. You can you don’t have to do anything.” And I’m like, “But but can you?” And he says, “No, no, no. You’re okay. You’re okay.” And then he signaled to the other people, the Indonesians, come sit at my computer. And I didn’t even have a chance to do anything. So, at that point, I just gave up and left. Hopped in a taxi, came to this hotel.

So, now I don’t know whether my phone is going to work or not. Cuz I’m on like I said, I’m connected to Wi-Fi, but I also have mobile data turned on, and I have this memory before. Let me turn off Wi-Fi. Now I’m only looking for a mobile data signal. And I think in the past when it was blocked, I would get an error message. Even when I didn’t have any data, it would just be an error message. But I’m not getting any kind of an error message. So maybe by pure luck, this phone isn’t blocked anymore. But I won’t know until I try to get data package. So, I’m going to go to the Telkomsel office this afternoon or tomorrow and then try to get that sorted out. So, that’s one part of my story.

But now we have to go back in time because yesterday I made the decision not to really shoot a lot of video about the trip. So, normally when I shoot a YouTube video for Planet Doug, I start at the very beginning. I make a video about the day. So if I’m flying to Banda Aceh, I will start filming at my hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Fire up my GoPro and welcome to Planet Doug. Today I’m flying to Banda Aceh. So I have to get to the airport first and let’s go. And then I film the whole process leaving my hotel, getting to the airport, going through customs, going through immigration, the flight, the landing, all like from when I wake up in the morning to when I go to bed at night. I film the whole day. But I didn’t want to do that this time partially because I was so tired. I was so exhausted. I was flustered by everything I needed to do for this trip. And I’d done that so many times. I’ve flown into Sumatra many times. I’ve taken a ferry to Sumatra. I’ve sort of documented the experience of going to KLIA, the international airport in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve documented it many times. Going by bus, going by car, going by subway, and then express train. I’ve done it many, many times. And I just did. I thought I don’t I’m just not going to do it this time. So, I didn’t. But in a way that kind of threw me off because I’m so accustomed to doing that. My idea was to land in Banda Aceh and then as soon as I exit the airport then turn on the GoPro and then I can do the Itchy Boots thing like welcome to Indonesia and I can start the video bang when I land and it would be new and fresh. But I never do that. And then when I turned on my GoPro outside the airport here in Banda Aceh, I didn’t know what to say. It was like it wasn’t a natural starting point for me. Like I didn’t know why I was recording then because I normally start recording in the morning and I kind of fumbled and was like, “Okay, I guess I just babble a little bit.” And I took video of the taxi ride, video of arriving at my hotel, and then video going out on the streets and going to Indomaret to try to put money on my e-wallet. So, I did film my arrival, but it was all kind of weird and scattered and I was so tired. I didn’t know what I was doing and yeah, it was kind of weird. But anyway, so I did not film the whole story and that’s why I’m here recording the podcast because now I can tell the whole story in retrospect going all the way back to the beginning.

In a previous podcast, I think I told the whole story about getting my new Indonesian visa on arrival. So, I told that whole story in depth already, I think. But just to sum up quickly, the problem I had was that I have a new passport from Canada. My old passport, all the pages were full, so I had to get a new one. So, I entered Malaysia on one passport, but now I’m exiting and going to a new country on my new passport. So, everything was mixed up. And one of the things that turned out to be very mixed up was getting an Indonesian visa because when you do that, you go to the Indonesian website and you open an account. And I already have an account, but that account is connected to my old passport number. And when I started this process, I assumed all I needed to do was sign into my account and update the passport number. I have a new passport. Change the number. Change the photo and then I can just continue with the same account. But based on all the research I did, you can’t do that. When you open an account with Indonesian immigration with a passport number, it is locked. It is fixed to that passport number. So the only way you can start new with a new passport is to open a brand new account. But when I tried to do that, every attempt fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. Just an entire day of trying to open a new Indonesian immigration account. And everything I tried to do failed. And it turned out the problem was I’m trying to open a new account with a new passport number. That’s good. But I’m using the same email address, the same phone number, all the other data that’s connected to the other account. And as dumb as their computers are, they picked up on that. So when I tried to open it and use the same email address, it failed. And I just got a generic error message, it just said fail, right? It doesn’t tell you why. It doesn’t say the email address is already in use. Please choose a different one. No, that’s way too logical. That makes way too much common sense. It just fails and you don’t know why. And you try to figure it out on your own. I thought, oh, the email address. So, I tried to use my other main email address. It also failed because I have, Microsoft. Everybody has like a Microsoft and a Gmail and they act as backups one to the other. And I guess years ago I also went to Indonesia but I must have used both of them at some point. My Microsoft and my Gmail. So both of them I couldn’t use. So then I had to come up with a new email address to put in a third one and it was still failing. And then I realized ah the phone number is also the same because I’ve had the same Malaysian phone number for a long time. So then I changed the email address and the phone number address like everything I made everything brand new and fresh and then it finally went through and I managed to open a new account. I was like ah thank goodness. I was exhausted by the time that was done and I still hadn’t even applied for my visa yet.

So now that I had my new account, I settled in to apply for the new e-visa on arrival. And I also had trouble with that. I talked about that already. That the new Canadian passport, the information page, is like a thick piece of plastic. It’s not like a piece of paper anymore. It really feels like a thick piece of plastic because it has many many holographic layers, so many security codes. And getting a photograph of that page that is acceptable to the Indonesian computer system is very challenging because all of the holograms look like reflections. And the Indonesian immigration website has a rule that your photo of your passport has to be perfect. You can’t have your fingers sticking in frame. You can’t have a shadow. It has to be, the perfect shape and dimensions. It can’t be distorted and it can’t have any reflections. And I took picture after picture after picture after picture, uploading, uploading, uploading, uploading. And they were all rejected. But again, the system doesn’t tell you why. In fact, the message I got this time was said, “Please upload a valid passport.” That’s what the message said. So, I was like, “Whoa.” Like, it didn’t say the photo is unacceptable. Upload a new photo without reflections, without shadows, etc. It just said invalid passport. And I thought, “What the heck? It’s a brand new passport. It’s valid.” So, I thought I was in real trouble that my passport number, the way it was led, somehow or other, it was saying that isn’t even a passport. That’s what I thought the message said. So, I thought I was in real trouble. But then I went back to work with the photos and again, I worked for a very long time. Turned off all the lights. I’m in the dark. I’m holding up my passport using my phone and eventually I don’t know why this photo was any better than any of the others. They all look kind of the same to me, but I uploaded one and it was accepted. Apparently, that now was considered a valid passport. Again, the message should have said invalid photo or the photo does not meet our specifications, tell me something to give me some guidance, but it said invalid passport. But it turns out the passport was fine. It was the photo that was the problem.

So I finally got that done and I completed the application process and then I got my e-visa within 2 seconds. That’s the good thing about the Indonesian system. If you get the 30-day e-visa on arrival, at least in my case, the second payment goes through, you get it. You don’t have to wait 5 days. You don’t have to wait 2 weeks. You don’t have to sit there panicking that you’re not going to get your visa. I hit the submit payment button. I waited until payment went through. I was so happy. I was so excited that payment worked. I was like, “Yes, yes, yes.” And then ding. Oh, I got it. And it’s in the email. You get the actual passport as a PDF and you download it with a QR code and all that kind of stuff. And then you don’t have to print it out, but I print it out. I print out everything just in case. So, I have everything on my phone and I have all the, photo copies, printouts of it. And then I’ve got everything I need to get.

And then the next day, I went out to do last minute things. I like to have money in my hands before I go somewhere. I don’t like to land in a new country with none of the local currency. That’s just asking for trouble. I see so many people backpackers, YouTubers of course in particular cuz they’re the ones documenting all their trips and then they show up in a new country, they have no cash of any kind, nothing. And they have an ATM card and that’s all. And they just sort of go up to the first ATM they see and put it in. And of course it’s rejected and then there’s like, “Oh, I’m in big big.” That’ll be the title of their video. Disaster. I’m stranded in Indonesia. I have no money. I’m going to die. And that’ll be their YouTube video. And all I think about is, well, you’re an idiot. You’re not going to die and you’re an idiot. What happened to the old days? I remember in the old days, you would never go anywhere without emergency cash. You’ve got your traveler’s checks and then you’ve got your $500 in US currency in various denominations. You’ve got to have some $100 bills. You got to have some 50s, some 20s, some fives, some, you prepare in advance for these situations that when you can’t get money through the banks or today through an ATM, well, you got a $100 there, you go to a money changer, I got a 100 bucks and then you get your money. So, don’t give me these videos about how, oh, I’m going to die because I can’t get any money. Well, bring money anyway. So I bring US cash and in advance I get Indonesian rupiah. So I did that while I was in KL. Went to an ATM there. I withdrew Malaysian ringgit of course from an ATM and then I went to a money changer and I got millions of Indonesian rupiah. I keep hearing there’s a government program advancing right now in Indonesia. They’re going to lop off three zeros. So right now, everybody who comes to Indonesia is a millionaire because everything is in millions of rupiah. But now they’re just going to cut off three zeros and reprint all the currency. So a 100,000 rupiah note will suddenly be a thousand rupiah. Basically they just get rid of three zeros and but we’re not there yet anyway. So you end up with millions of rupiah, a big stack of 100,000 rupiah notes. So I had cash.

So when I landed and then I was packing and getting organized. You got to do so many different things. And then I was all ready to go to sleep. And this is so stupid. I had a list on my phone, a to-do list, and I’m ticking off everything. Everything from do laundry, repacking cuz I was switching from one bag to a backpack I had in storage. I had so many many things to do, getting the money. I had a lot of other stuff I needed to do. And I went through my entire to-do list. I got down to the last one, ticked it off, and I’m ready to go to bed, get a good night’s sleep, and then I remembered, oh, for Pete’s sake, the Indonesian arrival card. Like for me to forget to do that is ridiculous because I’m usually on top of these things. I’m overly concerned about all the steps you have to follow. And I was recently hanging out a lot with the American hobo, a cyclist YouTuber who was in he was in Malaysia for 5 months and I managed to meet him in KL and I was hanging out with him while he was getting ready to go to Indonesia himself with his bicycle. So I was going through all this stuff with him and so I was thinking about the new system for Indonesia like you used to have to go to different websites. So everything is digital now. So when you go to Indonesia you used to go to the immigration arrival website and you fill out the arrival card within 72 hours of your trip. And then you go to the customs website and you fill out the digital customs form. And then there was a health declaration. You had to go to three different websites, fill in three different forms digitally. I’m very familiar with the process, but recently Indonesia consolidated them. So now they’re all in one convenient website called All Indonesia. So, you have to go to this website, All Indonesia, and you fill out one form. And that one form has immigration arrival, customs declaration, and health declaration all in one form. And I told the American hobo all about this. I’ve been thinking about it. I’d gone to the website myself to look at it, to learn how it all works. And then here, my trip to Sumatra, I didn’t have it on my to-do list. I mean, it was so natural to me knowing I had to do this. It never occurred to me to put it on the to-do list. Like, why would I ever forget? And I totally forgot.

So, there I am. The night before my flight, which was the next day, I still hadn’t filled out the arrival card. So, I was like, “Ah, I’m so tired. I just want to go to sleep.” But now, I had to start all over again. And then I went to the All Indonesia website. And then I’m trying to do it carefully. I don’t want to make any mistakes. Of course, you have to put in your passport number accurately, etc. Everything has to match perfectly with your passport with your visa application. All three have to be in lock step. They have to be perfectly in sync or you get into trouble. So, you really have to concentrate. Don’t make a mistake. So I went through that and I gave air quotes about the convenient all Indonesia system because you have to give your address in Indonesia like the hotel where you’re going to stay and I thought okay that should be pretty simple. I know I had the address in advance. And then you go down to that part of the form and there’s a drop-down menu. You can select from residence, hotel, or other. So, of course, I’m staying at a hotel. I click on hotel and then it gives you a drop-down menu. Stick with me here. A drop-down menu of all the hotels in Indonesia. And you’re supposed to find your hotel in that list.

It is so insane. I don’t even know how to talk about it because I was expecting well okay hotel and now you have a blank form and you write in the name, address, and phone number of your hotel. But you can’t do that. It gives you a drop-down list and you have to search through the list to find your hotel. That’s the only way to choose your hotel. And I think it goes without saying that this hotel, this weird place with the crazy name, the Hotel O Banda Aceh near the big mosque, formerly Wisata Satita. Well, it’s not on the list. I mean, it’s not there. I mean, you can start typing in and then you start typing in letters and the drop-down list changes to match what you’re typing in, but obviously this hotel is not on that list. So, I can’t actually tell them where I’m staying. It’s impossible. So, then I was just looking for any hotel in Banda Aceh, but I couldn’t find one. It was so weird. Figured I went to Google Maps and I’d find a hotel like a normal bigger hotel, a more popular one that should be on the list and then I’d try typing it in and it wouldn’t come up. I’d go get another one, it wouldn’t come up. No hotels in Banda Aceh would appear in this drop-down menu. And you can’t just pick a hotel in Jakarta or Bali, someplace like that, because this is linked to your immigration office. That’s the key thing. That’s why they want to know about your address because if you pick a hotel in Jakarta, it automatically puts into the immigration office field the Jakarta immigration office closest to that hotel. So if you just say ah I’ll just put in any old hotel name and you happen to pick a hotel in Denpasar. Well, when you have trouble with your immigration, with your visa, you have to go to the immigration office in Bali, and there’s no getting around that problem. They will force you to do that. You got to fly across the country just to deal with a visa problem. So, you got to be very careful when you fill out these forms. So, I really wanted to get at least a hotel in Banda Aceh. It doesn’t have to be my hotel, but it needs to be in this city. And I couldn’t find one. Even the biggest five-star resorts were not showing up in that list for me no matter what I did.

So then I actually went to AI I think I was using Grok at the time and I explained this problem to Grok and Grok actually gave me a useful suggestion and says oh why don’t you try typing Banda Aceh into the form and then maybe you’ll get a list of Banda Aceh hotels which doesn’t make any sense because as you type in letters it populates with hotels that start with those letters that’s how it’s supposed to work. But I thought, I don’t know. I’ve tried everything else. I’ll try this. I typed Banda Aceh into the And then all the Banda Aceh hotels showed up. I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. That’s how it works.” Anyway, of course, my hotel wasn’t there. None of the low-budget hotels were there. So, the whole system to me is insane. They basically tried to create a drop-down menu of every hotel in Indonesia. Can you imagine how many thousands of hotels there are? Talking about coast, depending upon real hotels, hostels, capsule hotels and these hotels are constantly opening, closing, changing their names, changing their locations. It would be how can anybody on earth maintain a database of all the hotels in Indonesia? It’s insanity to even think about it. But that appears to be what they did.

But anyway, once I typed in Banda Aceh, I got a list of some of the hotels in the city and I just picked one that looked reasonable like because I wanted to pick one. I didn’t want it to be way out of my price range because it’s possible that you arrive at immigration, they look at your arrival card and they say, “Oh, you’re staying at this hotel. Show me your reservation.” And then I’m stuck because I’m not actually staying there. And they could, this happened to me once before, coming to Indonesia, way before I was a YouTuber, and immigration took me into a back room and forced me to make a reservation at the hotel that I had listed, even though it was like way out of my price range. So, in this case, I’m looking for a hotel that is on the list, which means it’s a nicer hotel, but I could still in an emergency come up with the 150 ringgit to pay for a room at that hotel if they force me to. So, anyway, I finally found one of these hotels. I was kind of in the sweet spot that looked like it had a, nice clear name. I could, I can’t afford the price, but in an emergency, I’d have no choice. And then I like I wouldn’t want to stay at like pick a name where it’s like a thousand ringgit a night. That would be insane. But anyway, I tried to find one and I put that in and then the immigration office filled out with the Banda Aceh immigration office. I was like, “Oh, hallelujah. Finally.” And I have no idea what time this was. I was working on this so late and I finally got it all figured out. Checked it, double checked it, triple checked it. Everything looked good. I submitted it and I got my arrival card, QR code. Everything was done and I had it on my phone. So, finally I was good to go.

But then came another problem. This next problem isn’t really related to the trip going from Malaysia to Indonesia, visas and money changing and transportation. It’s not really connected to that, but in a way it is because I’ve had this ongoing drama with my Canadian credit card, the only credit card that I have. And it was cancelled because of fraud somehow. Yeah, there was a risk of fraud on my account and my bank cancelled it, sent out a new card and there happened to be a postal strike in Canada. So, the card was delayed. There was no clue when it was finally going to arrive and I was waiting and waiting and waiting and the new credit card finally arrived at my address in Canada. And then my brother in Canada, he helps me out with all these things. He checks my mail. So I was constantly calling him and then he one day I called him like, “Oh, recently it just happened.” And he says, “Yeah, it arrived.” So over the phone, he could tell me my new credit card number and expiry date and CCV code. So I had all the information. I didn’t have the physical card, but I had all the information about the card. And then I went to my banking app to activate the card. And then when I went to activate it, I got the message saying, “Well, we’re going to send you a security code and the only way we will send you this code is by making a phone call to your landline number in Canada.” So they have a computer and the computer calls my phone number in Canada. Somebody has to answer the phone and then a computer will say your security code is and tells them the code and then you have two minutes to enter it into your app to activate the credit card. And it doesn’t take a genius to see a few problems with that. The main one being I’m on the other side of the planet. I’m not there beside that phone. And at the moment neither was my brother. He wasn’t beside that phone either. And I tried to set up this telephone tag with my brother that I call him. He calls somebody that’s near that phone. That person can answer the phone quickly. Call my brother. My brother, I call him. And then I can get the code within the 2-minute window. But it turns out the people who could be beside that phone were out for the weekend. There was nobody there. So, I was like, “Ah, I finally got my new credit card, but I can’t activate it.”

But then it turned out I could work out the logistics that my brother, he was going to be at the location where this phone is, and if I’m communicating with him, I can get him to be sitting beside that phone. And then I will call him and then we can set It’s like a whole James Bond operation. And it’s like a heist we’re setting up where I call him on that landline phone from Malaysia and say, “Okay, we’re good to go. I’m going to hang up. I’ll activate the card online.” And then you hang up. You wait for the call. Answer the call. As soon as you get the code, hang up. I’ll call you back. Answer the phone. Give me the code. I’ll enter it. We got to get all this done in 2 minutes. It’s just nuts. Get Yeah, it’s just nuts.

So anyway, this was all set up for the one time my brother was going to be sitting beside that phone, but it turned out I totally forgot about this. The day that he could be there was the day of my flight. I’m supposed to be waking up, packing up, and getting ready to go to the airport to go to Sumatra. But no. Well, what I wanted to do was sleep in as long as possible, but now I had to because of the time difference, like 12-hour time difference. I had to wake up early so that I could start doing this banking app thing with my brother. So, I had to set an alarm, wake up early in the morning in Malaysia in my hotel there and then, take a shower, have a cup of coffee, wake up because I needed to be on I needed to be sharp to do this. I couldn’t be, just kind of stumbling around. I had to be fully awake and alert. So, I woke up early, showered, shaved, had a cup of coffee, fired up my computer, fired up my phone, logged into my mobile banking app. I’ve got like everything ready to go again, like a Mission Impossible sequence, and then I take a deep breath, okay, here we go. Few deep breaths and then I call my brother. Oh, and at the very last minute, one issue I have with people in Canada in general is they’re not online like Asia has leapfrogged the Western world in my opinion and I see that in my daily life all the time. No matter what you’re talking about, airports, mobile connectivity, the internet, Wi-Fi speeds, mobile banking, QR code, e-wallet, cashless. Asia is living in the future. Canada is still way back in the past. People still use landlines. The only phone they’ll have is a landline. And all my friends and my brother, they fall in this category where they don’t even have smartphones. So I can’t even communicate in real time with my brother because he doesn’t have a phone. He does not have a phone. So it’s not like I’m not connected with him on WhatsApp. So it’s much more difficult. The only time I can get in touch with him is if he’s at home and I call him on his home phone and it rings and he answers it. It feels like I’m dealing with people who still live in the 18th century. It feels like that.

But anyway, so even in the middle of all this, I can’t do things through WhatsApp or anything like that. But then I remembered where the phone is, there’s also a computer. And years ago, I would communicate with my brother on Facebook Messenger. So when I called my brother in the morning, I says, “Oh, do you remember? I think you have a Facebook account, right?” And then he of course he’s not online. He doesn’t he himself he doesn’t have a computer, doesn’t have a smartphone. He was like, “Yeah, I think I do.” So then I had to sit there on the phone walking my brother through getting back onto Facebook and then he has to log into his account, remember his password. So when he finally got into Facebook, then I had to help him find Facebook Messenger. And then once he was on Facebook Messenger, I sent him a message and it popped up on his computer. It’s like, ah, yes, that because now he can send me the security code on Facebook. So we don’t have this delay of him hanging up his phone, me guessing that it’s done and calling him back. So now he can just put the code into Facebook Messenger.

So, in the end, it all worked out and the whole James Bond Mission Impossible thing worked. I called my brother, he hung up, I activated the computer, called his number, he answered the phone, got the code, hung up, put the code into Messenger, I read it on my laptop, entered it into my banking app, and we got it done within the window. So, it was such a huge relief. Amazing. Just waves of relief going through my body that I finally got this done because I’ve been hitting I’ve been hit with endless Yeah, I just got another one this morning from an online account saying, your account is about to be cancelled. We’re going to delete everything because you haven’t paid because my credit card doesn’t work anymore. And anyway, so it’s been a real problem for me. So finally I had a working credit card.

And then something good happened which is interesting because I have one smartphone that I use only for all of my banking and stuff like that. So that’s my important phone. And then when I did all this on that phone and then after I input the security code, I got a message from my bank that said, “Would you like to register this phone for push notifications?” And I was like, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, I want to do that so badly if that’s possible.” Cuz I think if I have this phone officially linked to my mobile banking app, I think they can send security codes through a push notification to this phone. And I was never able to do that in the past. I couldn’t set it up. There’s all kinds of barriers. You have to sort of anyway I couldn’t do it. But they were giving me the chance to do it because I just did this security code system. So they thought, “Oh, okay. This is really him. He got the code. Everything looks good. This really is the owner of this bank account. Hm. Would you like to have push notifications on this phone?” I’m like, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, please. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” Just like, when people on YouTube say, “Smash that like button.” I wanted to smash that yes button to push notifications. And I assumed it would say no. I assumed there would be another step, something I wouldn’t be able to do, some requirement I could not fulfill because I’m not physically in Canada. But I hit I didn’t smash it. I was very careful, very gentle. You don’t hit these buttons twice. So, I just kind of pushed the button and it worked. So, now I have push notifications for mobile banking. So, that could make my life I wish I could have done that like five years ago. That would have been a big help to me. But finally I may have found a way to communicate with my bank and get security codes in an easier fashion. And my credit card, my new credit card is fully set up. New credit card, new passport, visa for Indonesia, arrival card for Indonesia, customs declaration, health declarations, flight was booked, confirmed, checked in. Everything was done. All I needed to do was go to the airport.

So there I was in my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. This was still relatively early in the morning when I got all this done. And because I had been so busy, of course, I’d been working on YouTube videos at the same time. I talk about all this official bureaucratic logistical stuff like it takes up my entire day, but in fact, most of the time what I’m doing is working on YouTube videos. I was still editing videos, trying to get a bunch of videos completed so I could upload them to my YouTube channel while I still had good Wi-Fi in Malaysia. So, the vast majority of my time was spent editing and uploading video. So, with all of this, all these added problems, I wasn’t quite as fully packed as I wanted to be in the morning. I kind of put some of that aside, thinking, “Okay, I’ll be up early in the morning.” My flight wasn’t until about 5 in the afternoon. So, it was like a 5:00 p.m. flight, 4:50 to be exact, but let’s call it 5:00 p.m. So, I had it felt like I had a lot of time. I had the whole morning to get ready and to pack check out at noon and then that would be 5 hours before my flight and I wanted to get to the airport early because I still had the two passport problem to deal with and I didn’t know how that was going to turn out. I wanted to get to the airport as early as possible to deal with that. And in my head I kind of did rough calculations and I thought, “Oh yeah, okay. I think I have more than enough time. I don’t really have to worry about it. Check out and just sort of go to the airport. I don’t have to rush. I don’t have to worry about it and I’ll get there in plenty of time because that’s like 5 hours right from checkout until my flight takes off.”

But it turns out the timing was actually pretty tight because well 5:00 flight they you should be there by 3. So now it’s actually only three hours from checkout to arrival time, but I wanted to be there three hours early to give me one hour to just in case there’s a big immigration problem. So then I wanted to be there at 2, but then leaving at noon, it would probably take me 2 hours to get to the airport. So even leaving right away at noon, I in my mind I was still getting to the airport barely in time. That’s how it works in my brain. But anyway, I started packing and organizing in the morning and I’m very methodical when it comes to this and I was even more methodical because I was now traveling with a backpack which I hadn’t used for a long time. So, I had been using sort of like bicycle pannier bags and my bicycle trailer, but now I was switching over to an actual backpack. So, all of my packing systems had to be adjusted. So, what I normally do is I don’t just grab things and throw them in my backpack like it’s a big empty bag and I just throw everything in. I take every single item in my life, every bag that I have and start from the very beginning and just open it up and take out all the contents. And because I’m doing an international flight, I also do this just to make sure you don’t accidentally end up with a pair of scissors in your carry-on bag. You’re not accidentally carrying anything at all that the airline might have an issue with. So, I start from the very beginning. Like, I have this little bag, for example. This one contains all of my flash drives, SSD drives, cables, things like that. And it’s all in there. You can hear all the things rattling around. But I don’t just take this bag, think, “Oh, it’s okay.” And throw it in. What I do is I open up this zippered compartment, take out everything that’s in that compartment, line it up on my bed, and I go through every item one by one. Then kind of refresh my memory about, oh, okay, this is my, SD card reader. Okay, that’s cool. That goes in there. This is my, travel flash drive with all of my important documents on it. Okay, that goes in there. This is my secure flash drive. Like this one needs a password to get into it. So all of my ID like sensitive documents, everything goes in there. It’s protected by like hardcore encryption password access. And then I have another card reader. So I go through that zippered compartment. Then I open up the other one. I dump out everything that’s in this compartment. I go through item by item. And there’s some items I don’t need anymore and I take them out and I just oh I don’t need this anymore. I give it to somebody or leave it behind. And every single bag I have I go through it one by one. My passport bag, my money pouch, documents pouch, every my toiletries kit. I go through every bag item by item by item. Open up empty out all the contents and repack everything. Sort it all and then put it into my backpack.

So that’s what I was doing in my hotel in the morning. And then time started to get away from me a little bit and then I realized, oh, it’s checkout time. It was almost 12:00 noon. And what I was doing as well, every time I finished packing one bag, like I took my carry-on bag and I did a test packing. I put everything that goes into my carry-on bag is like the most important things. Everything of value goes into my carry-on bag. So, my laptop, tablet, smartphones, GoPros, and of course, these days, you can’t put batteries in your check-in bag. So, even like all my extra GoPro batteries, Insta360 batteries, all of that I had to remove from my check-in bag, put it all into my carry-on bag, because they will ask you, “Are there any batteries in your checked bag, in my backpack, and if you say yes, you got to open it up and take out the batteries.” So, I go through things very carefully, but that makes my carry-on bag really heavy because my laptop is a bit of a beast. It’s a heavy, powerful laptop, so it weighs a bit. And then I had am I still under the 7 kg? So, I fully pack it. It’s ready to go. And my hotel lobby actually had a scale and you can weigh your luggage there. So, I went down to the lobby. I weighed my carry-on bag and it was just under seven kilograms, even with everything in it. Just under 7 kg. So, that was good. It was heavy, but at least I was under the limit. Then I did the same thing with my full backpack. Put everything in my backpack, everything else that was left over, brought it down to the lobby and weighed it. And it was 13 kg. So again, it felt pretty heavy when I put it on, but it was within cuz I have a 20 kg baggage limit for my flight. So it was well under 20 kg. So total weight for all my gear was 20, but it was 7 + 13 for 20 kg. So I was fine with that.

But then I realized it was almost 12:00, so checkout time. So I spoke to the clerk there. I know them quite well. I stayed a long time at the Raja Bot Hotel and we’ve had lots of long conversations and they know me quite well. I stayed there a long time. I consider myself a good guest because even when I stay at a hotel, I clean my own room. I tell them you don’t need to clean my room. I clean everything. Even when I check out of the room, I clean the whole room top to bottom before I leave. I bring out all my own garbage. I wipe down the bathroom. I soap it up. Scrub everything down, sweep the floor, take out all the garbage. I even make the bed before I go out because I want them to see at a glance that everything is still there. I didn’t steal the pillows. I didn’t steal the comforter or the towels. I make the bed with the comforter, the pillows, I put the towels, I lay them out. So, I make everything perfect. They don’t have to do anything really to clean the room. So, I think of myself as a pretty good hotel guest. So, I think the hotel can make a little bit of an exception for me from time to time. So, I spoke to the guy and I said, “I’m running a little bit late. Check out is like in 10 minutes, but I want to take a shower. I haven’t showered yet. I want to take a shower, shave. Can I check out at 12:30? Is that okay?” Like 30 minutes late. Cool. And then the hotel clerk, he didn’t seem happy about it, which kind of bugged me. Again, I stayed there for weeks. Never cost them a penny because I never had to clean my room. And I thought, half an hour late check out in a casual hotel like this. It’s a reasonable ask, I thought, but he seemed kind of like he didn’t like that and that kind of bothered me. But then he did say, “Okay, okay, 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Okay, late check out 30 minutes. No problem.”

So then I went up to my room and I got everything ready to go, but I still needed to take a shower. So I climb into the shower. I’ve got the water running. I’m soaping up, taking a shower, going to shave. And suddenly I hear thundering on my door. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Hammering on my door. And I’m like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Cuz it now it was like 5 after 12. And apparently the guy who cleans the rooms, nobody told him about the late checkout arrangement. Or maybe they told him and he didn’t understand. One issue I’ve noticed with hotels in Malaysia, a lot of the workers are immigrant workers. So, they’re not from Malaysia. They could be from Bangladesh, from Nepal, from any number of countries. And language like being able to speak English and good customer service skills are not requirements for getting one of these jobs. So quite often these people, the service people in hotels in Malaysia are not always very good at their jobs and they don’t speak any English. Security guards in particular are a big problem because so many security guards in Malaysia are hired from other countries and they’re the ones controlling access and yet and they’re the ones carrying weapons and things like that. And then when you have to deal with them, it turns out you have trouble communicating with them because they’re not actually Malaysians and they get very hardcore about the rules and they seem very angry all the time. So I don’t have a good feeling about a lot of these like security guards and house cleaners.

Anyway, this guy was just pounding on my door and I’m in the middle of taking a shower. So now I’m like, “Ah.” So I’m and I’m rushing. I’m trying to get to the airport to fly to Sumatra. I’m not in the greatest of moods, but I don’t have a choice. I got to go answer the door. So, I turn off the water. I rinse. I’m toweling. I have to get dressed, pulling on shorts and a t-shirt. I go to open the door, and there’s this guy looking very angry with me. What are you doing? Check out, check out. He didn’t actually say anything. He just looked angry. And then I just said to him, “Oh, the late checkout 12:30, like 15 minutes, 30 minutes.” He said it was okay. And this guy was just not having it. He was standing at the door looking at me, looking like, “Hey, dude.” I didn’t get upset with him. I didn’t argue cuz he didn’t speak any English anyway. But he was really upset. He looked very unhappy. Then again, I’d seen a lot of him in that hotel. He was never happy. He had a very very gloomy face. So anyway, he finally just started walking away, but he kind of looked at me, took out his phone, and he’s like calling somebody, and he’s all upset like, well, this is not how I wanted to start my day. And it gave me a kind of a negative feeling about the hotel. All of a sudden, it’s like, ah, this is not a good way to leave. But anyway, I asked for permission. 30 minute checkout. Everything was approved. So, I just closed the door, locked it again, and said, “Okay, dude. I don’t know what you’re dealing with in your life, but you’re just going to have to wait. I’m just I’m not going to rush. I’m just going to do what I need to do, and you do what you need to do.”

So, anyway, I finished my shower. I shaved. Though to be honest that encounter upset me enough that it threw off my rhythm and I don’t know how many people out there in the world can relate to this but if you’re shaving and I was shaving with kind of a new razor a very sharp one you have like muscle memory like when you’re shaving you do it in a certain way that you’re accustomed to doing it you don’t have to think about it and when you do it naturally. You don’t end up cutting yourself. But as soon as you get thrown out of your rhythm, you’re thinking about things, you’re stressed out, and now you’re trying to shave faster, things go wrong. And I cut myself to pieces. I cut myself under my nose here. I was just like bleeding down. I cut myself on the chin. I was bleeding. I was just bleeding all over the place. I thought, “Oh, cuz this is such a now you’re trying to pack up. You’re trying to get ready and you’ve got blood everywhere and you’ve got your serviette and you’re like trying to stop the bleeding while you’re packing up to go to the airport and it’s like I did not want to deal with this cuz I’m aware of this. It’s like usually the day when you’re under the most time pressure, that’s always the day like you have a job interview or something. That’s the day you end up cutting yourself badly and you’re bleeding from your ears, you’re bleeding from your lips and then you go into the interview and you come out of the interview later on and you look in the mirror at yourself, you got blood all over the place and you didn’t even realize it was there. You look a mess.” Anyway, that’s what happened this time because of that guy pounding on my door. He upset my routine. So, fully packed, bleeding all over the place. Ready to go to the airport.

The actual trip to the airport, I think it went fairly smoothly. There’s no big drama there, I don’t think. I did the travel hack. So I was right at the Chow Kit monorail and even though I knew it would take longer in the end, what I decided to do was ride the monorail from Chow Kit to Titiwangsa and then at Titiwangsa right there I can transfer to the Putrajaya MRT line and then ride the MRT all the way to the end of the line at Putrajaya Central. And at Putrajaya Central, you exit and then you scan back in. It’s like a two-minute walk basically to get from the MRT station to the I don’t know what they call it, the KLIA express train station, the tracks there that take the express train to the airport. So you can transfer very very quickly and then there you can take the KLIA transit train. This is very important because there’s two different trains running, at least two different trains running on that track. The KLIA Express, which leaves from KL Sentral, it’s an express, which means it doesn’t stop. It goes from KL Sentral to the airport. It just blasts through all these intermediate stations. So, if you’re hoping to, if you’re looking at that schedule thinking you’re going to get that train at one of these stations, you’re not. The train is just going to blast through. You’re there to get the KLIA transit train which actually stops at the intermediate stations. So you can take the MRT to Putrajaya, transfer to the KLIA station and then wait for the next transit train to stop. And that’s what I did and everything kind of worked out very well for me.

Though there were a couple of gotchas along the way. One is just as I was approaching Putrajaya Central on the MRT, it occurred to me that I want to get this done very very quickly. Like I looked online for a schedule and I guess I looked at the wrong schedule because it looked like there was a train coming in 20 minutes and if I missed that one, the next train wasn’t for two hours and then I wouldn’t be able to get to the airport in time. So suddenly I thought, “Oh my I didn’t think it was that serious.” So I thought, “Oh man, I’m in trouble now. If I miss this train, I’m going to miss my flight. How am I going to get to the airport?” So I was kind of freaked out. So I started doing some research and I wanted to know how quickly can I get from one station to the other? And I didn’t want to stop to buy a ticket from one of the kiosks because who knows with my e-wallet maybe that takes time to register, do this, do that, hit a lot of buttons. And I wondered, oh, can I just use my Touch ‘n Go card and just beep in and that would be the fastest way possible. And I didn’t know if this was a possibility or not. So I checked online. And I did some Google searches and some AI questioning and they says, “Yeah, you can use your Touch ‘n Go card just like on the MRT.” But the catch is you have to have a minimum of 20 ringgit on your Touch ‘n Go card, which I didn’t know. And then there was a woman on the MRT with me sitting across from me with suitcases like with rollers and I thought, “Ah, she’s probably doing the same thing I did.” And she was a local person, a Malaysian. So I asked her, excuse me, are you going to the airport using the KLIA transit train? She says, “Yeah.” And I asked her, “Oh, can I get on that train using my Touch ‘n Go card?” And she said, “Yes, you can, but” and she repeated what I’d heard, “You have to have a certain amount on your card.” She didn’t know how much it was. But she says, “Yeah, if you don’t have enough, even if you have enough on your card to pay for the fare, that’s not enough. You have to hit a certain minimum amount in total.” And she didn’t know what that was. So, I thought, “Oh, okay. Okay.”

So, I just had seconds to do this cuz we were arriving at Putrajaya Central pretty quickly. So, I quickly got out my Touch ‘n Go card, opened up my Touch ‘n Go app, and then I did the NFC transfer. I put my card on the back of the phone. I’m very proud of myself that I know how to do this. And then from the Touch ‘n Go app, I transferred. I could see the balance on my card. And it’s a good thing I did this because my balance was like six ringgit, nowhere near enough. So, okay. So, I transferred just to be safe, I transferred 50 ringgit from my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet to my Touch ‘n Go card, assuming 50 ringgit has to be more than enough to satisfy the system. So, luckily I checked this just in time because then I got off the MRT, scanned out of the MRT system, but then I had to scan back in to the KLIA train system, and it worked. Beep. And I went straight down to the tracks.

But then it turned out that things weren’t as serious as I thought cuz when I got down there I looked up at the sign and the sign said 7 minutes until the next train. So I was patting myself on the back going cuz had I arrived 7 minutes later I would have missed that train and maybe missed my flight. But then I asked some people waiting for there’s one guy he looked like a pilot. He had the pilot luggage and the pilot hat and everything. I went up to him and I asked him, “Oh, do you do this trip all the time by this train to the airport?” He says, “Yeah, I take this train all the time.” Being a pilot, makes sense. And I asked him, “Well, how often do these trains run, these transit trains?” And he said, “Every 30 minutes.” So, I was like, “Ah, okay. I didn’t know that.” I guess I thought I had done all the research I needed to do for this trip, but then I’d still find out little things like, “Oh, I should have found this out in advance. I forgot to find out about the schedule for the transit train.” And it turns out I was running a lot later than I expected, and I wasn’t going to get to the airport 3 hours early as I’d hoped. I wasn’t even going to get there 2 hours early. So, if all of this screwed up, I could have been in trouble. So yeah, I didn’t plan I thought I had planned ahead like a maniac and it turns out I didn’t even plan ahead enough, which is crazy. A 1-hour flight across the Strait of Malacca you’d think would be the easiest thing in the world, but for me it was a huge undertaking. When did the world get so complicated? I thought the internet was supposed to make it simpler, but it seems to have made it more complicated than otherwise. You have more control and more power in your life because of the power of the internet and smartphones. But it also means you have to do more. I think though that’s how it works out.

But anyway, the pilot told me there was a train every 30 minutes. So even had I missed that one, I would have waited 30 minutes and the next one would have come. At least that’s what he told me. I haven’t confirmed that that’s true or not, but anyway, that travel hack of course takes much longer than taking a Grab, taking the KLIA Express or even taking the airport bus from KL Sentral. All three of those are faster kind of the bus maybe is the same. The bus is a bit slower, but taking the travel hack is a lot cheaper because you pay for an MRT ride and then you pay for just the last section of the KLIA train system. So, it ends up being much much cheaper than taking KLIA Express. So, it’s kind of a popular kind of a well-known travel hack.

So, I get to the airport feeling pretty good about myself, but I’m feeling kind of nervous because I still got the two passport things to deal with. Hey, I got my luggage tag. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, but I figured I had purchased my flight with my new passport, my new passport number. So, as far as AirAsia was concerned, that’s the only passport number they know about for this flight. So, I figured I could just go through the check-in process using my new passport and I didn’t have to tell anybody at AirAsia. But just to be sure, I went up to an AirAsia employee, explain my issue to them. Old passport, new passport. What do I do? Do you have any idea? Do I have to check in in a different way because I entered Malaysia on this passport, but I’m exiting on this one? Does that cause any trouble? And according to the AirAsia people, as far as they’re concerned, getting on their flight doesn’t matter. You can just do whatever you normally do. This only matters when you get to immigration. As far as checking in for your flight, just go get your luggage tag as normal. You’re already checked in for your flight. So, just put on the tag, go to the self drop off area, drop off your backpack.

So, I did that. I got my luggage tag. I had to sit down for a minute because I had to rearrange my bag a little bit. I remember I realized I had put a power bank or a Yeah, power bank. A power bank in my checked luggage cuz I have two of them. I have a big one and a small one. And I thought the small one would be enough to get me to my hotel in case my phone ran out of power. I didn’t need to carry the big one. And my carry-on bag was pretty heavy. I didn’t want to also carry my heaviest power bank. But then I heard somebody talking about how you can’t have power banks in your checked bag. And if they ask you about that and they find out you have one, then no, that’s not good. So, I had to reopen my backpack and then take out the power bank and put it in my carry-on bag. So, I had both power banks in my carry-on bag. And then I repacked and resealed everything. I dropped off my luggage. I had a little bit of trouble with the scanner. The last time I did this, they have new self-check-in scanner systems at KLIA, and it wouldn’t work for me. No matter what I did, it’s supposed to read your luggage tag automatically from a camera up above the conveyor belt. And it wouldn’t work. My bag would go forward, error, go back, try again, error, error, error, and I eventually had to give up. And I had to go to another self-check-in place where they still use the older handheld scanners cuz then I could hold it right up against my luggage tag, beep, and it read it. But reading it from a distance, it failed. And no matter how many times I tried, it didn’t work. So, I was hoping this time it would work better because I just ended up at one of the new machines again. And I put down my backpack. But sure enough, no, no, no error. It couldn’t read the luggage tag. So, I had to two or three times try it. And eventually, it did register. And then I checked in my bag and then things got a little bit weird because they always do.

The funny thing is here is that I mean I think about things a lot. I’m very interested in systems organization. I like to know how things work. So you could say I overthink. And people do leave comments on my videos from time to time saying you’re overthinking this. It’ll be fine. Just go to the airport, two passports. You don’t have to do anything special. Just go up to immigration, hand over two passports, boom, boom, they’ll transfer it. You’re done. Like, don’t worry about it. Everything, you don’t have to do anything in advance. Everything will be fine. Lots of people told me that. Haha. But they don’t live on Planet Doug. They live on a planet where things make sense, where things are logical. I don’t live in that world. I live on Planet Doug, hence the name of the YouTube channel.

And so I’m going through the first stage of immigration, I guess. There’s an area you go through where there’s a man on a stool who checks your boarding pass against your passport. It’s a security check. So he was the first official airport immigration person I encountered. So I went up to him, told him my issue. Old passport, new passport. What do I do? He said, “You don’t have to do anything. We have an autogate system here. Just take your new passport, go to the autogate, scan it, you’re done. You don’t have to do anything.” And I thought, “Whoa, really?” I stopped cuz I thought, “Well, that really doesn’t make any sense to me.” And I didn’t really trust him, but he was an immigration official, the first one I encountered, and that’s what he told me. Just go to the autogate, scan out with your new passport, you’re done. Don’t have to worry about it. So, I was just about to walk away and do that. But then I stopped and I went back to him and I says, “Okay, are you sure?” And I explained to him, I took out my old passport and I showed him, I have a stamp. I was stamped into the country on my old passport, but I don’t have a stamp in my new passport. How can they exit me out of the country? And then he started thinking about it and he says, “Oh, you know what? Yeah, you probably can’t use the autogate because you have a stamp when you came in.” Hm, that changes everything. Okay, maybe you should go through regular immigration. I was like, “Yeah, maybe I should.” But anyway, he was the first immigration person to not he didn’t even understand what the process was. He was going to send me in the totally wrong direction. But anyway, I checked I double checked with him and he told me to go to immigration, the regular immigration counter. He didn’t send me to an office or a special counter or anything.

So then I go to the regular immigration desk and I show him two passports. I give him the song and dance about how I got a new Canadian passport. This is my old one, etc., etc. I hand them over and then he’s looking at me waiting and he finally says, “Where’s your special pass?” And I’m like, “I’ve never heard of a special pass.” He said, “No, you have to do this, you have to have a special pass.” And I’m like, I don’t know what that is. I don’t have one. Nobody mentioned this to me at any point. I even tried to go to the Malaysian immigration office in Kuala Lumpur. I thought maybe I needed to get some kind of a document. Everybody told me I didn’t need to. Nah, no, you’re crazy. You’re overthinking it. It’s not necessary. Just go to the airport. But me overthinking, I did go to immigration. And I tried to find somebody there who could do this for me, who could understand it. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t find anybody at immigration in Malaysia who could even tell me anything. I just I couldn’t even find the right office. I couldn’t find the foreigner tourism visa immigration office or counter. Nobody. I just went around and around and around in circles. Talked to everybody I could talk to, every information counter I could go to. Nobody could tell me anything. I just gave up and left.

But anyway, here I am at the airport and the guy’s saying, “Where’s your special pass?” And I’m like, “All right, here we go. Planet Doug, Planet Doug rules are in effect.” And then he dug around in an area behind his desk. And he pulled out a document that said across the top, special pass. And it was like an official form with all kinds of stamps and signatures and dates and things on it. He says, “You need one of these. Old passport, new passport. You have to get a special pass. Bring that to the airport with you. Why don’t you have a special pass? How come you didn’t?” I’m like, dude, I tried. I mean, I really tried. I did more research on this topic than anyone in the history of the world has ever done. And this issue of a special pass. It never came up. Like, ah, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have one. So, is there any way we can move forward with this?

So anyway, he gets up, tells me to wait, takes my two passports, my and did I give him my visa for Indonesia? No, I don’t think so. Just my two passports

He went off. He had to go confer with the powers at the airport. And he was gone for quite a long time. I didn’t dare look around. I’m doing that thing where I’m trying to act nonchalant because I know they’re looking at me through the cameras. I don’t want to look nervous. It’s like, “Oh, there’s that Canadian with two passports and he doesn’t even have a special pass. I think we need to arrest this guy. Let’s watch. He’s up to something.” So I’m trying to act casual, but when you try to act casual, you actually end up looking suspicious. So I’m like humming and just, but I don’t want to look around like I don’t know where this guy went, but I don’t want to like, where, where did he go? Where is he? Who’s he talking to? So I never saw where he went, who he was speaking with. But he eventually came back and then he came back and said, “Oh, can I see your boarding pass?” So then I got out my phone and had the boarding pass on it and he took my phone and he disappeared again and he went off to talk to people like, “Where are you going?” of Band Acha. Why are you going there? Where are you going after Bandanda Acha? Why? A lot of questions and I thought, yeah, this is not looking good for good for Doug. And he took my two passports and my phone. He disappeared, went to talk to a bunch of people. Then he came back, gave me my phone, and then he says, come with me. Come with me, sir. I thought, okay, immigration jail, here I go.

And then I had to scan my bag for customs. There’s a customs scanner there, which confuses a lot of people at the airport. By the way, everybody thinks that’s security. The first one you go through and they take off all their metal and take off their shoes and take their laptop out of their bag, whatever they need to do. But you don’t have to do any of that. All you have to do is put your bag and they scan it for contraband. So, it’s only a customs check. I knew that. So, I just put my knapsack down. And I went with this guy. And of course, we go deep into the bowels of the airport. We go through a door that says authorized personnel. I’m being taken to the back room. I’m thinking they’re going to start waterboarding me back there, something like that. But any just takes me to a little office and there’s some other poor foreigners in there. Everybody in that office is there because something went terribly wrong. And the guy took my two passports, handed them over the desk to a woman sitting at a computer, told her what was up. Then he looked at me and said, “Sit down. Wait.” And then he disappeared.

So there I was in immigration jail, waiting to see what was going to happen next. I talked to the poor guy behind me. He was even, I think he was from Australia. I didn’t get his whole story because we didn’t have time. But apparently he got stuck because he was on his way to Vietnam and he had a visa but he thought he had a multiple entry visa. He got it and I guess he was, I didn’t understand the story. How complicated these things could get. But anyway, he tried to board the flight. He exited Malaysia like went through immigration da da da da. He was stamped out of Malaysia but then they wouldn’t let him into Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually flew to Vietnam. Sounded like he did, but they wouldn’t let him into Vietnam because his visa wasn’t multiple entry. It was single entry and he’d already used it up. So, he didn’t have a visa. And I guess he got sent all the way back to Malaysia and now he has to start all over again. But he’s already been stamped out of Malaysia, but he has to get back into the country. So, he had to go to immigration jail with me. Anyway, his situation was far worse than mine. These people that get stuck in no man’s land between two countries. They can’t go forward. They can’t go back. Those are always the nightmare scenario. And that’s what he was caught up in.

But anyway, I just sat there for quite a while. These situations always remind me of the movie Midnight Express. And that movie had a big impact on me. It’s kind of freaked me out ever since I watched it and read the book because this guy, this American, it’s based on a true story. He was caught smuggling out of Turkey and at the airport. He was caught arrested and sent to a Turkish prison, which was not a fun experience in any way. So, yeah, that movie made a big impression on me. One thing that really struck me was that when this American in the movie was caught and then they took him to an office at the airport under arrest, it was like the worst, scariest, most horrifying moment of his life, right? And yet for all the Turkish police officers and officials, it was just a normal day for them. So, you’ve got the American under arrest who is terrified and yet everything around him was just normal. Everybody’s just sipping coffee, laughing, joking, and just having a good time. And that’s how it always feels to me at airports where I’m trying to get through this airport to fly to Sumatra, which is not a huge deal, but I mean, it’s a big deal. I’m dealing with official, visas, permissions, things like that. I mean, it’s a serious situation for me. And I got caught. I’m now in immigration jail. And I’m kind of waiting. I’m stressed out. My heart rate is elevated. I’m like, “Ah, I hope this, I’m in trouble. Maybe they’re not going to let me go. I’m going to have, I’m going to be denied. I have to go back into Malaysia, but now my visa is expiring tomorrow. How am I going to deal with this?” To me, it was a big problem for me, and I was feeling a little bit stressed out.

And yet the woman who had my passports, she had my fate in her hands, but she wasn’t taking it seriously cuz it doesn’t affect her. She was like joking and laughing with the other women who were also working. Other airport staff came in. They’re engaging in small talk. Oh, do you want a coffee? I just had two coffees today. I’m already jittery. Oh, okay. Yeah. How you doing? How you doing, Bob? Hey, Jim. What’s it going? They’re all just having a good time laughing it up in the office relaxing a normal day at work but the people like me in immigration jail were all like freaked out. I always, that contrast always strikes me where for them it’s just another day at work but for everybody they deal with it could be one of the worst days of their life, right? It could be a serious problem anyway. I always think about Midnight Express when I’m in those situations anyway. I don’t how long I waited. It really wasn’t that long. It felt like forever. But then eventually I heard the woman shout out my name. I don’t know. She said Douglas, Mr. Douglas or something. And I came up to her desk and then she reamed me out.

And this is the big problem. This is one of the things I was worried about because even if this woman is able to transfer my record from old passport to new passport, even if that isn’t a problem, whenever you go this deep into the immigration system, this is when they took a hard look at you. Like if everything is okay and you just go up to the immigration counter, he looks at your passport, he might flip through your passport and see that I’ve gone in and out of Malaysia quite a few times and he might go, “Huh? Why? Why so many times?” And he says, “What are you doing in Malaysia?” And I say, “I’m a tourist.” I say, “I’m a YouTuber. Here’s the name card for my YouTube channel.” and they kind all they really want to know is are you obeying the laws on a tourist visa? You can’t work. That’s the main issue. So the immigration guy might see I’ve been in and out of Malaysia a lot and he’s like, “Huh, this is weird.” And it’s like he wants to find out, am I legit or am I actually secretly working on a tourist visa? And then he asks me a couple of questions. If my questions sound good, oh, okay, okay, okay. stamp. Here you go, and you’re on your way.

But once you get taken to immigration jail, they have more time on their hands. They’re more serious. And this woman was looking at my complete immigration record because she’s transferring from old passport to new. And now she was not happy and she was not very nice. Maybe in real life she’s a caring mother, a wonderful daughter, an amazing sister, generous with all her friends. I don’t know. But when she’s at work, put on her serious face. Man, oh man. Oh man. She was not pleasant at all to deal with. She was very unfriendly. She was all official. And she just grilled me hard about what do you think you’re doing? What are you doing coming to Malaysia so many times? I looked at your record. What? That’s not what this visa is for. This is a tourist visa. And I said, “Well, I am a tourist in Malay.” Oh, what are you talking about? Nobody. here. She was so upset with me. She was angry like I had done something really, really horrific. And it was almost like she was forced to let me go. Like there was nothing in my record that was strictly speaking illegal. But man, she did not like me. She did not like what I was doing in her country. And she had the new and her job was to transfer me from old to new passport. I guess that was her only responsibility. And she seemed to be upset that she couldn’t deny me anything. Like she just did not like me at all. And she was going to blacklist me. And if it was in her power, I would not be sitting here telling this story. I can tell you that. I assume. I mean, that’s the way it felt.

Anyway, she had a very unpleasant face, unpleasant demeanor, and yeah, she really lectured me and said, “You can’t do this. you. This is not possible. You have to get a long-term visa. Long-term. You understand me? Long-term visa. You I’m so, I’m so sorry. I’m, I will next time I will get a long-term visa. I will. Trust me, I will. I will.” I would agree to anything she said. And then she’s like ah she was so angry. And then she just eventually Okay, here you go. Here’s your passport. And then she took my new passport and put a stamp in it. And then she wrote for a long time underneath it. And while I was watching her write, I was really nervous because I thought all that anger was being transmitted into what she was writing. This is a bad bad bad man. Be very do not let him back into Malaysia. Trust me. I thought she was writing something very very serious about me. And I was in big trouble when she wrote for a long time. And eventually she said, “Okay, you can go.” But I didn’t know what, what I didn’t know what had happened. Like what did she stamp? What did she write? I thought I was being banned from Malaysia, maybe even sent being sent to a detention center. I didn’t know. She never explained anything. She just gave me the passports back out. And I said, like what do I do? Do I have to go back to And then she said, gate. And okay, excuse me. Like I have to go back to immigration now. Do I have to go back and gate? No, I, Okay, I know. I don’t understand what gate I just gave up at that point. She kept saying a word. I didn’t know what the word was at the time, but she just really wanted me out of her field of vision. She really did not like me.

And so I left that office and then I’m back out in the airport and I didn’t know what to do. Like I didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t explain to me what the situation was. Did I have to go back to immigration, find the same guy, get scanned through now with my new passport? Did I have to go all the way? I didn’t know. Go back to Air Asia, recheck in, and then I stood there for a while, thought it through logically, and I thought, well, I’m actually in the airport. I’ve passed through immigration and the departure gate. So, ah, gate. As soon as I thought departure gate, that’s what this woman was shouting at me. Gate, gate. Like, like, like I wanted like where am I supposed to gate? And she was saying I’m free to go. All I need to do now is go to the departure gate for my flight.

Of course, me being me, being a very quiet, somewhat gentle soul, I thought the correct thing to say would be, well, sir, in the future, please get a long-term visa if you wish to stay in Malaysia for a long time, but for now, I’ve transferred your records over to your new passport. Everything is settled. Now, you can check out. you can continue on your way using your new passport. Just go to your departure gate and board the flight as normal. That’s what I needed her to say. And she just shouted, “Gate gate.” And I asked for confirmation like clar from like, “Can you clarify what you gate?” Okay. Okay. Okay. And then I finally thought, “Oh, she’s probably saying departure gate. I can, I’m free to go.” I think I just didn’t know. And I hate uncertainty almost more than anything.

So then I started walking away towards the hallway where you go to your departure gate and there was a block there. There was another security gate I had to get through. And then the man kind of looked at me and held out his hand. I’m like, “Oh, I like are you going to cuff me?” Like he’s like, “Takeालय me in, officer.” I didn’t know what he wanted, but then he said, “Oh, yeah. I need to see your passport and your boarding pass.” So okay, of course. So, passport, boarding pass, here you are. And then he says, so then I tried to ask him like, do you do you know what? And I told him, new passport, old passport, and what am I supposed to do now? And he says, I don’t know. So, all right. So, I guess I’m on my own here. And then eventually, I couldn’t do anything. I just went to the departure gate as normal. And I just figured that’s my only option at this point. I’m certainly not going to turn around and get myself in more trouble by going back to immigration. You can’t go backwards because I’d already gone through the custom scanner in order for me to back up. I have to get past that major security point and you can’t. So, I have no choice. I guess I’m free to go. I didn’t know, but I thought so. So, I made my way towards the departure gate and that is an entirely new story.

I do wish when I start the next stage of one of these stories, like a whole new story, I could now switch into everything that went right. Like I always want to switch into, wow, this was incredible. this was amazing, this was wonderful, and then tell a wonderful story. Maybe that’s just not my personality, the whole half glass, half empty, half full perspective. But honestly, I can’t think of anything. Well, one thing, but I in general, my experiences are always negative. Like, there’s nothing actually good about them. You could argue that the good thing is, well, I got through immigration. I got through customs. The plane didn’t crash. I got into Sumatra and I got to my hotel without dying in a car accident. So, but you see, those aren’t really good things. Those are all bad things that didn’t happen. Like, I don’t have a list of really good things. Like, wow, this went so smoothly. this was so easy. Those things I guess it’s part of the low budget thing. I think if you if your budget springs to you’re not flying Air Asia to begin with, you’re flying a more luxurious airline with a lot more services and everything is more comfortable. You have priority seating. They have a lounge. You can go wait in the lounge and have complimentary food and drinks and lovely people there to be nice to you, private bathrooms and comforts. Yeah, but I’m not at that level. I’m at the low budget level. And at the low-budget level, flying is really hard work. It just it’s just hard work. At an hour-long flight, hour and a half maybe, I’m not sure. But by the time I’m done with all this, I am a wreck. I’m exhausted.

So, by this point, I was pretty tired. And that’s when things start to go wrong. When I start making mistakes, I’ve had already made a few mistakes, but now I started to make new ones. It was so ridiculous. So, I’m heading towards the departure gates, and they have these long moving sidewalks going to departure gates P and Q, I think. And those are the good ones for the low-budget airlines. P and Q. But I realized as I was on the walkway, oh, I didn’t even know what my departure gate was because out in the airport proper, all the big boards that give you all the information, I guess I was there so early that my flight hadn’t been assigned a gate yet. So, I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go. I took a photo of the board and then I actually looked at my photo later on. I took a look at it and zoomed in. Oh, there is no departure gate. But now that I was through immigration through customs, there was a new departure board listing all the flights. And then I got off the moving sidewalk and I went up to one of the boards and it said L4 and it said new gate. Like my flight was flashing like big change, big change. We’ve assigned a new gate L4. And I thought, oh, it’s a good thing I checked because L4 is the bad gate. It’s like P and Q. It’s more open. It’s an airy area. Even the hallways going to the actual departure gates, everything is just more relaxed there. There’s more room. There’s more space. L is really narrow, cramped. There’s barely room for like you’ve got a bunch of people waiting to get onto their flight. They crowd the whole hallway and nobody can get past them. There just isn’t enough room. There’s just not. It’s a very uncomfortable area. departure gate L.

So, but anyway, I was assigned to L4. So, I turned around, went all the way back, and I started moving towards L4. You go down an escalator, and now you’re at the true security gate. Cuz, as I said, the very first one, you go through a scanner, everybody thinks that’s security. And they take off all their metal and all the coins out of their pockets, and they do this and that, and they get ready. And then they go through that. They think they’re all done and then they wait until like minutes before their flight and they think, “Oh, now I can just jump up and go to my departure.” But no, because now they run into the real security. And if it’s the wrong time of day, there could be 20, 30 people ahead of you. Total chaos. And now you risk missing your flight because you didn’t realize it’s two-stage custom scanning then security scanning.

So anyway, so I went down to the security scanning. On my way there, by the way, one good thing happened and it this one encounter made up for everything that had gone wrong that day. I’m a real softy and I just need like one person to be nice to me. It’s just such it’s such an amazing feeling. So so far nobody had really been nice to me like nobody official. So when I like even the Air Asia staff that I went to to ask questions, they barely had time foryen me cuz they’re standing out in the public area and then they got people coming at them from all directions. So as I was trying to talk to this Air Asia employee, she kept abandoning me. We’re in the middle of our discussion and then someone would kind of tap her on the shoulder and start talking and she’d deal with them and then deal with them and then come back to me and then deal with I don’t know. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience, but the poor woman was beleaguered with people asking her questions about self-check-in, self luggage drop off. Nobody knows what to do, where to go. Everybody’s in their own world of confusion like I am. So, yeah, I understand. She couldn’t give me her full attention. Then I got the security guard who tried to tell me to use the autogate, which obviously would have led to disaster. Then I have the special pass guy who was not nice to me. Then I had the woman, a horrible woman at immigration jail. She was very unpleasant. So I hadn’t really had any nice encounters. Oh, and I had the cleaning guy at the hotel just thundering on my door and getting really angry with me that I hadn’t checked out at exactly noon, even though I had permission. Anyway, so it hadn’t been a pleasant day so far.

But there I was heading towards the security gate and I realized I had some coins. I actually kind of planned ahead for this when I was back in my hotel in Kuala Lumpur. I had a bunch of coins in this pocket in this pocket. I don’t really spend money anymore, so I don’t really think about it. But these had gathered up who knows how, who knows when. And I put them all on the table in my hotel room, and I counted them. And I had like three ringgit in coins. and I want to get rid of them before I go through security because those coins are metal and they’re going to set off the metal detector and why would I take these coins to Indonesia. I can’t spend them and then I’ll just end up carrying this bundle of coins all around Indonesia for 30 days before I can finally bring them back to Malaysia. So, I want to spend the coins first. And there was a little shop right there and I thought, “Ah, maybe I can get something there for three ringgit.” So, I went into the store and I was looking at the candy counter and then this amazingly pleasant, amazingly nice young woman kind of looked across the counter and said, can I help you, sir? And I said, yeah, I have three ringgit in coin, so I’m looking for something that I can buy for three ringgit. And she says, oh, absolutely. I can help you with that. Have you ever tried Himalaya salt? And I said, “No, I don’t know what that actually in fact I had, but at the time I said because I didn’t recognize the name.” And I said, “No, I haven’t had Himalaya salt.” So, oh, it’s amazing. Costs exactly three ringgit. Here, let me show you. And she came around from behind the counter, came up to the front, came with me to the counter section and said, “Oh, right here.” And gave me a package of these like throat lozenges, like very powerful mint. They were like lemon flavored kind of like fisherman’s friend almost very powerful lozenges. They were lozenges called Himalaya salt. And she said these are three ringgit. And then she took the coins and yeah you have exactly three ringgit here. Thank you very much sir. Oh she was so nice to me. It’s interesting how that act of kindness made me feel. this store clerk going out of her way just to be nice to me and help me buy these lozenges. A very small act of kindness, but it actually made me like tear up a little bit at the time. I could have just fallen to my knees, I think, and started weeping. Just I don’t know, it just felt wonderful, this little act of kindness. Yeah, I guess I was pretty stressed out by that point.

So, I’d gotten rid of all my Malaysian coins, go down to the security area, and things there also kind of spun out of control. I’d like to say, “Wow, it was wonderful. It was amazing. I just went up to security, scanned my bag, and went through and everything was wonderful, but it didn’t quite work out that way.” In fact, there seemed to be a lot more activity there and a lot more energy than I’m used to. like when I go to the P and Q departures like I’m flying into Medan I always I often ended up at the P and Q areas and then going through security was never never a delight but here at this departure security area it seemed more rigorous there was something in the air and I wondered if it was because I was flying to Aceh province and of course Aceh province does have a history it’s not really a concern anymore but it has a history of a sort of an independence movement, a fight between the Acehnese and the national government of Indonesia. There was fighting there and it was a security concern. That part of Indonesia for long for many many years had heightened levels of security and that’s all gone now for the most part. But it is an unusual part of Indonesia. it the state of Aceh actually has more of a self-governing government than other states do. They have like a special status there and of course that has Sharia law is implemented there. So it’s a little bit more of a hardcore part of Indonesia and I thought maybe because of that they raise the security levels for flights in and out of Aceh. Probably not, but that’s what I thought.

Anyway, everybody going through seemed to be having trouble. Like, everybody would go through the scanner and it would go beep beep beep and then they’d leave something on their body that they forgot. And then they’d have to turn around, go back through, take off the offending piece of metal, find a bucket, like a bin to put it in, put that through, go through the scanner again, beep beep, something else. Oh, there’s something else. They got to, everybody was making mistakes. And then when they came back through, of course, they’re fighting against the flow of people trying to go in. And now you got this big lineup, people going back, people going forward, and everybody had to wait for a bin, but there weren’t enough bins. Like people were going through with the bins. And everybody was doing this. It kind of annoyed me. Like everybody that had a bag, like a knapsack, they all thought they had to put the knapsack in a bin. But you don’t have to. You can just take your little carry-on suitcase or your knapsack or your purse, whatever it is, and just put it on the conveyor belt. It will go through on its own. But everybody thought they had to put it in a bin. So, they ran out of bins. So, like when you needed a bin for small items like your smartphone or something like that, there were no bins available. So, now we got this big bottleneck of people who need to put their smartphone into a bin. their bag had already gone through, but now they had to go back and do it again, but there were no bins. They’re waiting for a bin to be returned. Other people are pushing forward. It was just total chaos. It really was not well organized at all.

But anyway, now I made a mistake. And again, it’s not entirely my fault, but of course, yes, it is. Ultimately, I was looking at all these people who forgot to remove metal items, and I was like, amateurs, come on. I’m very proud of myself that I plan ahead and I go through and I love it when I go through the scanner and it doesn’t beep. I feel like I’ve passed a test like I’m a student who got A+ on the exam or something. So, I’m like looking at all these people like amateurs. Come on, get with the program. But then I put my bag onto the scanner, it goes through, I go through the security gate and it beeps. I was like, what the heck? cuz I move I removed my wallet, got rid of all my coins. I have a key on my neck which is metal. I always make sure I remove that. I even take off glasses. I take away anything that can affect anything. Put it all in my bag. I’m very proud of myself that I do this. And this time I forgot my watch because for months and or I don’t know maybe a year I haven’t been wearing a watch because all the watch bands broke. So I just stopped wearing watches. But just recently I got a replacement band and it’s a brand new thing. So I completely forgot I was wearing a watch. Oh, actually, in fact, I didn’t even go through the scanner because I was about to go through and the woman looked at me, the security officer, and she saw the watch and before I went through, she says, “Ah, sir, watch.” So, I went, “Ah, what an amateur.” And I’d already sent my bag through, so I couldn’t put the watch inside my bag. And I thought, “Ah, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot.” So now I’m one of these doofuses who has to turn around and fight my way back through the crowds and wait for a bin because you can’t put a watch on the conveyor belt. That has to go in a bin. So now I’m fighting with all these other people. Bins, bins, bins. The bins have to be sent back on like a set of rollers. You slide them back, but nobody was sliding them back. So there were no bins. And I’m It was just It was just awful.

So finally a bin came and I grabbed it and put my watch in the bin, sent it through and then I went through security. It did not beep. So I guess my record is still clean. I didn’t actually set off the scanner. They just stopped me before I went through. So I still have a perfect record. But then I got to the other side. My knapsack came out. And there was a lot of concern about my knapsack cuz it was jammed with electronics, laptop, tablet, three smartphones, two GoPros, 360 cameras, two power banks, batteries galore. I mean, it was a hunk of metal in there. And they didn’t like it at all. And then to my surprise, they said, “Oh, sir, do you have a laptop?” And I was like, “Yeah, oh, you can’t. you have to take it out, go back and put it through separately, which not entirely my fault because at KLIA they don’t enforce this rule consistently. I remember there used to be signs everywhere that said remove all electronics, all your smartphones, all your tablets, your laptops, put everything in a separate bin, like one item per bin, which obviously nobody can do. I mean, in my case, I would have needed 15 different bins, and they have that rule on display, but they don’t enforce it. So, everybody just puts their bags through filled with smartphones and laptops and tablets, and they don’t ask them to take them out. But for some reason, in this case, and I thought maybe because I’m going to Aceh, they said, “No, you have to remove your laptop.” But nobody else did. I’m sure lots of people around me had to remove their laptops, but maybe because mine is like this big beast of a laptop, very thick with a lot of battery and who knows what all they thought, oh man, that looks Yeah, it’s pinging our security radar here. So, they told me, “Okay, no, can you go back through bring your laptop?” So, I said, “Okay, I can do that.” And they said, “No, no, you have to bring the whole bag. like bring your bag back, send the bag through again, and then take your laptop, put it in a separate bin.” So now I’m going back through, fighting through the crowds, all this bin madness, trying to get a bin, waiting for a bin. I was sweating. I was stressed out. I was getting tired, unfocused.

But finally, I got a bin. My laptop is so big. It barely fit inside the bin. Kind of remind me just how big my laptop is. And then I sent it through with my knapsack. And then I went through, everything was cool. Put on my knapsack. Well, got the laptop, put it back in my knapsack, and I’m just about to leave. And then I thought, my watch. I in all the confusion, I completely forgot about the watch, which I had sent through earlier in a separate bin. So now there’s all these bins all around me. And now I’m looking like, oh, I’m looking in all the bins trying to find my watch. Nowhere to be found. completely gone. It’s like, oh, for Pete’s sake, like somebody grabbed it, I thought. And of course, it’s not a big deal. My watch is this Casio worth maybe $15, something like that. It’s not like a Rolex or anything. And but I really really love this watch. I’m I like these F91W Casios. I have a long history with these and I’m very fond of it. And I went to all the trouble of getting a brand new strap on it. And then I had all the security problems cuz I forgot to take it off. Like I’m invested in this watch now. And suddenly I’d lost it. And normally I would have just let it go. I just like well that’s life. You lost your watch. And I would go. But then I did get the security woman’s attention and say I’m looking for a watch and I didn’t want to explain that I made a mistake. I sent it through but I forgot about it. Then I had to go back. You can’t explain all this. But I a watch. And she’s talking to all the other women. No, no, nobody. No, no, no. Nothing about a watch. Nothing about a watch. Sorry, sir. Sorry, sir. And they’re busy, of course. But then I’m just about to leave. And then I hear, “Sir, sir.” And someone else came. They put someone found the watch, turned it into them, and somebody put it on top of the X-ray machine. It was just sitting up there in plain view. Is this your watch? Oh, yes. Yes. And they so I got my watch back. So yeah, what an experience getting through there.

And now I was in the dreaded departure gate L which was very crowded, very confusing, very hot. There’s nowhere to there’s no room there. And it turns out my flight got delayed by an hour and it changed gates. So I went to gate L4 and then all these people were already lining up waiting and then of course it got delayed but everybody is still standing in line crowding the hallway. Nobody can get past them and I just sort of wandered around for a while. I like to go to the bathroom like right before I get on the plane. So I try to time things in terms of boarding. I don’t want to board so early that I’m sitting on the plane for an hour and then you wait for another hour and then by the time the plane takes off, well, you desperately need a bathroom, right? And so I hate that. So I try to time things like I’m watching the boarding area like a hawk and at the exact moment, okay, go. And then the clock is ticking and I find a bathroom, use the bathroom, go back, board, and then I hope the plane takes off quickly. So, I’m in the middle of this whole James Bond episode involving the bathroom. And then they changed the security the departure gate. I, I was waiting like gate L4 is here. I was waiting down the line closer to L6 and so I wasn’t caught up in the big crowd. And then I’m out. I’m sitting there waiting and out of nowhere this giant crowd of people just comes thundering down gate L. And now they’re all crowding around L6. And I was looking at all these people like, “You guys look familiar. I think I’ve seen you before. Aren’t you waiting for the flight to Banda Aceh at L4?” And then I look up at the board and my flight had been changed again from L4 to L6. So this huge crowd came and now they’re right in front of me. So now I’m sitting in this chair with the full hallway and everybody trying to go back and forth is now trying to get by my knees because I’m in the middle of this giant crowd. And so of course I have to get up and move out of that area cuz it was just chaos. And then waited and waited and waited and waited. I really wanted that flight to be on time because by that point I was so tired. I was so stressed out. I was so exhausted. Like a 1-hour delay doesn’t sound like much. Like in terms of the world’s problems with airlines and especially in the United States, you hear so many horror stories about flights being cancelled, delayed by 14 hours, by 24 hours, whatever. A 1-hour delay, not a big deal. Particularly for a 1-hour flight. Come on. But yeah, I mean I was running out of energy, running out of patience in a 1 hour delay. It was like h I was ready to get on the plane. I just I just want to get there by this point.

Anyway, I wait until things are going and then I time it perfectly so that they’re now letting people on to the they’re doing the security thing. Check your boarding pass, check your passport, things like that. And again, because they’re going to Aceh, I thought that’s why it was taking so long. Every person who went up took a long time. It wasn’t like beep beep, go ahead. Beep beep, go ahead. No, they took the papers. Some of them had stacks of papers. They’re flipping through them. They’re looking at passports. They’re looking at boarding passes. They’re examining things. They’re asking questions. Every person seemed to be going through a kind of interrogation. And I thought, is it because we’re going to Banda Aceh? is that like why is this so special? But anyway, I waited until there were like 10 people in line, the last 10. And I’m going to be the very last person going through. Ran to the bathroom. Came back. There’s like six people now. And I’m at the back and I’m thinking, “Oh, this is going to be amazing. I’m going to go through. We’re right at departure time, I thought. And then I’m just going to go through. I just left the bathroom. Walk through. Walk straight onto the plane. sit down. I don’t need overhead compartment storage space because everybody got on the plane ahead of me. So, all the storage is going to be done. It’s going to be filled because everybody has mountains of luggage. Of course, I just have my one small knapsack. I try to make it as small as possible. So, it goes under the seat in front of me. And I don’t want to put it in the luggage compartment because of security, too. I’ve got my passport and money and everything. Camera gear, laptop, so many valuable things in there. I don’t really want to leave it untended. So, I just like to keep it at my seat. I make it small enough fits right underneath the seat in front of me and I have access to everything if I need it. So, I figured it’d be fine that I’m the last person getting on the plane. I’m thinking things are looking up. An hour and a half from now, I’m going to be in Banda Aceh. But I completely forgot that even though I went through the security check, I didn’t get onto the plane. That led into the actual boarding gate. So after I got through that, I went into another room and that room was jammed with everybody waiting to get on that. Nobody was on the plane yet. I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Now I got to wait in this room.” And I knew that from previous trips to this airport, but I completely forgot. And I hate being trapped in that room because you can’t go backwards. And for whatever reason in these departure gates for the low-budget air well that there’s your answer right there, low-budget airlines, there are no bathrooms. Like once you get into your actual departure gate room, no bathrooms. you are stuck there and you have to wait until you’re on the plane before you can even remotely have a chance of getting to a bathroom anyway.

So now I’m in this room and it’s like oh for Pete’s sake I don’t know how many people get on one of these planes 200 250 all 250 people tons of people in wheelchairs or a lot of elderly people in wheelchairs just jammed into this area and that’s the room I walked into. But on the positive side we were as close to the official boarding time as possible. So when I went into that room, everybody was either sitting down or standing in the back area in the room itself. But since I was the very last person to enter the room, I couldn’t even get through the crowd anyway. Like even if I wanted to go through and get a seat if there were any available, I couldn’t cuz everybody was jammed in there. So I just stood at the very front. So even though I was the last person to enter, I stood at the actual zone 2 boarding sign at the very very front. So I was going to be the very first non-zone one person to get on the plane. So by pure fluke, I ended up at the front of the line, which is very rare for me.

So anyway, they went through all the usual chaos. Again, I look around at people all the time and go amateurs because it’s clearly marked Air Asia, zone one, priority boarding, zone 2, zone 3, look at your boarding pass, see what zone your seat is, stand in the proper lineup. But of course, nobody does that. Like, nobody knows. So, the poor Air Asia employees have to deal with this and they start boarding people and they want to board zone one people first. So they did they pulled back the security cord whatever it is and okay boarding for zone one zone one only they worked as hard as they could to make it clear that how this is how the system works but everybody rushing to the front. No, none of them were in zone one, right? They get up to the front, they show their boarding pass. No, you’re zone three. No, zone 2, zone 3. Anybody out anybody on zone one? and all the zone one people can’t get on because all the zone 2 and zone 3 people are blocking their way.-they’re all in the wrong lineup because nobody knew about the zone one, zone 2, zone 3 business. I knew, of course, I’m at the very front of the line for zone two, but now we get all these people coming up to zone one and then they get shunted to the side. They can’t go back anymore, but now they start building up this. Anyway, how it is. It’s airports. its airlines. Finally, the zone one people all boarded and then they boarded zone 2 and I was the very first person to get on the plane and yeah, Dated I found my seat 25F. I like 25F because you’re like window seat so you can take video and you’re kind of see the wing as well. You’re behind the wing on this plane and then you if you’re taking video or photo, you get a nice scenic look of the land, the ocean, the sky and with the wing and it’s kind of a nice setting. If you pick the wrong seat, you can be sitting right on top of the wing and when you look out the window, all you see is wing or if you’re to the front, you get a nice view, but you don’t get any wing. I like having the wing in the frame. It just looks more cinematic, I suppose. So I sat down in my seat and then came the flight and the arrival in Banda Aceh and that is a whole different story.

The passengers on this flight were an interesting bunch. I noticed this when I was in the airport and waiting at the departure lounge. There seemed to be an unusually large number of women, like unaccompanied women there. Like they weren’t women traveling with their children and their families and things like that. They were, it was like a big group of women and they all seemed to know each other. They were very friendly with each other. Everybody’s laughing and joking and having a good time. And I thought there must be something special about this group.

And then I got very lucky. One of the very good things that happened on this trip is that I sat down at the window seat and then the woman who sat, a person who sat beside me was a young woman and then I can’t remember who said hello first. Like I’m usually a little bit hesitant to start up a conversation because I don’t want to assume they speak English. I hope they do. But again, this was a woman from Sumatra and I thought she probably doesn’t speak English and she probably doesn’t want to talk to me. She’s probably kind of upset that she got the seat beside this giant foreigner and she wished she had a different seat probably. So, I don’t really want to bother them. I just want to leave them alone. But I’ve been alone all day. I spend a lot of time alone with nobody to talk to. So I thought, yeah, maybe I said something first. I’m not sure, but I think maybe she did in this case. I have to rack my memory.

And so I said hello. And then she said hello and something else in very good, clear, understandable English. And I went, “Oh, that’s so nice. You speak English. That’s amazing.” And not only that, she was like very self-confident. I thought she would be kind of hesitant and nervous, but she was like perfectly confident and we just had a nice conversation in English about the flight, about where she was from, about where I was from, what I was doing, what I was going to do in Banda Aceh, this sort of thing. Just a nice small chat, small talk conversation.

And then I asked her a question and she said, “I’m actually a leader.” Well, no. I think I asked her where she was coming from, like where, like she was coming from Malaysia. So, like where did she go? And she said she had been to Saudi Arabia for Umrah. And again, I was very proud of myself that I even knew what that meant. But Umrah is one of the pilgrimages that a Muslim person will take to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. And she said she had just been to Saudi Arabia for Umrah and then she was coming home again. And then she went on to explain she was actually the leader of a tour group. So she worked for a company that organizes the Umrah for people from the Banda Aceh area. And she was the group leader. And all these women that I noticed, this big group of 55 women all traveling together, they had just returned from Umrah. And she was the leader or one of the leaders of this group of 55 women and it was like then everything fell into place and I went ah that’s why you speak English so naturally and that’s why you’re so comfortable talking with a foreigner like me, you go overseas all the time, you’re a very experienced international traveler and that’s okay that explains a lot about your personality and how easygoing you are in talking with me. And she says, “Yeah, that’s true.”

So, that was very nice. And I got to ask her a few questions. And the thing I learned was that the trip, the Umrah trip was 9 days long in total and it cost 25 million rupiah. And that’s about $1,500 US for one person to go on this trip. And that includes everything, the flight, accommodation, food, luggage, even. And this is something quite interesting because I knew a little bit about Umrah because I’d encountered these groups before. I was in a hotel at the airport near Jakarta not long ago. And in the lobby, there was a mountain of suitcases and every single one was identical. Same suitcase, same design, same style, same company, and same color. Just stacks and stacks and stacks of check-in bags and carry-on bags matching color. It’s like, how in the world does a tour group have all identical suitcases? But that is part of the service that the tour group provides that when you sign up for a pilgrimage to Mecca, they do everything for you. You don’t even have to get luggage and everything is organized for you. They give you the luggage, everything is done for you and you just go along and they get not only the pilgrimage, the spiritual experience, but as part of the package, they also have some tourism opportunities. And the woman that I was speaking with, she would also take them out on tours of the city, seeing the sites, sampling the local food. So it’s a combination vacation and religious pilgrimage.

And of course it’s something that a Muslim person, I think they might do multiple times but a good Muslim would want to do it at least once in their life. And I got the impression that this group of 55 women particularly the elderly ones for them this was like the trip of a lifetime something they had saved up a lot of money to do. $1,500. And it was a very big deal for them to do this. And the elderly women that were in wheelchairs, they couldn’t, their health was failing nearing the end of their life and they couldn’t really walk on their own. And for them, it was sort of like doing Umrah as they approached. It was a big deal to them is what I’m saying. It’s a big event in their life, something that they wanted to do probably for their entire lifetime and had finally saved up the money to go do it.

So, I was with a very special group of people and it was kind of fun to be around all these women because they had gotten to know each other. They were probably strangers, many of them, before the trip, but during the nine days, they’d all formed this tight-knit group, and everybody was joking and laughing and talking with other people, and it was very nice to be with that group.

So, we fly to Banda Aceh. It was dark by the time we landed and the airport there was very very interesting because I’ve been there before. This isn’t my first trip to Banda Aceh and the airport is quite small and casual and kind of informal. It’s not like the normal international airports you might be used to that in Bangkok or Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or any big city. It’s a small regional airport and from the runway when your plane lands actually as you’re arriving you fly in over this beautiful area all farming country because the airport is about 15 km outside of the city in the countryside. It was gorgeous. It’s kind of the rainy season so they’re planting the rice. All the fields are either green with new rice seedlings or they’re just filled with water waiting to be planted. And then you get these tiny roads going in and out of all these flooded fields with farm houses. Just stunning. It was really gorgeous. And I took a little bit of GoPro video out the window as we were landing. That was really, really nice.

And then from the runway, the building itself, it almost looks like a big mosque. It’s an older building with lots of domes and minarets. Looks very traditional, very Islamic. Beautiful building. It’s not like a modern cold building. It’s like a very old style. It reminds me of all the airports I remember from the old days when I first started being a backpacker in this part of the world. And you’re landing at a lot of these very small airports where you just walked off the plane onto the ground and then you walk from there into the building. All the modern like massive mega structures that you see today, the airports they didn’t exist yet and this airport in Banda Aceh is kind of a throwback to that time.

So yeah, you go in, it looks like the kind of airport is so small, it could barely handle one flight arriving. Like the luggage pickup area is like one conveyor belt and that’s it. So like two planes arrive at the same time. It would be very very crowded in there, but it gives it a nice feeling. Gives it a very casual, easygoing feeling.

And then when I came into immigration itself, there was these windows for Indonesians and here was the window for foreigners. Orang asing and then there’s the immigration booth for foreigners. Nobody else there. It was completely empty. There was no lineup. Nobody is coming to Banda. So I could just walk right up to the front for foreigners here. But then things went off the rails a little bit because I handed over my passport and I handed over my, I made a copy of my visa on arrival. Normally you just have it on your phone and show it to them on your phone. You don’t even have to show it to them because as long as you filled out the arrival card, everything will be fine. They just need your passport and then they enter, they scan your passport or enter the passport number and your entire record will be there including your visa on arrival information. It’s all pulled together into the all Indonesia website arrival system. Everything’s supposed to be fully integrated.

But then I handed, I gave them a copy of my visa on arrival cuz I had it printed out. I thought it might be helpful. Gave it to them and then there was a problem. Even today I don’t understand what the problem was but the guy in the middle of entering and processing me he stopped and he started looking at my passport looking at my visa on arrival he’s like ooh and he said to me they don’t match your passport number is not the same and I was like oh come on okay I’m an idiot I’m a fumbling [ __ ] I’m exhausted did. I had a hard time preparing this trip, but I’m pretty sure I checked my passport number like a thousand times before I hit submit. If I made a mistake, you might as well find the local mental asylum. Like, just lock me up. I’m that dumb. There’s no How could I make that mistake? And he says, “Yeah, your passport number is different.” And he gave it back to me.

So, I’m looking at my phone for my oh my visa and my flight and everything and I’m going from one to the other. No, I’m going from my passport to my visa, not my phone. And I go through it. It’s exactly the same. No, they’re exactly the same. And I count it through, I know my passport number in my head by now. And I’m looking at it on my passport comparing it to the visa. They’re exactly the same. I did not make a mistake, they are identical. So I said to the guy, “No, they’re the same.” And he says, “No, they’re different.” And I’m looking, “No, they’re exactly the same.” And I gave it and he says, “No, they’re not the same. There’s a problem.” I have no idea. I again, I live in an alternate universe where other people see things that even I don’t see. No, they’re identical. I can get it right now. I still have the paper print out. I can get on my passport and I’ll, they’re exactly the same. I did not make a mistake, but the guy insisted, “No, they don’t match.” I’m like, “They do match. You’re nuts.” And he said, “No, they don’t match. I’m sorry, sir. There’s a problem.”

So, I’m thinking, “Okay, here we go.” And then he worked for a while. He called over other immigration people. They’re all looking at the computer. Oh, yeah. There’s a big problem here, sir. Your visa on arrival doesn’t match your passport. I don’t know if this is valid or not. There’s nothing I can do at that point. So, I just let them do whatever it is they need to do. And then they sent me over to another immigration counter, gave all my documents and passport and everything over to this guy. And then he seemed to think he could fix it. He says, “Oh yeah, there’s a big problem here, but I think I can fix it.” And then he just started typing on his computer. I tried to find out what he was doing because my passport and visa, they matched. The passport number was identical. So don’t tell me anything about there being a problem, but something they see is not lining up, whatever it is. And I tried to find out from the guy what it is exactly. Where is the problem? But of course, the language barrier, the setting, the bulletproof glass. We couldn’t really communicate, but I just let him do his thing and he finished. And then he said, “Okay, you’re okay now, sir. I fixed the problem.” And he gave me back my passport and I was I guess I was signed in.

One problem. Immigration officials. I think I want to make a video about this because I want to vent so much. I have a brand new passport. Blank pages. Every single page is blank from 1 to 36. And I’m thinking I can use this passport for the next 10 years. It will never fill up. But when I exited from Malaysia, what did the Malaysian immigration officer do? She just sort of flipped ahead to an empty page, stamped right in the middle of the page. So there was an entire like page number one for visas is now been skipped. She skipped ahead to page number two and put her stamp in the middle of the page. So right out of the gate, two pages done. Like no immigration officer is ever going to go back to page number one. They’re going to go to the most recent stamp, flip ahead, and that’s exactly what the Indonesian guy did. So he looked at the Malaysian exit stamp on page number two. It’s in the middle of the page, fills up the whole page. So now he doesn’t put his stamp there. He skips ahead to page four. Instead of going to page three, he goes ahead to page four. Puts his Indonesian sticker right in the middle of page four. Right out of the gate, one trip, four pages in my passport used up. That it’s like, come on. I know you guys are busy. You got a lot of passports to stamp, but can’t you take half a second, make sure you go to page number one, put your stamp in the top left corner, any corner, pick a corner.

Anyway, so I got two empty pages that they skipped past and each stamp fills up an entire page that nobody else is going to be able to use the space around it. Come on, immigration officers, get your act together. But maybe in the future this won’t really be a problem because so many countries use auto gates and you don’t even get a stamp in your passport. In this case, the Banda Aceh airport does not have auto gates. And of course, when I was stamped out of Malaysia, I had the whole problem with my new passport. So, I couldn’t use the autogate. But in the future, if I go to places like Malaysia, I won’t even get a stamp in my passport anymore. I’ll just use the autogate. But still, I don’t know. I spent a huge amount of money on this new passport because my old passport, they filled all the pages. There was still 5 years of validity left on my passport and I had to get a new one because they filled up all the pages with a random stamping. Drives me crazy. I don’t know why they do that. Yeah, not great customer service from an immigration point of view, but they don’t see it as their job to worry about your passport and whether you have enough empty pages left.

Anyway, so anyway, I got through that. Getting my bag was fine. I went into the luggage pickup area. There’s like one conveyor belt snaking in and out and then that’s it. I got my backpack and then I had to deal with two more problems. Customs and e-IMEI for my phone and then of course getting into town. And that is the next little story.

Next story. I honestly didn’t plan to talk this long about this trip. I was going to try and keep it very short and concise, but yeah, I ended up talking a long time. I guess I was just in the mood. And it’s partially because I didn’t shoot a lot of video of these experiences. I didn’t shoot any video about going to the airport in Malaysia and getting on the flight and the departure gate and all the drama. I didn’t really record any of it. So, I told myself I would tell the full story here in a podcast. Yeah, if you click on a Planet Doug podcast behind the scenes video, you kind of know what you’re getting yourself into. It’s going to be a long drawn out drama.

So, the next thing is an ongoing, Oh, I think I talked about this already at the beginning of this video, didn’t I? So, I don’t really need to go through it. This is all about the smartphone and whether I needed to register it with customs at the airport. And yeah, I now remember I told this whole story already. And the upshot was I didn’t. So, wisely or not, I didn’t register the e-IMEI at the airport. And again, I didn’t need to because the IMEI number is already registered, but I think the phone is blocked and I was hoping customs could somehow do some magic there and unblock it and I don’t have to go to Telkomsel or anything like that, but anyway, I wasn’t able to do that.

So then, yeah, by that point, I was officially in the country. I had my backpack on my back, pretty heavy, big and unwieldy with all my camera gear and whatnot. And then I had my knapsack in my hand, heavy, fully packed with laptop and all that kind of stuff. Very unwieldy as well. And normally what I do is, I think I mentioned this already as well, even planning ahead, I intended to hang out at the airport a little bit, walk around the airport and kind of do a video summary of what’s at the airport because when I was looking for information online, I couldn’t find any. Like, nobody seemed clear on what was there or not. Some websites would say, “Oh, you can get a SIM card at the airport. You can change money at the airport.” Other people said, “No, you can’t get a SIM card. You can’t change money. There’s nothing there.” Other people would say, “Oh, there’s an official taxi desk. You just go to the desk. They have a certain automatic amount for getting into town. You pay them. You get a coupon. And then you don’t have to haggle with taxi drivers. You don’t have to fight with them, get overcharged. It’s like it’s all regulated.”

So, I was going to wander around the airport and find, oh, do they have this taxi desk? Maybe there’s a new bus, an airport bus you can take. I was going to do like a summary of the services at the airport, but somehow I was so flustered that all of that went completely out of my head. I completely forgot. And it’s partially because when I came out of customs and immigration, there was nothing. There didn’t seem to be any airport building at all. Once I exited, boom, I was out on the street and there were about 20 taxi drivers all shouting at me at the same time, taxi, taxi, taxi, and that kind of got me a little bit flustered. Like I wanted to just sort of settle in. I wanted to sort of look at my luggage, make sure, okay, I still have my passport. Make sure I still have my smartphone, this, that. I wanted to just go over my situation and make sure everything was under control and I hadn’t forgotten anything. And I wanted to get out my GoPro finally. Get out my microphones, attach the microphone to my GoPro, check that the battery is fully charged, and start filming. That was when I was going to start shooting a video. And I like to do things very slowly, methodically, deliberately. But now I was in the middle of 20 taxi drivers all competing to get my attention. And I just kind of said hello, hello, hello, and said, “No, I’m okay. No, thank you. No, thank you.” And I wanted to leave all the taxi drivers behind, go around the corner, find a quiet place, and then start getting set up. And then I would decide what I was going to do.

And at the time I had been told that you can walk out of the airport onto the street, turn the corner, and there will be Grab drivers out there or you can summon a Grab driver. And you save money that way because the taxi drivers, they’re taxi drivers. They’re going to overcharge you. But when I was on the plane and I had the woman sitting beside me who spoke English very well and I kind of there were two of them. There were two group leaders sitting together and I had a chat with both of them and I asked them okay going from the airport into downtown what do you recommend is there is there an airport bus and they said no there’s no airport bus so no or airport train no bus nothing like that and they said you can take a taxi or you can get a Grab and they said for a taxi 100,000 rupiah that’s a good fare for the taxi that’s the normal rate. They say seratus ribu. If the taxi driver says that, you’re fine. If they say dua ratus ribu 200,000 that’s too much. So don’t but 100,000 that’s what you should pay.

So there I was putting all my stuff together thinking I’m going to take a Grab. But this one guy kept, stayed with me. Like one of the taxi drivers, he was more determined than the rest. And he kind of came around the corner and stood there watching me and he was talking with me. And obviously he just wanted me as a fare and of course I’m suspicious of him because he’s a taxi driver worldwide at airports. They are the bane of everyone’s existence, especially for foreigners. So I wasn’t being mean to him. I wasn’t being rude, but I was chatting with him, but I was being a little bit guarded. And then eventually I thought, well, it doesn’t hurt to ask. So I asked the guy, “Oh, how much you, Oh, you’re a taxi driver?” He says, “Yes, how much would it cost to go to my hotel in Banda Aceh?” And he took out a like an official piece of paper and he started running a finger and you could see he was trying to set me up for a really high amount and he was kind of running up and down. His fingers settled on 160,000 and he showed that to me this much and he was trying to convince me that this is the official rate whatever that piece of paper was. I have no idea what it was but then I kind of said to him well on the I talked to some local people and they said a 100,000 is the going rate for a taxi into the airport. And he says well how about 120,000 and I thought well yeah I mean fine with me. I’d had so much trouble by this point. I really didn’t want to go out into the darkness, put on my backpack, walk out into the dark onto an empty highway. And now I’m in the middle of nowhere and I can’t summon a Grab because I don’t have data. I don’t have a mobile internet connection. Nothing works. So I thought 120,000. Sure. Sounds good. So I said to the guy, “You got a deal. You got a passenger. Let’s go.”

So, I hopped into his taxi. His name was Rizal. We went into town and then we had a whole lot of adventures. I think I did I tell this story already? I think I did in a way. I think I went that far with my story at the beginning about how my hotel has a very strange name. And no matter how many times I told him the name of my hotel, he had no idea what I was talking about. And it was quite a funny experience. Anyway, and then eventually he gave me his phone. He opened up Google Maps. This is what I wanted to do. I told him like just can I can I put it into your, if you open Google Maps I can type it in. And then he eventually Yeah. Okay. Here’s my phone. And I typed in the name of my hotel. It came up on Google Maps and I said, “Okay, this is my hotel, the location.” And then he clicked on getting directions and then he drove me there. But man, it was a scary scary ride. He was not a good driver in any way. We had so many near accidents. He didn’t obey any of the traffic rules. We got to roundabouts where people were waiting for their turn to get through the roundabout. He just went off on the shoulder, just zoomed all the way around everybody. We had a lot of near misses. Yeah. Wasn’t a he was not a safe driver in any way, but he did get me to the hotel which yeah was very very nice to finally arrive and then I wasn’t sure we were in the right area but I was tracking everything on Google Maps and then when I stepped out of the taxi I looked up at the hotel building ah I recognize it from the Google maps listing so I was in the right place and I guess the final part of the story. Checking into the hotel and yeah, arriving at my new home and getting settled in.

Okay, coming in for the landing. If you stuck with me this long on this video for this whole story, congratulations. That definitely makes you a member of the Crunch Club. Shout out to the Crunch Club members out there who make it all the way to the end of the video. You’re my favorite people.

So, yeah, the final story. At by this point, to be honest, I didn’t even know that I really had a reservation at this hotel. And this is a long complicated story, but I already mentioned that I accidentally booked the wrong hotel. So through Agoda I wanted to stay at one hotel that I’d picked out and then I clicked on it made a reservation but through some sort of error I ended up with a reservation at this hotel where I didn’t want to stay and at that time I thought well I don’t want to stay there so can I cancel that reservation and just make a new booking so I went into my Agoda listing and it said there was a cancel button. If you’d like to cancel this reservation, click here. I thought, oh, okay, so it’s cancellable for a full refund. So, I clicked on that button, but it turns out that cancel button wasn’t the normal you can cancel and get a full refund button. For some reason, it was a strange button I’d never seen before on Agoda. It was like a special request cancellation because for this reservation, it was nonrefundable. I’d already paid in advance using Touch ‘n Go, by the way. So, the money had been deducted from my Touch ‘n Go account. It was gone. And if I cancelled, I get no money back, no refund. But this button was a way to say special circumstances and then it turns out that you don’t automatically cancel and get a refund. Agoda will send a message to the hotel and say, “Special circumstances. Would you give this preferred customer, a customer that we like, make an exception for him to cancel it and return his money, but it’s up to the hotel. They can say yes or no.” I didn’t know that. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have clicked on the button, but I’d never seen this button before. But I had clicked on it and now I got a message from Agoda saying okay we’ve sent a message to the hotel and it’s up to them they will decide but they have 48 hours to decide. I was like I didn’t know that had I known that I never ever ever would have done it because now I’m living in uncertainty. I’m flying into Banda Aceh. I made a reservation. I tried to cancel the reservation, but I won’t know for 48 hours whether it really was cancelled or not. I just I have no way of knowing. So anyway, they had 48 hours it said. Was it 48 hours? I think they gave me a time and said they will tell you by noon of the next day. That’s what it was. So noon of the next day was the day of my flight. And then at some point when I was at the airport, I think it was mid-afternoon, I suddenly got a message from Agoda saying, “The hotel denied your request.” But I didn’t know what that meant. Like it said, “Okay, the hotel denied your cancellation request.” But what they denied was giving me my money back. But to me, the language wasn’t clear. Maybe they I hit the cancel button asking for a refund and they denied the refund, but what does that mean about my reservation? Did they actually cancel it and give me no money back? And there was no way for me to know now, do I even have a reservation or not?

Anyway, I tried to just relax and think, okay, there’s nothing you can do about this situation, so stop worrying about it. And it’s not an expensive hotel anyway. I mean, I think when I booked the room, it was 20 ringgit a night, which is like 90,000 rupiah. So, and I booked it for five nights, though. So, it was still 100 ringgit. Yeah. So, but it wasn’t a huge amount of money. So, I was thinking I’ll take the taxi to this hotel. If I show up and they say, “You don’t have a room.” Well, then I just have to go to a new hotel. That’s the worst thing that’s going to happen. And I lose my money. And I thought, “Okay, just relax.” So, I did. I relaxed.

And then when I got here though, I was very happy to arrive and they were expecting me. Who knows whether they even saw my cancellation request. I think what happened is that Agoda sent them the cancellation request. They never replied like I don’t think they never saw it and then there was a time limit on it and then when the timer counted down Agoda just said automatically denied because they didn’t reply. So, I think this hotel never even saw my cancellation request cuz they’re not it’s not the type of hotel there. When I walked in, I mean, there’s nobody at the front desk. There was nobody there. The whole place was empty. It’s not like they have 10 staff monitoring their online systems and making reservations and things like that. It’s a very casual, low-budget place.

So, anyway, I walk in. I wandered around the entrance for a while waiting for somebody to show up. Somebody did show up and this was a nice change again from Malaysia because things in Indonesia and at a low budget are pretty informal here. And the guy just looked at me, “Oh, Douglas.” And I went, “Yep, Douglas. Okay, here’s your key.” And that was it. There was no check-in procedure. He didn’t have to see my passport. Didn’t have to make copies of anything. No tourism tax. No, I don’t have to download the tourism tax receipt and copy it out, send it to him via WhatsApp. I didn’t have to do any of this stuff. It was just he just kind of looked at his computer, looked at me, Douglas. And I went, Douglas, okay, here you go. Here’s your key. And he walked me up to my room and then here I am. I didn’t have to do anything else.

Really interesting hotel. I think I talked about this a little bit already. It used to be like a house, like a mansion. I think some maybe some sort of a government building or a mansion of a wealthy family and then they divided it up into hotel rooms. A lot of big open common areas filled with sofas and tables and chairs. Couple of outdoor rooftop verandas and the rooms themselves are low budget. There’s nothing in them. Good air conditioner which is nice. It actually has a TV but that’s it. The bathroom is cold water only. Lot of openings, so a lot of mosquitoes get in, which is a bit annoying. And I don’t have my mosquito net with me, anything like that. You’re not going to get bottles of water and shampoo and toothbrushes. You don’t even get a towel, so you have to bring your own towels, things like that. So, yeah, low budget place, but it got a lot of character. Very interesting.

And I was so tired, though, when I got here. I was so flustered. I just lay on this bed for a long time. And in fact, I totally forgot that on Planet Doug, my main channel, I made a video about the Touch ‘n Go, using Touch ‘n Go, just on daily life, buying things in restaurants and markets, on the street, things like that. And I totally forgot that video was going live. And when I popped in here, I think I got a message from a friend. I clicked into Wi-Fi, so I got caught up with messages and things like that. And somebody mentioned that video and I went, “Ah, I forgot. I forgot it was there.” So then I went to Planet Doug just to look at that video and turned out it was relatively popular. So it’s been out there 22 hours now since it was posted and it’s up to 17,000 views which is very very good for one of my videos. It’s more of a how-to guide. It’s not like a travel video. It’s a little bit of a travel video cuz I included 18 different examples of me using Touch ‘n Go. So, I show myself buying Malaysian food, Malaysian snacks, buying coffee, riding on the LRT system. So, it’s a little bit of a travel video, but it’s mainly about using Touch ‘n Go. And it seems to have struck a little bit of a chord with people. People seem to like it. So, it’s getting a lot more views than normal for me, a lot more comments than I normally get. So, then I spent some time just sort of reading through the comments and yeah, this video went out to a wider audience than normal. So, I had a lot of fun reading through the comments. People who know me, who follow my channel, a lot of comments from them commenting on, whoa, a popular video for a change on Planet Doug, you’re really on to something. You should make more videos like this. And then you get newcomers who have no idea who I am and they think I’m an idiot and I’m a [ __ ] and I don’t know what I’m talking about. So, I get a lot of these videos. I just saw one here. No offense, bro. TNG was introduced more than 20 years ago. What is the big deal? You’re an idiot kind of thing. But yeah, so it’s been a lot.

Anyway, I came into my room and I had all of that to look at. Was very entertaining. So, I was looking through a bunch of the comments. I didn’t unpack for a long time. I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t have the strength. And then when it was like 9:30, 10:00 at night, I needed to get drinking water. So, I went out into the city, walked around my local neighborhood, pitch black, and I found myself at a convenience store, Indomaret, bought water, bought some milk, and then I just came back to my room, unpacked, and here I am finally getting to the end of a behind the scenes storytelling podcast video. And I think that is the very end.

As I said, I didn’t mean to go on at such length, but hey, I just got into storytelling mode. And because I didn’t shoot video about most of these events, I thought I should go into them in detail, and I just enjoy rambling about these things anyway. So, I hope you enjoyed that a little bit.

All right, it’s time to shut down as always. If you want to stay up to date with everything I’m doing away from these behind the scenes videos, check out the Planet Doug Patreon. There might be like more daily short updates there. And I post things to the Planet Doug main channel, the posts, and I’ve recently started up a Planet Doug Substack and Buy Me a Coffee. So, if I write like a long update on Patreon, I’m trying to copy and paste that into YouTube posts and into Substack and into Buy Me a Coffee. So, all of those are kind of on the same level in terms of real time updates and photos and things that I’m doing, announcements about the Planet Doug adventures and YouTube channel, stuff like that. So, check all those out. Patreon, YouTube posts, Substack, and Buy Me a Coffee. They’re all out there on the internet. Go check them out.

So, yeah, today I may I don’t think I will, but I was thinking I might go to Telkomsel to see if I can get my smartphone set up with mobile data, but I think I’ve run out of time, run out of energy. I’m just going to head out into my neighborhood, get something to eat, get to know a little bit more about my neighborhood, and tomorrow morning I can really start my time here in Banda Aceh. All right, that’s it. Shutting down. See you in the next video.