VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
In this behind-the-scenes podcast, it’s a day of technological struggles and real-world adventures in Kuala Lumpur.
🔧 The Tech Story: I’m trying to re-integrate my classic Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II into my daily filming. The mission? Master the wireless OI Share app for remote control. The result? A revelation about how it works (thanks to AI!), surprising benefits, and one ultimate deal-breaking flaw that made me abandon the entire idea. If you’ve ever been frustrated by camera WiFi apps, this is for you.
🏨 The Hotel Saga: My stay at the Crossroads Hotel takes a chaotic turn. To save money, I booked a cheaper “closet” room, leading to a packing marathon, frustrating front desk negotiations, and an unexpected 40-ringgit solution. I also explain my little trick for finding cheaper hotel rates on Agoda via Google Maps.
🍔 Street Food Detour: I take the GoPro out into my favorite Chow Kit neighborhood for fresh pisang goreng (fried bananas) and not one, but THREE delicious, saucy 5-ringgit Ramly burgers (beef & chicken). Plus, a look back at two incredible surprise meal deliveries from a Planet Doug subscriber!
📺 YouTube Stories: I talk about two videos I’ve been watching:
1. The Moroccan cyclist “Let’s Go Cycling” and his dangerous mountain camp in the Philippines.
2. The epic “Auto Alex Cars” Vietnam motorbike adventure specials—and why their “dream trip” would be my nightmare.
Chapters:
Reunited with the Olympus Camera
Figuring Out the OI Share App (The WiFi Revelation)
The App’s Major Advantages & Flaws
The Deal-Breaker Problem
Hotel Crossroads Price & Room Chaos
My Agoda/Google Maps Booking Trick
Street Food Run: Ramly Burgers & Pisang Goreng
Surprise Meal Delivery from a Subscriber (Throwback)
YouTube Story: Let’s Go Cycling in the Philippines
YouTube Story: Auto Alex Cars in Vietnam
Final Thoughts on the Olympus App & Moving Hotels
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to the Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast for Tuesday, January 20th, 2026. I wouldn’t normally record so many of these in a row, but these are unusual days in my life right now. Partially because, as I’ve already mentioned, I was reunited with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II camera, and I’m trying to incorporate that camera back into my daily vlogging, daily podcasting routine, and I want to bring this camera with me in the future everywhere I go. You pay a heavy weight penalty for carrying around a camera like this, especially if you have, you know, extra batteries and the battery charger and a couple of lenses. And for that reason, I’ve often left it behind. And being an older Olympus camera, it still relies on contrast detect autofocus, which is not very fast, not very accurate, and it can pulse in and out of focus, which can get a bit annoying when you’re looking for that sort of thing. And the batteries don’t last that long. And I think the main problem for me when it came to vlogging with it, like walking around, is I don’t have a lens that’s wide enough. So I find it’s really hard to hold the camera far away so that the field of view is like as wide as a GoPro. And none of my lenses go that wide. So anyway, there are a bunch of little issues with the camera which means I often end up leaving it behind. But then every time I do, I really miss it because there are certain situations where I would love to have it. So anyway, I’m working very hard right now to get reacquainted with this camera. At the very least, I can use it for this sort of setup inside hotel rooms, in cafes. I put the camera on a tripod. I turn off stabilization because I don’t need it when it’s sitting on a tripod. And I’m using a small, small range telephoto zoom. So I can set the camera down on the floor on the far side of the bed and then I can use the zoom to kind of come in a little bit, which means, by the way, that I can no longer reach the camera. I mean, it’s so far away. Feels kind of weird in a way to be sitting here talking. I’m accustomed to having a GoPro right here. So, it really feels like I’m talking to you into that GoPro, or with the Olympus having it right here as well, using this, as I talked about before, this 12 mm lens. So, having the camera so far away, it feels very odd because the camera is quite small at this distance and I can see the whole room out there and it’s like, okay, who, who, who am I talking to? It’s almost like I’m a talk show host who gets confused about what, what camera am I looking at? Camera A, camera B, camera C. It’s like, oh, there’s the Olympus over there. But once, you know, you adjust, once you get used to it. And that brings me to the main reason why I’m recording again today when I just recorded I think two days ago. And that’s because my technology project for today, for this morning, was to learn how to use the Olympus app because I remember trying this out before, but then I didn’t really dive into it. So, I kind of forgot. I didn’t even know if there was an Olympus app that I can use to control the camera wirelessly. And then I did some research yesterday and reminded myself, you know, I went online and I was like, “Oh, is there an app, a smartphone app for controlling the OM-D E-M5 Mark II?” And it was like, “Yeah, there is one. Go to the Google Play Store and download OI Share, something like that. It’s called OI Share.” So I thought, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This rings a bell.” So I went to download the app and it said, “Oh, it’s already on your phone.” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I already have it.” So, it turned out I already had the app on my phone. And where is it? I lost track of it again. It is called OI Share. Oh, there it is. OI Share. Oh, this is the older one. This is like Olympus Imaging. OI. So, I do have the app OI Share. It was already on my phone. And then this morning I had to remember, well, how the heck do you do this? Because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to do this in the past. I’ve done it with many different cameras, many different apps, and the technology is confusing. I’ve never really come to grips with it. I always end up like, “How does this work again? How do I turn this on?” and you have to do something on your camera and then you have to link them and you got to do Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or I don’t know. I never really understood the technology. So, I went through the whole process this morning of relearning how it works with OI Share and I’m pretty sure now I have it figured out. And the key concept that I had to understand how this works is that when you do this, you have to turn on Wi-Fi on your camera. And the way you have to think of it is your camera becomes a Wi-Fi router all by itself but without internet access. That’s the key. So basically what you’re doing is you turn on Wi-Fi on your camera and that becomes a Wi-Fi hotspot. So, your camera is emitting a Wi-Fi hotspot and then you take your phone and you connect to that hotspot. And in order to do that, your phone has to disconnect from everything else. So, it disconnects from hotel Wi-Fi, it disconnects from mobile data, and then it connects to the Wi-Fi hotspot being produced by your camera. And as soon as I figured that out, it was like, “Oh, now I understand how it works.” Turn on Wi-Fi hotspot on your camera. Then your smartphone app automatically connects to that hotspot and then you can control the camera remotely. So that is why the Olympus camera is running right now. I don’t have it connected to my phone right now. I just hit record on the camera. And so anyway, this morning I’m doing a little bit of a test of the OI Share app. And I’m sure you can’t see it from that far away, but maybe yeah, I’ll take a screenshot of it and then you can see what it looks like. And the key one at the top is remote control. So you click on that remote control live view and then I can control the Olympus from my phone. And I’m just trying to figure out is it even useful because there are many, many limitations. One is that the Wi-Fi connection is so slow that it has to reduce the bit rate. So on your phone you see a live view of what the camera is seeing. But it’s so fuzzy, it’s so out of focus that you can’t judge. Like, yeah, I can look at the LCD screen on the phone and I can say, “Oh, is it in focus or not?” I can tell. But on the app, I can’t tell. It’s so fuzzy. It’s such a low bit rate that it just looks out of focus all the time. So, you can’t use the app to judge whether you’re in focus or not. You can’t use the app to judge the brightness level. Is it underexposed or overexposed? Because you just can’t tell. It has to reduce the, yeah, it goes down to a lower resolution and it has to reduce the frame rate. That’s the other thing. I have the Olympus set up to shoot at 50 frames per second, but in the app remote, it has to reduce it to 25 frames per second. And it has a tremendous amount of lag when you’re using the phone app. So like if you’re moving the camera around, you move the camera and then it takes the app like 3 seconds to catch up before the video finally makes that movement. So if I’m looking at myself on the LCD screen and I do this, I can see it on the camera, it’s in real time. But if I’m doing it here and I raise my hands on the phone, it takes like three seconds before the image catches up to reality and my hands go up in the air. So, there’s a tremendous amount of lag. So, there are many, many problems and I’m not entirely sure what information I can see and what settings I can change. So now what I’m going to do is stop the camera and then I’m going to come back here and then launch the Olympus app and then I’m going to start and stop recording from here and then just play around with it and see whether does it even make sense to use it because I think the only advantage is that I can start and stop recording from here. That’s the only advantage. Nothing else, everything else is a disadvantage. But I can sit here without getting up, walking over to the camera, stopping recording, restarting recording. I can just do it from here if I want. But I think that’s the only advantage. Everything else is a disadvantage. So it may even be pointless to do that. If that’s all I want to do, I think there are Olympus remotes like with a wire or wireless remotes that all they do is start stop recording. So, it’s basically a shutter release button. And if that’s all I want to do, then it would be better just to have the camera set up. Don’t use the app, just have this, you know, I just have a little remote and go beep, start recording, beep, stop, and then if I need to look at anything more serious, I just look at the camera’s LCD screen or I get up and walk over to the controls and make adjustments. But anyway, we’ll discover that how this works. I’m going to now stop recording and then the next time you see me, it’s because I’ve started recording from the app.
Success. That was easier than I expected and perhaps more useful than I realized. So, the way I didn’t even realize this until this morning and just now confirming it, that in order to do this, you basically start with your camera. So, when I was looking at the LCD screen on my camera, there was a little button on the screen that said Wi-Fi. So, the LCD screen is a touch screen on this Olympus. So, what you do is launch the app. Of course, you have to click on the Olympus OI Share app. So, you open the app and then you click on the Wi-Fi button on the LCD screen and that turns on your camera’s Wi-Fi and it’s a Wi-Fi hotspot. And of course, there is a setup procedure the first time you do it because it functions exactly like a hotspot on your phone. So, it can be private or it can be public and you can have a password. So, you set all of that up one time, right? The first time you do it, and then there’s a QR code on the screen. You scan the QR code from your OI Share app. And by scanning the code, now your phone and that camera are linked. And you only have to do that one time. So, I did that this morning. Actually, I redid it because I guess I did it in the past, but just to make sure everything was up to date, I reestablished the connection and chose a new password and things like that. So, the key for me intellectually is to just realize it’s a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot coming from the camera. And as soon as I figured that out, it was like, ah, that’s how it works. Okay, because I’m really, really familiar with hotspots. I do that all the time. Like right now I have a really good mobile data plan from Digi Celcom and I have a really strong mobile connection in this room for some reason. So I don’t even bother with the hotel Wi-Fi. It’s way too slow for me. I just turn on mobile hotspot on my phone and then I connect all my other technology to this hotspot. And of course, when you’re traveling and maybe you’ve arrived in a new country, like it happened to me when I took the ferry from Malaysia to Sumatra, you’d land at the dock, you know, the boat arrives at the dock. I don’t have internet because I don’t have a SIM card yet. I’m not connected. But then you’re chatting with a friendly Indonesian person there and they say, “Oh, I’ve got internet. Let me give you my hotspot.” And they turn hotspot on their phone. You connect to their hotspot and now you have internet access. Right? So I do that all the time. So I’m very, very familiar with the concept of hotspots, but I never thought of it that way before. It was actually because of an AI. I went on to ChatGPT this morning and I said, I do all these technology confessions. AI actually understands me better than my friends, like better than anyone in my life, which is really weird because I’m interacting with AI so many times now. And then I just confessed to the AI this morning, like ChatGPT, I said, you know, I’ve used tons and tons of apps to connect to cameras and other devices and I have to confess that I’m absolutely bewildered. Like I never know what I’m doing. I don’t understand the technology. All I really do is just start mashing buttons. Like I don’t know, do I do this first or do I do that first or do I double click? Like I don’t know what I’m doing because I don’t understand the foundation of the technology. So, I just click on buttons until something works. That’s my confession. And it’s like, can you help me get over this? And then the AI explained it to me in terms I can understand. So, yeah. And then the AI said, hey, you’re not alone. Nobody really understands truly how these things work because camera companies are not good at UI when it comes to this sort of thing. That’s not their specialty. So all the information, the systems, the UI just don’t make any sense to anybody. And then the AI explained it to me. Okay, this is what’s happening. Your camera is functioning as a Wi-Fi router and it produces a Wi-Fi hotspot and then you connect your phone to the camera’s Wi-Fi hotspot. And as soon as the AI laid it out to me like that, it was like, “Oh, oh, that’s what’s going on. Now I get it.” It was like the light bulb went off and it was like, “Oh, now I understand.” And now it all makes sense to me. Like you always have to know where to start when it comes to technology. If you’re using a bunch of devices, okay, what’s the starting point, and now I finally got it. The starting point is the Wi-Fi button on your camera. You click on Wi-Fi, it turns on your camera’s Wi-Fi and it emits a hotspot and now you go to your other device and you connect to that hotspot which automatically disconnects you from everything else which is why you no longer have internet access. So that, I mean that’s one of the tricky things now that I’m using this phone to connect to my camera’s hotspot, this phone disconnected from the internet. So I no longer have internet access, I think. So that’s very, very interesting. And one big problem doing it this way for me is what I already mentioned, I think, is that now that I have my camera’s image on my phone, the LCD screen on my camera no longer shows this. What I would like is to have both operating, right? I would love to be able to see the image here on my phone and see it on the LCD screen. I want both of them active. But when you’re doing this, on the LCD screen, all I see is the Wi-Fi setting and a QR code. That’s all I see. So, I no longer have access to the information screen on that LCD. This is the only access I have. And I was thinking that was going to be a big problem for me, but I think I might be okay because the screen here looks better than I expected. I talked about how it reduces the bit rate, reduces the frame rate, but in terms of the brightness, I think I can make a judgment call. In terms of the framing, I can see it quite clearly here. You know, I’m happy with that framing. Not too close to my face, not too far away. I think this is a nice framing for a podcast, a video podcast. The lag is not as bad as I thought it would be. It’s behind, but not by 3 seconds. When I did my testing, it was 3 seconds behind. But now, if I raise my hand, it’s like a quarter of a second. Half a… no, not even half a second, maybe a quarter of a second behind. So basically it’s real time. And right now all I have access to is stop start. That’s the only setting I can change. But that’s a limitation of Olympus. Like this is an older Olympus camera, so its video features are quite primitive. So, while you’re shooting video, your settings are locked, which I find, yeah, really annoying because you can’t change exposure. When I’m doing, when I’m taking pictures, you’re looking to take a picture, you can adjust exposure compensation, dial in exposure, and then take the picture. And in some cameras, while you’re shooting video, you can adjust the exposure. So, if I’m outside walking around with the Olympus and it’s overexposed while it’s shooting video, I can dial in, I can bring down the exposure live. But with this one, you can’t. You have to stop recording, adjust the exposure, restart recording. So, that’s what I have to do here. I can’t adjust the exposure. I would have to stop recording. But, I can change the exposure here on my phone. So I could stop recording and I have a button for exposure compensation. I can also change white balance and I can change mode. So from here I can change my camera to photo mode, program mode, aperture priority, shutter priority, manual exposure. I can change the camera mode here and I can change exposure compensation and I can change white balance, but that’s all I can do. But it’s more than I thought. And one more advantage, I just realized that now that I see the video screen here and the LCD screen on the camera is not showing video, the LCD turns off, which should save battery life. It might even double how long the battery lasts because it’s no longer powering the LCD screen. So, yeah. And I can see that it’s recording. I was complaining the other day that one problem with Olympus cameras, again, an older one, is it doesn’t show you much information. Like there’s no tally light. I love to have a tally light on the front of the camera. Like when you’re recording video, you get a light, a red light, and as soon as you see that red light, if it’s flashing or it’s steady, depending on the camera, you know you’re recording. But this camera has no feedback. There’s no tally light. And it does on the LCD screen have a tiny little record, it says REC in the bottom right hand corner, but even from this distance, it’s practically impossible to see. So I’m like, is it recording? I can’t tell. I can’t tell. But now I can see it right on my phone. It says recording up there at the top. Very clear. Because it’s so close to my face. I can actually see it. I can see the focusing mode. I’m in continuous autofocus. So, and it shows me how much time has elapsed, which is really handy because, as I said, this camera being a not a very good video camera has a 29-minute recording limit. So, when it hits 29 minutes 58 seconds, it just turns off. It stops recording. And the camera doesn’t tell you that it stopped recording. So, I’m always monitoring. It’s like, oh, have I reached 30 minutes yet? And quite often I miss it. I forget and I’m talking for 10 minutes and, oh, for Pete’s sake, it’s not even recording anymore. But now I can see exactly, I’ve been babbling for 12 minutes, and I can monitor it from here. So, this, two thumbs up. OI Share is working better than I expected, especially since now I understand what’s going on. But one thing I want to find out though is like, can I go away from this screen? Can I refer to my notes in another program or will that turn this off? So this is going to be a big test for me. So, I’m going to go to another app on my phone and we’ll see whether the camera just stops recording. This is very exciting.
Unfortunately, that was a failure. Once you have the Olympus OI Share app running and connected to your camera and you’re recording, you can’t leave the screen. And I kind of knew that would be the case, but I was hoping the technology would be advanced enough that I could just roam around my smartphone, go to different apps, do whatever I want, and then I could just come back to OI Share and pick up where I left off. But no, as soon as you navigate away from this screen, everything shuts down. And a little bit of my excitement has been tempered because 30 minutes has gone by since that happened because I couldn’t reconnect. I tried over and over and over again and for whatever reason, these connections are very fragile, it seems. So, and you don’t know what’s wrong. Like I didn’t do anything differently. All I did was the usual, like I would turn off the Olympus camera, like shut it down completely, turn it back on, click on the Wi-Fi button, launch OI Share, connect, and it would fail and then it would fail and it would fail and then I would do it again and again and again and finally it just, for no reason that I can see, it connected. So it took me 30 minutes to reconnect. And if it’s such a fragile connection, then obviously it’s a waste of time trying. I mean, this is all about convenience, that I don’t have to get up and go to the camera and fiddle with the controls. But if every time I do that it takes 30 minutes to restart the recording from the app, it’s just a giant waste of time. But we’ll see. Yeah, there’s a few other issues. The main one I think is audio. I was hoping that I would see an audio signal here and show me the levels, but it doesn’t. So, there’s no, again, this Olympus is not a video camera, so it isn’t designed for stuff like that. This remote connection is mainly intended for taking pictures. It’s not meant for shooting video. It does work for video, but it’s not very powerful. So, I’m assuming I’m recording audio. At least if I use the LCD screen, I can see the audio bar going up and down. So, I know that there is audio being recorded. Right now, I have no idea. I just have to hope and guess that it’s recording audio. Yeah. Yeah, I mean technology, man, it just goes on and on because with my Rode Wireless Go, I have it set up so that I can use two microphones at the same time. So, if I’m hanging out with a friend and I want to mic them up, then their microphone goes to one audio track, this one goes to a different audio track. And then in the editing program, you can choose, you know, to mix them or mute this one, do whatever you want. But that means if I’m only using one microphone, then it only records on one audio track. So like on the Olympus, you know, there’s track for stereo, there’s track one and track two, but this one is only recording to track two. And in the editing program, then I have to change the settings to send this audio also to track one. And if you forget to do that, you only hear the audio in one ear. And it would be nice to be able to change that setting from the microphone, like just on the receiver, just go, oh, you know, single mic, dual mic, but the Rode Wireless Go system, as good as it is, a lot of those settings you can’t change them on the receiver. Now I have to plug the receiver into my laptop, launch the Rode Wireless Connect app, and then those settings I have to change it from a laptop. There’s no way to change it from the receiver itself. The DJI mic system is more advanced. They have a much more complete set of controls. You can change all the settings directly from the microphone or the receiver, but Rode hasn’t implemented that. And so basically the point here is that once you’re recording using this OI Share app, I have no access to anything else on the phone. So if I kept notes somewhere, I can’t change screens. So what you have to do is control the camera with this phone. And then if you want to refer to something like a note, then you have to have a second device, which luckily I do have, so I can look at other things, you know, on my phone. But then you have to have two devices. Anyway, the ongoing technology struggles, but this is very exciting. It’s working better than I expected, even taking into account all the limitations. Yeah, I don’t mind this at all. I may end up doing this routinely. It’s one of these things you have to do it routinely just so that you remember how it works because if you don’t do it for two months, you’re starting fresh every time. It’s like, how does this work again? What do I turn on first? What are the settings? How do I, you know, and then it takes a long time. But if you do it regularly, you get muscle memory and mental neural pathways develop where you just do things on autopilot. But anyway, yeah, I would call that a success, a rare technological success on Planet Doug.
Switching gears. That was a Planet Doug success. Now, let’s get back to the normal mode where everything on Planet Doug goes wrong for a variety of reasons to do with my own stupidity and the way the world works and we don’t seem to get along very often. So, I had this adventure about my room here at Crossroads. I’m staying at Crossroads Hotel and I have a queen, a standard queen room, and I’m very happy in this room. It’s quiet. There’s no cigarette smoke. I have no connecting door to another room. So, I don’t have to worry about the people next door. Even if there’s smoking in the neighboring rooms, the smoke doesn’t get into my room. So, I’m very happy in this room. It’s got a nice air conditioner, good mobile internet, nice bathroom. Yeah, it’s a, I mean, things could be improved, you know, don’t get me wrong. Things could definitely be improved, but overall, yeah, I’m very happy here. But then I went to extend my stay because my reservation ran out because I’m staying in KL longer than I thought I would, as always happens to me. So I needed to book more nights and then the prices for this room just went through the roof. I don’t know if this is a setting that you can modify on Agoda or something, but this hotel Crossroads, they seem to have the prices on an elastic band. You just never know what you’re going to get. And I don’t know how, you know, whether the system monitors you and your behavior. And of course, it’s monitoring the day of the week. Wednesday is going to be cheaper than Friday night. Sometimes if you want to book a room for tonight, same day booking, maybe the prices will be lower because they’re trying to get the same day reservations, or sometimes it’s like triple the old rate. You just never know what you’re going to find. So I went into Agoda to rebook this room for a few more nights and the price was just astronomical. It’s like, oh, give me a break. I’m not staying at the Hilton here. I’m not at the five-star Sheraton. It’s not worth that price. The price just went through the roof and I said, “Nah, that’s ridiculous.” And then out of nowhere, I saw a single room and I’d never seen that here before. So I thought, “Wow, they have single rooms here.” And of course, single rooms are smaller, meant for one person, so the price is lower. And I think the price I saw was like 48 ringgit per night. So call it 50 ringgit. It’s a 50 ringgit per night for that room. I mean, it’s not a great room. It’s, most people would not be happy with it. More like a windowless closet, but I don’t need a lot of room. I don’t need windows. I don’t need much, you know? I just need the lowest price I can find with the bare minimum of comfort levels. So, I thought, ah, let’s hop on this train here. And I booked the single room for a couple of nights and I got it at 50 ringgit per night plus the tourism tax and all that kind of stuff. So it was significantly more expensive than that. But the base price at least was reasonable for a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. So I booked that and then of course what I had to do is change rooms, right? So, I have to check out. This was all yesterday. I planned ahead and my idea was to spend the morning in this room and then I’m going to sort of, you know, repacking and organizing things like that, working on YouTube videos, all my usual stuff. And then I would check out this room and then check into my new room. Basically stay in the same hotel, but just carry my bags to the new room. But to be honest, when I booked the single room, I kind of forgot that they have very poor customer service here. So, they’re not going to give you early check-in. I kind of got used to it. Like some of the small hotels like the Hotel Raja Bot, the desk clerks there are very friendly, very nice, very customer service oriented, and they think about their guests. So they can, if I ended up in a situation there where I’m staying in their hotel, but I’m moving from a single room to a double or from a double down to a single, they can see, oh, he’s staying, but he’s just moving rooms. Let’s see if we can get him into that room early. So the cleaner will clean the room for me in advance so that at 12:00 or even sometimes 11, they’ll knock on my door. It’s happened as early as 10:00 a.m. They knock on my door and then I open the door. Oh, your room’s ready. You want to pop over? It’s all done. So, they’ve done something good for me. So, I try to make sure I do something good for them because they’ve prepared that room for me in advance. So, then I’m not going to sit in my old room for 2 hours because the cleaner needs to get in here too. So, because they did something nice for me, as soon as they tell me at 10:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., “Oh, your new room is ready.” Boom. I grab my bags, I’m in the new room, I drop off the key, check out, check in, and now their cleaner can get into my old room and prepare it for the next guest. You know, we work together to make my life easier and then I make their life easier. That’s the way it works. But here at Crossroads, it’s never ever any option like that. Checkout is at 12:00 and if you’re not out of this room at 11:59, they send the bouncers, you know, the power turns off, everything disappears and you’re out the door and you’re not getting your new room until 2. So then you’ve got 2 hours of sitting in the lobby waiting and I kind of forgot about that and I thought, huh, that’s going to be… yeah, I wasn’t thinking about that. So now I saved money by moving to a single, but now I’m paying a price because I spent the whole morning packing and now I’m going to have to sit there for two hours waiting. And yeah, maybe I made a mistake. And then I realized through because of various circumstances in my life, I’m going to want to stay in KL longer than those two nights. So, I thought, “Oh boy, I better get on top of this and make sure I book the single room for more nights because I’d only booked it for two nights.” And then, of course, I went to Agoda, looked at the single room, and it was available, but now they wanted 100 ringgit per night. So, I got it for 50 for two nights. And now that I tried to rebook it for like two or three nights in the future, now Agoda was saying, “Oh, it’s a hundred ringgit.” I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” And there’s no way I’m going to be paying a hundred ringgit for a little closet here at the Crossroads. For 100 ringgit, you can get a much, much, much nicer room out there at a different hotel. So annoying. So then I realize that if I move into that single room for two nights, after two nights, I’m going to be moving again because there’s no way I’m paying 100 ringgit for that single room. So I was like, moving into this single room, two nights, now I got to move out back into a double, queen, or back to the Raja Bot or some other hotel, you know? I was just like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” You know, the prices, like, yeah, they just go up and down and you never know what you’re going to get. And here I was booking it relatively, for me, in advance. And they were still trying to take advantage of me by asking for 100 ringgit. 100 ringgit for that single room is far more than they charge for their deluxe queen room. So, it makes no sense at all. Why does it have that price? It makes no sense. But anyway, once I realized that, I was like mid-packing here in this room being really annoyed because I wasn’t in the mood to do it. I usually enjoy packing and organizing and going over things. But I’ve just been so tired here in KL for some reason. I’ve just been out of it. So, I wasn’t very focused. And just I looked around at my room at all this stuff that I have. It’s like, huh, what do I do with all this stuff? I just didn’t want to deal with it. So, I thought, well, let’s go down to the front desk just to tell them. Cuz normally if you rebook in the same hotel, Raja Bot, they see on the computer. It’s like, oh, Mr. Douglas, he’s extending his stay, but moving. They see what’s going on. Here at the Crossroads, they don’t pay any attention. So, they’re not even going to know that I’m checking out but moving to a new room in their hotel. So, I went down to the lobby to the front desk just to bring them up to speed, just to tell them. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, me being something of a preferred customer, a regular customer, maybe they would look at their computer and go, “Oh, you know what? Yeah, we’ve got some empty rooms anyway. We can play around with the reservations.” Okay, you booked the single, but why don’t you just stay in your room, the one you’re in now? Yeah, just stay there and we won’t charge you anything extra, but just stay in that room. I was sort of hoping this might happen. But I went down there and unfortunately my regular front desk clerk, he wasn’t on duty yet. It was earlier in the morning and it was another guy who, to be kind, is not the sharpest tool in the shed. I just, it’s hard to deal with this other guy. He doesn’t seem clued into anything. Anyway, I thought, well anyway, it never occurred to him, of course, to just tell me, ah, you can just stay in your room, don’t worry about it. He doesn’t really have the power to do that. I don’t think he’s not like a senior staff member. So, I knew that was off the table. But then I wanted to find out, okay, well, I’m really unhappy about this single room going from 50 to 100 ringgit per night. So, I’m wondering it might make sense for me just to stay in this room and I’ll just pay to upgrade. So, I’m explaining to the guy, “Okay, you can see I’ve booked a single room for two nights, right? Yeah, you’re with me so far?” because you really got to walk this guy through what you’re talking about. And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see. So, can I upgrade to a standard double?” And I opened up Agoda to a standard double cuz on Agoda you could see that this room was available. So I’m like, see, like this room is available. So I’m thinking I want to stay in this room. I made a mistake by booking the single room. I want to stay in this room. Can I just pay to upgrade from single to double? And look, the double is available. And he looked at my phone and he focused on the photo, like the photo at the top that showed, as I talked about before, for all the rooms here they show the executive suite as the photos. So everybody no matter what room you book, you think you’re getting that executive suite with the big windows and the furniture and the fridge. They’re basically deceiving customers by showing room photos that don’t match the room. And then he looked at that. He said, “No, no, no, no, no. That picture is not the single room.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, I know that. I mean, we’ve talked about this in the past many times. I’m not pointing at the photo. I’m pointing at the words queen. Standard queen. It’s available, standard queen. So, can I upgrade from single to standard queen? How much would that cost?” And he says, “No, no, no. That’s not right. That photo, that room has no window. No window.” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I know. We’ve had this conversation. We’re in like a loop here. We’re in a matrix glitch.” Okay, let’s just forget about the photo. I’m not talking about the photo. I’m not talking about the window. Can I, how much would it cost to upgrade from the single? My reservation is a single. Right. Right. Right. I’m walking him through the logic here. I say, yeah, you have two nights single. Yeah. I want to upgrade to a queen, standard queen. How much would that cost? He’s like, no, that’s not, you know, it’s so frustrating when you run into that barrier. And again, I’m pretty sure it’s not a language barrier. It’s just a focusing problem. For a hotel clerk, a front desk clerk, upgrading from one room to another should not be such a difficult concept to grasp. That should be like hotel front desk clerk 101. I mean, that’s the basic level. Check guests in, check them out, and occasionally maybe they want to change rooms. Upgrade or downgrade. That’s got to be something you’ve done in the past. This should not be such a difficult concept to get across, right? And yeah, he just would not catch up with what I was saying. And I’m pretty sure I was being clear. I don’t think I was being complicated or anything. Anyway, I just gave up. And he said something about, “Oh, you know, when the new hotel clerk comes, you can talk to him,” cuz you could tell I was a little bit annoyed and he wasn’t grasping what I was talking about. Yeah. Well, when the new guy, when the other guy, the more senior guy, comes in. But of course that doesn’t do me any good because what I’m trying to do is avoid all the packing. So if I can find out, you know, at 9 in the morning, 10 in the morning, I don’t have to change rooms, then I can stop all the packing, all the organizing, and I’m just staying in this room. But now he’s telling me I have to wait until 12:00 to find out whether I can upgrade or not. But then I have to pack up as if I’m moving out. So, you know, I got to pack up my laptop, all of my electronics, all of my extension cords, all my camera gear. So, basically, I have to pack up anyway, as if I’m moving to another room. And then maybe I find out, oh no, I can pay a little bit and upgrade and stay in this room. And then all the packing was for no reason at all. He’s like, “Well, so this doesn’t really help me out that much.” Anyway, so I walked away from this guy, came back up to this room, and I packed up. I packed everything up like right down to it. All I had to do was pick up my bag, move it to a new room, and I’m done. And then this was around 11:00 and then I thought, well, why don’t I just go outside and get a carton of milk? I need something good this morning. I needed like a fresh, cold milk. And then I thought, as I go down the stairs, I can go through the lobby on my way to 7-Eleven and then maybe the new hotel clerk will be there, the guy who’s a little bit sharper, and then maybe we can work something out last minute and maybe he would, you know, cut me a break. I’m like, “Oh, no. Just stay in that room. It’s fine.” So anyway, I did that. I went down the stairs, down, down, down. I went through the lobby area and the new hotel clerk was there and he was standing beside the other hotel clerk and they’re both looking at the computer and I kind of glanced over and made eye contact and I thought, well, I’ll just go get milk first, then I’ll come back and I’ll talk to this guy. But then as I was walking by, I heard, “Sir, sir.” So, oh, something’s happening. And then I went back to the front desk and then I could talk to the new guy and then he understood instantly. Just upgrade. I paid for a single but the price skyrockets. So I think I want it’s better for me just to stay in my room. And I’m kind of like, is he going to just say, yeah, just stay, don’t worry about it. But no, he wasn’t going to be that nice to me. And then I said, “Well, how much would it cost to upgrade? Like, I’ve reserved a room for two nights, but can I upgrade and pay extra so I can just stay in this room?” And then he says, “Yeah, 20 ringgit per night.” So, cuz it’s a two-night reservation, he says, “Well, in order to upgrade from this single to your current standard queen, it’s 20 ringgit more. So if you pay 40 ringgit now in cash, yeah, you can just stay in your room.” So I thought about it, you know, it’s my own fault, my own stupidity for doing all of this. So now I’m going to end up paying more for this room compared to if I had just booked it in advance, right? So anyway, I wasn’t going to do it cuz I thought, ah, you know, you’re not made of money. You can’t just be throwing money around like this. And then I thought, well, what are the alternatives? And I finally, okay, let’s do it. And I just paid him 40 ringgit. And then he says, yeah, just stay in your room. Then I showed him my key cards. I got all my key cards. Like, do you have to reset these so everything doesn’t suddenly shut down and I get locked out or something? No, no, no. They’ll still work. Don’t worry about it. And that turned out to be true. So, here I am. I’m still, I wasted essentially an entire day because of this dumbness on my part. And yeah, so I just said, “Yeah, I’ll stay in this room for two more nights.” And then I was going to, then I had to start all over again, of course, cuz I need to stay longer than those two nights. And then when I checked the prices here at the Crossroads for this room and the single room and all the other rooms just through the roof. They just skyrocketed. And I said, “Okay, I’ve had enough of this place.” I mean, every time I come here, I end up coming to that conclusion. I was like, “Ah, that place is just too much trouble. Don’t stay at the Crossroads.” And I wasn’t going to stay here this time. Except I made the same mistake back at the Raja Bot where I was before where I didn’t book far enough in advance and they had no rooms left. So I had no choice. They kicked me out because the hotel was fully booked and then I just go back to the Crossroads and, who knows, maybe they’ll end up giving me a really nice room and everything will be wonderful and, you know, always hoping for the best. But of course my move to here and everything that’s happened since has just been, has not been a good experience. So I booked more nights back at the Hotel Raja Bot and I got my room there, a standard queen, windowless but a queen, standard queen, private bathroom, hot water, air conditioning for, yeah, about 50 ringgit. It was like somewhere like 47 ringgit per night. So when I saw that pop up on Agoda, well, I wasn’t on Agoda. What I normally do is go to Google Maps first cuz I find, this is anecdotal, but I’ve seen it many, many times. If I open up a booking on Travel or just look at the price, it’ll be high. But if I go to Google Maps, click on the hotel, and it’ll give me a price there. And the key thing here, which is kind of interesting, that if you put in like a bunch of nights that go over a weekend, you’ll end up with a really high price because they fold in the weekend pricing surge. Every hotel does that now. But a trick I discovered is that what I’ll do is book one night. So I on Google Maps I’ll enter dates for one night like January 19th to the 20th and then it says 45 ringgit per night because it’s midweek, right? It’s like, oh, and that’s the Agoda price for one night, and then I click on that to take me to Agoda. It opens Agoda on my smartphone and it gives me that like 45 ringgit per night price, and then in Agoda I’ll change the dates and I’ll say well 19th to the 24th, like four nights or five nights, and then it’ll go up to like 50 ringgit per night. So if you come from Google Maps you can game the system to keep the price down. One advantage for me going back to the Raja Bot is I have a good relationship with the front desk clerks there and they seem to be a little bit more focused on, maybe because it’s a smaller hotel and they don’t have quite as much turnover perhaps. But anyway, we know each other fairly well and if I’m moving from here to there tomorrow, there’s a good chance they’ll anticipate that. So they know, you know, they think about their customers that way. It’s like, “Oh, Mr. Douglas, he’s checking out at the Crossroads at 12:00 and then he’s just going to bring his bags over here and he’ll be here at like 5 after 12.” So, you know, if a room is available, why don’t we make sure that that room is a standard queen and then he can just go directly into that room. Something like that. So, we’ll see if that happens. This time I’m going to give them a heads up actually because it’s getting later in the day now. And I haven’t finished all of my podcasting stories yet. But I’ll finish them later. I’m just going to go out into the real world, do some things and get some fried bananas, which is my fried banana place, right beside the Hotel Raja Bot. Who knows? Maybe I’ll take you with me. Why not? I’ll fire up the GoPro and we can go out into the world together and, yeah, I’ll just pop in at Raja Bot and then just chat with the hotel staff there and say, “Oh, by the way, I’m coming back tomorrow. I’ve booked a room here,” just, you know, just to let them know and then maybe that will work to my benefit.
Going back in time, this may have felt a little bit disjointed, this little conclusion to my hotel story, and that’s because with the Olympus app, I found a deal breaker, basically, which means I can’t use the app. It turns out that when the camera stops recording, the app doesn’t know. So, for example, I mentioned the Olympus has a 29-minute recording limit, and it’s really hard to monitor when you reach 29 minutes because the Olympus does these weird things where sometimes it makes a 29-minute video clip, but sometimes it makes like 10 minute clips and divides everything up into shorter video. I don’t know what it’s doing. And it gives the files different names. It’s very confusing. But turns out what just happened this time is that the Olympus reached 29 minutes and stopped recording. It just quit. But the app, I kept looking at the app cuz I had the app open on this phone like sitting on my thigh and then as far as I would just kind of, so I can see it out of the corner of my eye and it looks fine. I’m moving in the video screen. The record light is still on. Everything is fine. So, I’m just talking and talking and talking. And all that time that I was talking, the Olympus wasn’t recording anything. But on the app, it looks like it is recording. So, if the Olympus shuts down for any reason, say the memory card runs out of room or it reaches a time limit or anything else goes wrong and the camera just stops recording, I have no way of knowing because on the app it looks like everything is still working. So basically, yeah, I can’t live like that. All the convenience of using the app is totally wiped out if you’re just sitting here and you have no confidence that anything is being recorded, right? So yeah, totally pointless. Yet another technological problem. I run into that with everything I try to do and I don’t know why that is. Nobody else in the world seems to struggle as much as I do. But yeah, little experiment with the Olympus OI Share app to control my camera remotely. No, can’t do it. Doesn’t work.
All right, so anyway, let’s head out into the world. I’ll take you with me with my GoPro and we can see if we can get some fried bananas on the way. Maybe even a couple of Ramly burgers for a little snack.
And here we are at long last with the GoPro, back on the streets of KL. Since I’m mixing this video with the podcast video from the Olympus, I had to change the settings because my Olympus maxes out at 1080p. That’s the highest resolution you can get. So, I can’t shoot 4K or 2.7K or anything. I mean, I could on the GoPro. It doesn’t really matter in the editing program. I could mix and match. Things will be fine. We’re not making cinema here. But just to keep everything the same, this GoPro is now shooting at 1080p to match the 1080p from the Olympus. But yeah, there’s my neighborhood behind me. I do love it. This whole area, it’s always full of life. Luckily, Crossroads and the Raja Bot are roughly neighbors, you know. Hello. Hello. They’re in the same neighborhood. And oh, there is right there the Hot Papa Burger. Yep. Look at there. Come on. They make a really nice Ramly burger right there. And there’s another one right around the corner. If I’m in the mood for a Ramly burger, I can go there. Yeah, they both charge five ringgit for a basic chicken burger or beef burger. Yeah, really nice. I got some there the other day and the funny thing is, this always happens. I talk about this quite often. They worry about my foreigner palate, like can I handle local food. So, when I put in my order and I sat down, I’m waiting. And then the woman called out to me and she did like a gesture like this, like, you know, are you okay with hot and spicy? And I was like, “Yeah, sure. Fine. Whatever is normal. I don’t want to mess around with communicating. Just whatever is easy, whatever is normal. Just give me whatever you give everybody else. I’m fine with hot, hot, hot. That’s okay.” And then I got my burgers and I’m eating them back in my room with a knife and fork because the Ramly burger sauce, right, is such a gooey, messy affair. But there’s no spice at all. Like it’s not hot. Like a Ramly burger doesn’t have any spiciness to it. So I don’t know why she was worried about, you know, like hot hot hot. Maybe I think quite often what happens here is they think about spiciness and flavor as the same thing. So, what she was probably saying is like, “Do you want us to load it up with sauce like we normally do?” But it’s not spicy sauce. It’s probably more of a sweet sauce than anything else. But yeah, here’s the other neighborhood Ramly Burger spot here. And they both take e-wallets. So, I’ve experimented with this place using Touch ‘n Go and using GoPay. Same at the other place.
So yeah. Nice weather today. It’s a bit gray and overcast. You can see up there pretty gray, but at least it’s not pouring rain, which is nice. Yeah, the weather’s been largely, I mean, it’s been rain at night, but during the day as I wander around, yeah, haven’t really been rained on, so that’s kind of nice. And right, yeah, the Raja Bot is just up here just ahead and the fried banana place is there too. It’s not the best time to get fried bananas cuz usually what they have on display at this point has been sitting out there quite a long time. So it’s not, it’s a little bit soggy and cold unless they got a fresh batch, but we’ll find out.
Actually, I forgot until just now, but there’s another Ramly burger place right here. So, there’s three of them in my neighborhood. But I’ve never, I think one time I got a burger from this place, but they’re not usually open. And one time I tried to go there when they were open, but for whatever reason he said, “We don’t have any.” So, I was like, “Ah, all right.” So, it’s not one of my regulars. The other two places are more reliable. They’re almost always open.
So far so good. I can tell they’re open. That’s the spot right there on the corner. And from here, I think I can see some pisang goreng. And they have the Touch ‘n Go or the, yeah, it’s actually a Touch ‘n Go QR code. This one is not a DuitNow code, so you can’t use GoPay here.
There’s all the fried goodies. And there’s my fried bananas.
Is it open? Ah, it’s okay.
Hello. How are you? Yeah. Just letting you know I’m coming back. I check in again tomorrow. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. You saw that? Yeah, I just came in to work with me. Oh, I see. Okay, I’ll see you again. Unless I MIA, right? You know, unless somebody gone MIA. M-I-A. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. You know Chuck Norris? Yes, of course I know Chuck Norris. You know MIA? Yes. Missing in action. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I used to have a red beard and everybody said I look like Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris. Yeah. When I have my beard, but not now. All right. Thanks. Yeah. You come back tomorrow. Yep. Thank you.
This is an interesting sight in my neighborhood and a regular sight. You see that group of foreigners up ahead? It’s a tour group. And there’s a tour group here pretty much every day. And this restaurant is part of their tour that they offer. I don’t know what company it is. I have no idea. This is a Nasi Kandar restaurant and they all come here and get a meal and they all have a chance to go behind the stove, behind the counter and they get to see them making roti and things like that and they get to do it themselves. So, it’s kind of a hands-on experience for this tour. But yeah, every day I see a group. I saw one the other day. It’s kind of funny. They were right here again like crossing the road from this intersection to here. And it’s a very confusing intersection. Like you just don’t know where the cars and motorcycles are coming from. They seem to come at you from all directions. And I guess they’ve had problems with foreigners in the past. And the guy was herding them like he was talking to little ducklings or something, like everyone pay attention. Single file. Everyone single file. Watch out for your friends. Let’s go now. Wait, wait, wait. Okay. Single file. You know, he was really trying to take care of them, make sure nobody got hit by a car. But yeah, I think if I were in that tour group, I’d be a little bit like, “Come on, dude. We’re not 5 years old. You don’t have to worry about us to that extent. I think we can cross the road.” But I guess he’s had experience with foreigners in the past being a little bit distracted and walking out into traffic.
Yeah, I really love this neighborhood. There’s so much going on. No matter which alleyway you duck down, there’s always something.
Yeah, here I am talking about dumb foreigners and I nearly get clipped cuz this is a really dangerous corner. I think they realized it too cuz they put a cone right here to make sure people go around cuz the motorcycles will cut this corner and then I’ve almost been hit by a motorcycle many times coming around this corner.
I find I’m very susceptible to people being kind to me. I wasn’t really thinking about getting a Ramly burger, but then when I walked by this place, the woman was sitting there and she kind of waved at me and said, “Hey, do you want a burger? We’re open. Come, come, come.” So that little bit of customer service and kindness made me think, “Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I will.”
So there’s their menu. There’s chicken, like regular, biasa burger, ayam, five ringgit, special cheese 6.50, and then biasa for daging which is beef, five ringgit.
Hey, ayam burger biasa dua and daging satu.
It’s not just mango. Mango. And they have some other things on the menu too. Roti John. It’s quite good. And then they have the crispy burger. So sort of like deep fried crispy batter. And I haven’t had any of these though. I haven’t had their fries or wraps, anything like that. But yeah, I find the burgers are a good value. And there we have it. Three hot off the griddle burgers. Two chicken, one beef. Really nice. Really nice people there, too. Hot Papa Burger. Highly recommend it.
Back in my room and I can give you the full Ramly burger experience. Ooh, daging has a D on it. So that’s the beef. And then I have two, okay, that are unlabeled. So, these are the chicken and, yeah, I’m going to try, I haven’t had a beef for a while, so I’m going to give this a try. And they’re hefty, you know, there’s some substance there. And they’re so saucy that I don’t generally eat them by hand because yeah, just makes a huge mess. So I get very elegant with my knife and fork. But yeah, there you go. It’s not a bad burger, really. Look at that. I like to fold the edges of my wrapper so it looks like a little plate. Nice and manageable.
And there we have it. So, I don’t know how well you can see that, but there’s a bun, lots and lots of cabbage, lettuce, yeah, I guess it’s chopped up cabbage and then onions and sauce. I mean, yeah, it’s a substantial little burger for five ringgit. So, now we dive in with our knife and fork and cut it up into nice, manageable pieces.
And let’s see. Like I said, I haven’t had one of their beef burgers for a long time.
Yeah, that’s really nice. I mean, it’s not gourmet. You know what you’re getting when you get a Ramly burger, but for five ringgit for something like this, can’t complain. Yeah, it’s really good.
And I just remembered I have a little bit of video of a meal that was delivered here by a Planet Doug subscriber, and a friend of mine ordered all the way from India and then the meal was delivered to this hotel and I ate it here and I’ll put in the video of that meal right now. Though I think I shot that with a GoPro and I didn’t have a microphone connected up. So yeah, in a way it’s interesting because you can see the difference between Olympus video and a GoPro video, particularly in a dark environment like this. And I just remembered I have one meal from Banda Aceh, the same benefactor, Planet Doug benefactor, a couple of meals for me when I was in Banda Aceh. Some kebabs which are really good. But I don’t have any video of that. But I do have another meal that he ordered and I have that on GoPro as well. So we’re going to go back in time, show you a meal that I had here and then a meal that I had in Banda Aceh, also shot with a GoPro, kind of in the dark, I think. Anyway, so I’m going to dive in, finish this, and then you can watch my other two meals and then I’ll come back and finish the podcast.
So, this is me in the elevator at the Crossroads Hotel, and a Planet Doug subscriber has kindly sent me a meal, and it, yeah, delivery, the order was placed, and it’s coming fast, so I have to rush downstairs to be out on the street.
So, yeah, here’s the entrance to the Crossroads Hotel. It’s kind of hard to get a delivery here because this is the reception, the original reception, but it’s been abandoned. So, you have to push buttons to unlock the door to get in and out. But if a delivery person shows up, this is what they see. And it’s really difficult to even figure out what button to push. You have to like push the doorbell to get the front desk guy to open the door. So, but luckily in this modern age, you can do this. You can actually track exactly where these delivery people are and then you can be down on the street waiting for them. I became something of a master of doing this in my last week in Banda Aceh. So, I’m getting more comfortable with the modern world of ordering things online and having things delivered. Figuring it all out. I don’t know what the food is. It is meant to be a surprise. And I promise not to cheat to look at the restaurant and try to figure out what it might be. So, it will be a surprise. So, according to the map, the delivery dude, that could be him right there. Yeah, cuz there’s like one of these dividers on the road. So, it’s one way. They have to go all the way over here and somehow do a loop-de-loop. Yeah. Here’s my neighborhood, Chow Kit. I haven’t been shooting video of my daily life here since I got back. Today’s a Sunday. Pretty quiet out here on the streets. Maybe tonight it’ll all pick up. Oh yeah, it’s hard to find the entrance to the Crossroads Hotel. Yep, that’s me. Pack Punjab restaurant. There we are. Okay, masya Allah. Thank you. Really cute. So, yeah, the other confusing part is if you’re looking, I think they have a door here. Like this is also an entrance to the Crossroads Hotel, but it’s blocked. And right up here there’s the main sign that a delivery driver would see that sign and they would instinctively come right here cuz they think this is where the entrance is. And that’s what he did as well. Yeah. Without this tracking, it would have been completely chaotic. I never would have been able to meet up with this guy. The poor guy would have been driving all around here trying to find the entrance. Like, is this the entrance? Is this the entrance? Is this, you know, it would probably never occur to him to finally get around to these doors cuz it’s right beside a bank, if you see what I mean. BSN bank and then doors. So, it’s like, okay, that can’t be the hotel. Anyway, it’s pretty confusing. But there is the food. Oh, man. I’m so excited. It’s very heavy cuz it’s got a nice soup up there and rice down here. I think that looks amazing. So good. So, yeah, for me to get in, I have to beep here. Oh, no. That’s my room key. Wrong one. I used the wrong card. So, now we can go in. Thank you.
So, here is the door to my room. And in a behind the scenes video, I was talking about all the confusion that I faced because I was originally given a key card and it works like it beeps, but then, you know, the door handle seems to be broken. So I thought, oh, the card doesn’t work. But then I noticed this dark circle down here. And it turns out that’s a keyhole. And they also gave me a key. So then I was thinking I had to insert the key and do this in combination. So it’s doing this and this and then this then this. But it turns out all you need is the key. So the key opens the door. This doesn’t do anything. But you do need this to turn on the power in the room. So you need that to open the door and this for power.
Oh, there I am. Yeah, very, very heavy meal. I prepared my little desk here and let’s get that laid in there. All right, let’s open up this surprise package and see what’s going on here. This neighborhood has a lot of Pakistani restaurants, really good food from Pakistan. So, that is a pretty good guess that that might be what this is. Ooh. Ooh. Yeah. You know, words fail me. I know all these foods, but then I think, what is this called again? You know, the, you know what it is, especially if you’re thinking Pakistani, Middle Eastern kind of food, and naan bread, kind of some sort of a naan bread. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice and hot too. Everything is like piping, piping hot. This might even have a like a naan bread filling. Could be cheese or potato, egg. And then perhaps a type of biryani.
Wow. Yeah. Biryani. So my, I’m guessing that there is chicken. I’ve had this experience in the past. I’ve gone into Pakistani restaurants and I’ve ordered biryani chicken and I get this big thing of rice and then I don’t start eating because I’m waiting for the chicken to arrive, you know. So, I wait and I’m waiting a few minutes and the chicken isn’t coming and then I finally realize, being a dummy but having had this experience in the past, that the chicken is generally underneath the rice. So, if we dig in there… Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s like a big juicy piece of chicken there underneath the rice. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I always have my own cutlery in my cutlery bag just in case. I’m going to embarrass myself now, but I want to, the word tzatziki keeps popping into my brain. Is that what this is called? Like a yogurty thing.
It’s so good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Let’s try some of the rice.
Very hot. I don’t mean spicy. I mean still like fresh, very fast delivery. My mystery benefactor, Planet Doug benefactor, contacted me and said, you know, are you at your hotel? Are you in the mood for a surprise meal? I said, “Yeah.” And then almost before I knew it, the order was placed. And it was out for delivery like so fast. So, I almost wasn’t prepared, certainly to take video of it. I had to make sure I had battery and memory card in my GoPro and then race down the stairs.
I had to check with the internet so I was not wrong. Tzatziki, a popular yogurt-based dip or sauce in Southeast European and West Asian cuisines. And according to this AI overview, while not traditionally Pakistani, it’s easily made with local ingredients like yogurt, cucumber, garlic, mint, dill, and lemon vinegar with Pakistani food bloggers sharing recipes and serving it with local dishes. All right, so yeah, dipping sauce. Well, let’s dip into the roti here. I wonder if there’s anything on the inside. Looks like there’s something on the inside here. Like maybe in the middle. This outer part. Maybe. Maybe not.
It’s very, like pancake. Like it has a flavor like a normal sort of pancake.
Get some of that.
Mhm. Mhm.
Okay. Again, I’m no expert in food of any kind, but that tastes amazing to me. Really, really nice. This is good. The rice, as I said, best thing about it is it’s so hot, fresh off the stove.
Mhm. Yeah. The chicken in these biryani dishes is so tender. Like it just falls off the bone. Like right there, just turning it over, you can see it just falls right off the bone. It is so tender.
So, there’s a nice piece of chicken. Let’s just try it without the tzatziki.
Good.
When it comes to a food review, I always end up thinking in two ways, I guess. Would I order it again or would I go to this place again? Yes. Based on what I’ve got here, absolutely I would. Very good chicken, good rice, everything is good. And would I recommend to another person? Like, would I say, “Oh, yeah. You’ll get a good meal at this place.” Yeah, I would say that as well. Mhm.
Let’s try some chicken with some of the sauce.
Yeah, really nice.
Just want to get to the middle here. See if this is… Yeah, I think it’s got potato on the inside. Yeah. So, it has a kind of a potato filling, which I really like about Pakistani food. They do that quite often, I think.
So, there you have it. My Sunday mid-afternoon lunch. It’s almost dinner time, to be honest. Well, 4:00, lunch-dinner time, thanks to a Planet Doug supporter. All right, so I’m going to turn off the camera and dive in and enjoy the rest of this. Thank you very much for my food delivery. Much appreciated. As I said, I have no idea what this food is or even what the drink is or, yeah, nothing about it at all. Let’s open up the drink here and see what’s going on. I mean, it’s looking like iced coffee, something like that. But it could be, could be something surprising. See what the flavor is.
Chocolatey. And it’s not cold yet. It’s got a ton of ice in there, but it must have been made like fresh hot with hot water and then they put the ice in. So like, I don’t even know what the flavor is of things like Milo. Could this be Milo? I suppose it could be like Milo is kind of chocolatey, right? So, if you’re picking Milo from a menu, this might be what you end up with. But anyway, we’ll let that get nice and cold. And it looks like a spicy, soupy, maybe noodly kind of thing in here. Let’s see what’s going on. Okay, nice simple meal, which I like. You don’t have like 15 tiny bags of sauces that you have to tear open and the sauces go flying in all directions. I like a cook who knows what a meal is supposed to taste like and they put the sauces in for you. You don’t sauce it up yourself. That’s the Planet Doug style. I may have spoken too soon. Maybe there’s… Oh, whoa. Wa. Okay. I said, like, I was just about to say like, well, we better wait a minute cuz from looking through the lid, I saw something unusual and I thought, oh, maybe all the bags of sauces are on the inside and then you got, and then it’s like, oh, now you got to undo all the bags and mix everything. But no, the unusual appearance is from what it actually is. And I couldn’t begin to tell you. I mean, obviously there’s some noodles down there, like they may they even look like instant noodles like from a packet, but then there’s also wieners, like chopped up sausages, and then some orange reddish stuff. Let me grab the GoPro and dive in a little bit. Zooming in. So that was what I saw when I took the lid off. That’s definitely a surprise. So, this is kind of like sausage, hot dog, wiener kind of thing. And more here, I guess, with some orange sauces. This at first I thought this was like big pasta, but it might be something else. And then we’ve got the noodles down on the bottom. Yeah, a lot of these. So, it looks, yeah, nice and filling, which is good. Yeah, a lot of these. Maybe this is like rice. Rice. Like compressed rice kind of stuff. All right. Looks very good. Simple and filling. Easy to eat. My kind of food. Now we just have to figure out the flavor. I don’t know what the lighting is like right now. This is just a, this is a very impromptu, pop the GoPro onto my handy tripod and just hit record. We didn’t worry about the lighting. So, let’s start with the kind of the hot dog wiener kind of thing.
Spicy. Wow. Yeah. On Planet Doug, when I start clearing my throat, it’s like, it’s spicy. Just that one piece of wiener, whatever it is, just that one little piece is spicy. That is hot. So, I imagine that’s going to continue through this. Let’s see what this is. Yeah, it’s like, why do I always have trouble describing that? You know, it’s like compressed rice cake. I know there’s another name for it, but that’s essentially what that is. Very hot and spicy. It’s good.
And then once you get down into the noodles, I’m curious whether that level of spiciness is it restricted just to the things they put on top or is that amount of heat go all the way through it? Like I don’t know what it’s called. I still don’t know what this dish is called or even what cuisine this is. Is this Sumatran food, traditional Acehnese food? Was it ordered from an Indian restaurant or a Chinese restaurant or something like that? I have no idea.
Let’s try some of the noodles.
M. That is really good. That real heat, that spicy heat, that seems to be the sauce that goes on the things on top. And then the noodles themselves has its own separate flavoring. Still hot and spicy, but not quite as dramatic as the stuff on the top. A little bit of a milder, but very strong flavor. I have no idea what it is. If you want to know what the flavors are, you got to talk to somebody else. Not me. I am a simple man when it comes to food and I have simple tastes, simple taste buds as well. I like that a lot. I’m going to have to find out what that is and where it came from. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Planet Doug subscriber out there. In fact, all the way from India, I talk about that all the time. How the modern world is so amazing. Somebody in India can fire up their smartphone, get onto an app, and then have a meal delivered to a hotel in Sumatra, in Banda Aceh of all places. You know, modern world, man. It’s pretty amazing. All right, thank you again. And I’m going to dive into my lunch.
Continuing on to the end of the podcast. A little bit of a mix and match kind of podcast where old video, new video, sitting in Planet Doug studio video and then heading outside into the real world video just for a minute. Yeah, that worked out really well. I like the Raja Bot Hotel. I guess I like the smaller hotels where the clerks just, you know, they have a chance to be human. It’s more informal, right? More natural. This Crossroads is a bit bigger, I guess. They got more people going in and out every day. And they seem to have big groups of people going in cuz they have big rooms here, too. Anyway, it was nice to go back to the Raja Bot and announce that I’m returning tomorrow. And I’m looking forward to that. We’ll see how things go. And yeah, fried bananas were good. I just had a couple of them after my Ramly burgers over there.
And now moving on to the YouTube stories part of my podcast. First one is from a Moroccan cyclist that I’m following. The channel, of course, is called Let’s Go Cycling. The name of the vlogger and the cyclist. And the latest video that he posted and that I watched was video 76. And it has the title, I didn’t expect this, a dangerous night on my journey. It’s kind of a classic YouTube title when you think about it. I mean, how many of these videos do you see where it always has, I didn’t expect this. It’s just sort of a standard YouTube hook to indicate that there was something surprising. And I guess it’s designed to catch your curiosity. It’s like, oh, he didn’t expect it. Something happened. What? What didn’t you expect? And then a dangerous night on my journey. So, I’m not quite sure what he didn’t expect. I watched the whole video and nothing in it was particularly surprising, especially considering, yeah, like where he was going. On this video he was in the middle of cycling from Baguio to Sagada in North Luzon in the Philippines, and I was talking about that in a previous video and I said that I had also spent a lot of time there, not on a bicycle, back in the old days when I was just a backpacker, and I said that I couldn’t remember, I mean I knew Baguio, but it wasn’t Baguio where backpackers went. That was like the jumping off point to go deeper into the mountains. And then when I was watching Youssef’s video and he mentioned Sagada, it was like, ah, Sagada. So that was the name of the town up in the mountains where that was very popular with backpackers back in those days. Very difficult to get to, a real journey on some rough roads. I don’t know what it’s like now. I think the road is much, much better than it used to be. Paved the whole way. So, it’s not quite the same anymore. Fascinating area. And it might have been one of the first times I became aware of this pattern that I’ve since seen pretty much all over the world where you’ve got a continent or an island, usually an island, and then so you’ve got the shore, the coastline, and then mountains in the interior. And the people who live in the mountains tend to be different from the people who live on the shore, like on the coast. And that happens over a long period of time because of migration. So basically what I’m saying is you tend to have tribal groups, like tribal indigenous groups, living in the high altitudes and then other people down on the lowlands because the tribal groups that you find in the mountains, they used to cover the whole island. I mean they were the original people who lived there, but then migrants came from other places and took over and they pushed the inhabitants towards the interior, basically pushed them away, defeated them, and then the remains of these tribal groups would have to go deeper and deeper and deeper and higher into the mountains. So all over the Philippines and many other countries you find that up in the mountains you find the tribal groups and then down in the coast lowlands you find a different type of people who arrived later in terms of history. And I remember going to the Philippines, going to Sagada, spending a lot of time in the villages up there with these tribal groups. And I learned maybe before then or after that, I can’t remember, but the tribal group that you see in the movie Apocalypse Now, like there’s this very famous scene late into the movie where this group performs a ceremony, like a dance, and the climax of the dance was taking a huge machete and cutting off the head of a cow, of a bullock. And that’s in Apocalypse Now. And it turns out that those people, they’re supposed to be, you know, a tribal group in Vietnam, but since Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines, the people that were hired as extras to perform in Apocalypse Now, they were from this area, Sagada. They were the, I think the Ifugao tribal group. And then Francis Ford Coppola basically paid this entire, like a very large group of Ifugao people to be in his movie as extras. And if you, I think I remember from the documentary Heart of Darkness, that the Ifugao people when they were on the movie set, they performed that ceremony just naturally. It wasn’t written into the script. It was just something that was part of their life and part of their culture, and they did this ceremony and Coppola and his wife and the movie people saw it and then they filmed it and included it in the movie. So in fact it wasn’t planned. Just that’s something the Ifugao people did. So yeah, I remember that and I remember when I was in Sagada and then I was hiking into the mountains and sleeping in these villages. There was a museum, maybe it was in Sagada itself, but there was a very small museum that consisted of hundreds of photographs and I can’t remember the history of it now and I don’t know whether it still exists, but there was some kind of a foreigner, European, I think, who just ended up in that area basically as a traveler and became fascinated with all the different tribal groups that lived there and then started documenting their life as a, not really a professional photographer. He wasn’t like a modern National Geographic photographer, but he enjoyed photography and he tried to take pictures of all the tribal groups with their traditional dress, traditional ceremonies and lifestyle. He was basically taking a photographic capsule of the people that lived there at that time. And I think he kind of sensed that they are going to disappear. That way of life is going to eventually disappear. So he wanted to record it at the time. And there was a museum there that had hundreds of his photographs on display. And I remember that quite clearly. Well, I guess I don’t remember quite clearly cuz it just came back to me now. And I don’t remember the name of the photographer or the name of the museum. I don’t know whether it’s still there, but it makes sense that it would. Maybe those photos have been digitized and they’re all online now. I’m going to look it up after I finish talking about this podcast. But anyway, so Youssef, he was riding from Baguio, the bigger city, to Sagada, and there’s about 140 kilometers and I think he had to do it over 2 or 3 days. And it’s a major journey because, according to what I looked on Google Maps and did like an altitude comparison, to get from Baguio to Sagada is 3,000 m of climbing and then 3,000 m of descending. So, it’s not like Sagada is 3,000 m higher, but by the time you ride your bicycle or drive your car up there, you know, you go up and down and up and down and then up higher and down and up higher and down. You put it all together, it’s a total of 3,000 m of ascending and then 3,000 m of descending. So, that’s a major climb on a bicycle. So there were many times where he had to get off the bike and push it because it was way too steep. There were parts of the road there you can see it went from asphalt, like went from tarmac to cement, and whenever you see cement that tells you it’s much, much steeper because cement just works better on these like switchbacks where it has to go really, really steep. They put in a section of cement there and then they go back to tarmac when it evens out. And so there were times in his video where he was on cement and then, you know, okay, that’s really steep, and then he had to push his bike up. And yeah, I keep wondering just how heavy his bicycle is because he doesn’t seem to worry about loading it down. In this video he stops at one point at a store to buy provisions and that was quite interesting where he seemed to buy a lot of food. I mean he was there like it was like he was provisioning an expedition like a two week journey through the mountains or something. You know, I’ll have six of these and five of these and can I get half a kilogram of rice and can I get this? Can I get that? And he also got six eggs. And he had a little plastic egg carton, like a specialized plastic case that you can open up. And he put six eggs inside. And you close it and it protects the eggs. So he can put that container inside his pannier bags. And when the bike goes over bumps, you know, the eggs don’t break. So, I mean, he just carries a lot of stuff for camping in his pannier bags. And then that night, he set up his tent at the side of the road. It’s really hard to find a place to camp in the mountains because it’s all steep hillsides, but he found a spot. He put his tent there. And then he didn’t show the whole process, but in his tent he was cooking and he actually had his gas canister with this little thing on the top. And he said he’d already cooked the rice. So he’d had some sort of a pot boiling rice, you know, cooking the rice, and that was finished. And now he took out a big frying pan, like an actual frying pan that you would use in a kitchen. So he’s even got a pot for boiling rice and a frying pan, or maybe he cooks the rice in the frying pan as well. I’m not sure. So he’s got this big frying pan. He puts it on there and he starts taking out the eggs and frying all the eggs cuz as a cyclist, he needs a lot of food, you know, for energy just to keep cycling. But yeah, it’s pretty impressive to be honest. He doesn’t shoot a lot of video. He doesn’t put a lot of effort into it, but he is shooting video. That takes time and effort and energy. And then he’s climbing 3,000 m and descending 3,000 m. And then he sets up a tent. And if I were doing that, I’m done, right? I’m cycling. And then I might buy, I would buy prepared food from a place at the side of the road. I might get a dinner at the end of the night and then when I crawl into my tent, I’m done. I don’t have the energy to cook or do anything else. But he, he pulls over to the side of the road in the dark after a whole day of cycling. And then he still has enough energy to set up his stove and cook a complete dinner. And then after cooking the dinner, he has to wash up. And I don’t know how he does that to be honest. I mean I’ve done some camping in my days and the cleanup after cooking is just such a hassle because in Canada if you’re camping and you really want to be beside a river or a lake because then you can take your pots and your plate and your cutlery and just take it all down to the river and you’ve got your biodegradable soap or a scrubber and then you can just rinse everything off. But he’s in the middle of the mountains. He doesn’t have running water. So, how in the world is he managing to cook all this food, eat all this food inside his tent without gassing himself, you know, because he’s using up all the oxygen in the tent. And then the cleanup afterwards and then packing everything away, making sure everything doesn’t get dirty, and then finally going to sleep and then waking up in the morning to cook breakfast and to cook. How does he do all of that in one day? That’s that seems crazy to me. But yeah, pretty impressive. So yeah, that’s what I was watching and yeah, I enjoyed the video. Beautiful scenery up there. Really gorgeous. Like I said, I’ve been there myself, so I know what it looks like. It’s really impressive. Yeah, I think people who go to the Philippines, if you go to that part of northern Luzon, you’ll be surprised at how big the mountain valleys are and all of the rice terraces and the farms going down the sides of the mountains. It’s, yeah, it’s really quite impressive. You don’t think of mountains that big being in the Philippines, but yeah, it’s a very cool area. Very dramatic. And it looks like it’s much more developed for tourism now. Like a lot of roadside places where you pull over like a scenic viewpoint and there was a little shop there where you could buy food and drinks and coffee and stuff like that. And that didn’t exist back in the old days when I was there. But I don’t really know where his journey ended. I don’t know whether he reached Sagada or not because he just stopped the video, right? It just sort of stopped. He doesn’t conclude the day’s adventures or give any summary or do anything. There’s no epilogue. The video just stops. So, I don’t really know where he was or where it ended. But yeah, so that was Youssef. Oh, I didn’t expect this a dangerous night on my journey. What turned out what was dangerous about it is because he put his tent at the side of the road where there was sort of a turnout for trucks to park their car, and then he put his tent, but of course he’s in the mountains, so right above his tent was a very steep rocky mountainside and you could see that big boulders and rocks were constantly tumbling down because there were rocks everywhere. So it was basically a risk of landslides, but mainly rock slides. So his tent was like in a almost like in a shooting range because the valley was shaped like a V and then his tent was sort of at the bottom of the V. And I don’t know whether he knew that when he set up his tent. Maybe he just set up his tent in the dark because there was a flat area and then he woke up in the morning, you know, unzipped his tent, and then he looked up and went, hokey doodle. You know, it’s like any rock that came down that mountain because of the valley coming to a point would have been aimed straight at his tent. So, it really was a dangerous place. So, he wasn’t lying about that. It was a dangerous night. Yeah, maybe had he seen it in the daylight, he wouldn’t have put his tent there because, yeah, no joke. I think there really was a risk there. Any rock coming down would have gone right through his tent. So, yeah, enjoyable video. Yeah, I really enjoyed watching that one.
Last YouTube story and last part of this podcast, I wanted to talk about another travel video that I watched. Actually, it’s a set of three videos. Yeah, a little bit different. These aren’t people that I’m following. It’s not a travel channel like, you know, Let’s Go Cycling, not like an onward journey. The YouTube channel is called Auto Alex Cars and they generally do car reviews. So, they’re a little bit like Top Gear, you know, like the old classic Top Gear where the three presenters in the show would head overseas to some exotic destination and buy a local car and then they go off on a big journey and they all play jokes on each other and very, very enjoyable, those Top Gear episodes. So, from what I can tell, these guys, three guys that went together from Auto Alex Cars, they know about Top Gear, of course, and they’re in the car industry, and they basically went to Vietnam and kind of reproducing a Top Gear episode, but they went there to buy three motorcycles and then they were going to go on a big journey through Vietnam on these three motorcycles and make a video about the trip. And they posted three videos, you know, like video one, like arriving, buying the motorcycles, getting ready for the journey, and then video two, a few days of the journey, and then video three, couple days and conclusion. And each one is about an hour, hour 20 minutes long each video. So, the first one is called We Flew to Vietnam to buy cheap motorbikes. The second video is called 1,000mi Vietnam Adventure Special. The third video is called Our 1,000mi Vietnam Adventure Got Dangerous. So, it’s only three videos that covers the whole trip. And for me, there’s a lot of food for thought here. I mean, a lot. These guys are popular. Looking at their channel, they have 750,000 subscribers, 207 videos, and 107 million views in total for their videos. But they’re not all like travel videos. They are mainly car review, funny Top Gear style car reviews, that kind of thing. But this whole trip to Vietnam was something special that they did. I really enjoyed watching these three videos. I’ve been watching them over the last week. I mean, it’s like 3 to 4 hours worth of video, so it’s like a big time commitment. But I watched all of the videos from beginning to end and they’re really interesting for me because I love a trip like that, but they’re also shooting video. So, I get to see how they shoot video and there’s a lot of logistics in the video. Not everything. They don’t explain everything, but there’s enough that I find it quite entertaining. And then they have the usual adventures along the way. But it is kind of interesting because when you watch one of those videos, you often have a feeling like, “Wow, I’d love to do something like that.” And in the video, they often encourage people to do it. Like they say, “Oh, we’re having such an amazing time here in Vietnam.” You know, if you ever dreamed of doing something like this, we encourage you to do it. Get off your couch, turn off the TV, fly to Vietnam, and do this because it’s so amazing. Yet, yet if you really look and break down the experience as it was, I would never do something like that. I would be miserable from beginning to end, mainly because they don’t have enough time and the complexity of the journey, right? Like you are not going to get me on a plane to anywhere unless I can stay for at least a month, definitely two, hopefully three. So, if I’m going to fly to Vietnam and go through all the, you know, booking the flight and getting the visas and getting prepared and doing the research and going to Vietnam, well, I’m going to do all that because I’m going to stay there for 3 months once I get there. These guys, one week, it was like a 7-day trip, which to me is absolutely insane. I mean, they flew from the UK. They’re from the UK, by the way. Flying all the way from the UK to Vietnam. The expense of that and the complexity of what they did is astonishing because yeah they did so many things. They landed and on the day they landed they went out shopping and they got for some reason they got custom-made suits made. So they had to go somewhere and get measured and pick out material. They ordered these gaudy like purple and yellow clown suits for some reason. I never did quite figure out why they got them, but they did that. And then they had to go to a market to buy waterproof bags to put onto their motorcycles. And then the next day they went to a shop to buy motorcycles. Like they didn’t have any gear. They didn’t have motorcycles yet. So, they still had to go there, pick out motorcycles and buy them and then get them outfitted and do all of that. And I’m assuming they had to get insurance and permits and licenses and things like that. They didn’t talk about any of that. Like they bought three. They bought like a scooter and two motorcycles, but they never talked about ownership, right? The ownership papers and how they got them transferred. Did they have legal ownership? Were they covered by insurance in case there was an accident? I have no idea. So, they had to do all of that. And then there they are in Vietnam and they went to all that effort, all that work, all that expense to get there. And then they’ve got like five days to ride to, I think they went as far as, well they went to Da Lat, then they went to Nha Trang, and then they went to, they only went like halfway up the coast and then I think they turned around and then they flew out from another city. So they didn’t even go from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. They only saw like a very small portion of South Vietnam and then after five days of on the go every single day, then they left the country. And in terms of the work involved, that was just the tip of the iceberg because they had three of them, like the three main riders, and each of them had two GoPros. So, right out of the gate, six GoPros. Every one of them had a GoPro on a chest harness and a GoPro mounted on the handlebars filming them. So each one had a GoPro recording facing forward and one facing back. And of course, each one was recording audio. So they had a microphone, a microphone rig into one of the GoPros. So right out of the gate, six GoPros operating. Then they had two cameramen, like dedicated cameramen who had big full-on cameras and a Pocket 3. And each cameraman had to ride on another motorcycle, but that motorcycle was being driven by a Vietnamese driver. So they hired two Vietnamese drivers to drive around their cameramen. So you got the three guys riding their motorcycles. They’re the star of the show. Six GoPros running and they’re taking photos and video with their smartphone. They’re all wired for audio. And then they have two motorcycles with Vietnamese drivers and two cameramen who are going around them and then shooting video of them from a distance with a Pocket 3 or a big camera, action cameras, and they had a drone. And they had two Vietnamese fixers and guides who went with them on the entire journey. And then every time they had to stop to get something to eat or get their motorcycle repaired, the Vietnamese guides would, you know, translate for them and get everything done. They couldn’t have done this without them, obviously. So, can you imagine the amount of work that went into preparing for this journey? All that camera gear. They had a mounting system for every GoPro to go onto the handlebars. The microphones for every single GoPro that they had set up. I mean, it was an incredible amount of prep work for like 5 days of riding your motorcycle. And almost I think every single day they got rained on. I don’t know what it is about Vietnam, but every single travel video I’ve seen on YouTube in Vietnam, people just get poured on, like downpour after downpour, like doesn’t matter what time of year it is, everybody seems to be there during the rainy season, like heavy, heavy rains. So, that would have been absolutely miserable. Every single night they had so many mechanical breakdowns, so many problems that they didn’t arrive at their destination until it was dark. So every day at the end of the day, they were riding in the dark, heading into a busy Vietnamese city before they finally get to their hotel. And then at the hotel, of course, they have to park the motorcycles and then they go out and get something to eat. And since they’re British, every day ended with beer after beer after beer after beer. They all had to have a whole bunch of beer at the end of the day. And then they must just collapse into bed while then they have to go out to the local market and get more footage of exploring Vietnam. So they must be exhausted. And then the next morning they’re up at the crack of dawn and then they’re on the road again. I mean, it was just, to me, I would be miserable because it would take me one week just to get the motorcycle. Like, if I was planning if I was going to go on this trip myself, of course, I need a month to plan the trip or to think about it and get ready for it. I’d fly into Ho Chi Minh City. And if I’m going to buy a motorcycle, I want a week to look into it. Like find out where you can buy them, go to the different motorcycle shops, markets, wherever, test drive them, get them all fixed up and ready to go, and then you got to get the paperwork done, all that taken care of. So, for me to enjoy that process, I hate time pressure. I would need a week to do that and enjoy it and document the whole experience, right? And these guys just did it as soon as they arrived. They had like one day to get ready and then hit the road. And then whenever they ran into a rainstorm, they were on such a tight schedule cuz all their hotels are booked in advance. They’ve got to get to these hotels. They have no choice but just to keep riding in the rain. For me, of course, every city, village, town they went into, I would want to stay there for a couple of nights and then, you know, get to know. They went to Da Lat and I think they spent one night in Da Lat and then they’re gone. I could spend a month in Da Lat and then not even break a sweat in terms of doing everything you can do in that area. So, I’m just, I guess what I’m getting at is, I often find this contradiction between like a travel book or a travel video and it inspires you to think, “Oh, I’d love to do that.” But if you sat down and think about exactly what they did, no way. I would never want to do that. The reality to me, I would have been miserable on that whole trip. I would have bailed. You know, it’s like, you land in Ho Chi Minh City and if I’m with such a big group of people, such a complicated setup, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, we’re leaving tomorrow morning.” I’d be like, “Uh, no, you go. I’ve got Ho Chi Minh City, for Pete’s sake. There’s so much to explore here. We just landed.” And I know they’re there to make a video, an adventure video about riding motorbikes through the country. So they’re not there to learn about Vietnam. They don’t have time. They were there for basically like a good old boys fun and games adventure where they play jokes on each other. And they’re not there on any kind of a cultural, linguistic, culinary, historical experience. That’s not what they’re there for. They’re there to film something that looks like they were having a lot of fun. And yeah, I guess they were very successful in doing that.
Related to that topic, I also end up thinking about this idea of adventure, like having a big wild crazy adventure because they know for their video they want to have stuff. So they go to Vietnam and what makes the video enjoyable? Each video has got like half a million views. I think it’s because, well, they crashed on their motorcycle. So they can put in the thumbnail, you know, we crashed, the heavy rain, you know, they had all these difficulties, breakdowns, problems, difficulties to overcome, and like, wow, what a wild and crazy adventure. But I always end up tilting my head a little bit when I kind of see that because so much of the adventure is manufactured. It’s like self-imposed. Like I like a good adventure, but it feels like you should come about those adventures naturally. Like they should be a surprise. You shouldn’t design your trip so that it is a complete disaster from beginning to end. If you see what I mean? It feels like your goal, maybe your goal you go to Vietnam and you want to, your goal should be have a really good experience riding a motorcycle all the way from the south of Vietnam to the north and learn about the country and see this and the history. That should be your goal. And then you prepare and plan for that. And then maybe along the way something unexpected happens and you have a difficulty and you have to overcome that difficulty to have the experience you’re trying to have. Like it should be a natural occurrence inside your story. But so many of these YouTube adventures are just designed to fail right out of the gate because that’s going to be fun. Oh, it’s going to be wild and crazy. So, they pick a route and they pick equipment and they pick activities because they’re going to fail and they know they’re going to because it was designed that way. So like when they got their motorcycles in Ho Chi Minh City, the basic idea was to get cheap motorbikes and then of course a cheap motorbike is going to break down all the time, right? And they know that from the beginning. Actually two of the bikes were, one was a scooter and the scooter seemed to do very, very well. I know if I rode around Vietnam, I would do it on a scooter. I wouldn’t do it on a motorcycle. But then they got like an XL something or other 150 that seemed to be pretty reliable. But then the third guy, he became enamored of this Suzuki. I never did learn exactly what Suzuki it was, but they saw it at this motorcycle place they went to visit. And then there was something weird where they didn’t want to sell it to him. Like he, they fixated on it. It’s like, “Oh, cuz it looked cool, I guess.” And then the people at the motorcycle shop says, “Nah, no, no, no. We can’t sell you that one.” I don’t know why, but they said no at first, but then they insisted that, “Yeah, this is the one we want.” And they wanted them to paint the gas can, the gas tank, purple and then paint this part yellow. So, like repaint it to give it some cool, bright, garish colors. And then they had to do all kinds of work on it. Like it took them like the entire night to rebuild this motorcycle and get it running, get it on the road or something. So, it had disaster written all over it out of the gate. So, as soon as they hit the road, that motorcycle fell apart again and again and again and again. It had mechanical problems from day one all the way to the end. And I don’t know, 50% of the video was about that motorcycle breaking down and then having to repair it. And as I said, it was sort of meant to be that way. They even joke, they were a little bit self-aware of that, where the even the Vietnamese helpers who were also, they were also mechanics helping fix their motorcycles whenever they broke down. They had their own name for that motorcycle. They called it the content cycle because it was designed to create content for the video. And the guy who was riding that particular motorcycle, he said from time to time, you know, if it weren’t for my crappy motorcycle, we wouldn’t have anything to film. Like our video wouldn’t be any fun at all because, you know, all of the fun stuff in our video is me breaking down at the side of the road again and again and again. And yeah, I don’t know, it just feels kind of weird in a way. It’s like, sure, a breakdown can be a part of the story, but it, I don’t know, it just starts to feel weird on YouTube when you see so many travel adventurers will deliberately pick something that they know is a piece of junk because that creates drama and you do it on purpose. You see what I mean? Even on their route. And I see this all the time with YouTube travel channels where there can be a perfectly safe, perfectly smooth road going from A to B, but you know that’s not going to be any fun for the video. So instead of taking the highway, you see, oh, there’s this dirt, this goat track going up the side of this mountain and over three mountains and through a swamp, then into a jungle, then across a lake, and then down. Well, let’s take that road. And then of course they get stuck in the mud. They break down. They fall off the bridge. They end up in the lake. They get bitten by, you know, snakes and tigers and whatever, you know, because they chose a mud trail and then they took a motorbike into that mud trail that isn’t designed to go off-road. So, of course, they get stuck. They burn out the clutch. Now they’ve got to drag the motorcycle out of the mud miles to get back to the road and find a mechanic. So that gives them all the content, but it was all done quite deliberately if you see what I mean. So, I do end up with that feeling a little bit when I see these adventure videos. They are fun to watch. I watched all three hour-long videos and they’re entertaining, but again, I have this other perspective where yeah, I wouldn’t want to do a trip like that. To me it would be a miserable experience and I would also try to buy a motorbike that’s in good condition that I can have confidence in. Like I would do my best to make sure I had no problems and then if a problem does occur, well, it’s not because I deliberately chose a motorbike that I know is going to break down every 10 kilometers, you know, going down the highway. It’s kind of a funny thing. Yeah, you get, I couldn’t imagine editing that video though. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Cuz I was thinking the whole time I was watching the 3 hours of video, I thought, how in the world are they keeping track of it? I have, you know, a GoPro, my Hero 12, and when I was riding my bike in a couple of places, I might have a Hero 9 setup, so I have two cameras filming with one audio track. And that just about was a huge job daily just keeping track of the video because you got to copy the video from this GoPro, put it into a folder and label it with the date and the type of camera. And then the video from the other GoPro goes into another folder with the same date, subject, the name of the camera, and you need another folder to match the video. And that folder is where you keep all of the photographs and graphics and audio clips, all the other extra things you need for the video. Just keeping track of the files is a big job when I have two cameras. These guys, like I said, they had six GoPros mounted on the three main motorcycles, and then they had the drone and audio from, and they weren’t synchronized. This is something I couldn’t figure out because they all were riding their own motorcycles and they couldn’t really talk to each other. So, each one has two GoPros. How do they decide when they hit the record buttons? How do they synchronize the two GoPros on each motorcycle? Like I have my own system where with just my two GoPros, I start this one first and then I start this one and then I clap three times, you know, so I get an audio peak and then I sync up. So, every time I’m filming, I’m filming with both GoPros and I remember that and I talk about it on video. I actually say, “Okay, two GoPros running, the Hero 12 and the Hero 9 facing backwards.” You know, I tell myself on video what’s going on so that later on when I’m editing and I start the video clip, oh, I tell myself exactly, oh no, for this one there was only one GoPro, but now I’m using two GoPros and now three GoPro. I give myself verbal summaries inside the video. And there’s no way these guys are doing that. So all three of them start off in the morning, off they go. Each one of them has two GoPros. Each one of them has a microphone. Are all of them recording all day long? Just talking, talking, talking, narrating. And when they do that, how much video and audio would they end up with? How in the world would they keep track of it based on the day it was filmed, the location it was filmed, and then how in the world do they edit it afterwards? And when I got to the end of the video, they had the credits, like full-on movie credits, and the credits included two full-time editors who were not the people. So, you’ve got the three travelers, and then the Vietnamese guides, then the two drivers, and then the two cameramen. And on top of that, they had two full-time professional editors to somehow take all of that content filmed from 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, at least 10 different cameras and somehow sorted all out and put together a coherent story. Oh, I can’t even imagine. Your brain would just explode trying to keep track of all of that. That would have been such a huge job. Way too much work for a five day, a five day thousand mile journey. Really like one week in Vietnam. Crazy amount of work. Yeah. But anyway, that is, who are these guys again? Auto Alex cars traveling a thousand miles in Vietnam. I wonder why they said mile. They’re from the UK. Do they use miles? I thought they were all metric, but anyway, they say a thousand mile Vietnam adventure.
One thing I noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about hotels, of course, because I just came from Sumatra back to KL. And my hotels in Sumatra were so much better value than the hotels here in KL cuz KL’s a more expensive place. But then the hotels they were staying in in Vietnam. Wow. That I was jealous of. I mean, in terms of a good point in history to spend time in Vietnam, right now is such a great time because the hotels there are such good value. When they, the very first video, I’m always tracking things down, right? So, at the end of the video, they ride their motorcycles up to their hotel. I look for the name of the hotel and I pause the video and of course I look on Google Maps to track down the hotel and I was assuming these guys were staying in, you know, five-star luxury for this whole journey. And the hotels were really, really, really nice. But when I clicked on them on Google Maps, they cost like 60 ringgit a night, 80 ringgit a night at the most. And I was thinking, 80 ringgit? You know, this room here could cost 80 ringgit a night if I get it on the wrong day. But the hotels that they had in Vietnam, they were nice, like 60 ringgit a night. And they were staying in the lap of luxury. The value for food and accommodation in Vietnam is really extraordinary right now. I don’t know how long that economy is going to last, but it’s a good time to be in Vietnam. I remember that from my own trip there. And I was going much more low-budget than they were, but getting like you pay as little as 20, 25 ringgit, the equivalent per night, and you get a nice hotel room, windows, nice furniture, appliances, really, really good value. So, that was quite something to see in their videos as well.
Yeah, I think that’s about it.
There were some funny things in the video. I mean, these were, I don’t know if I’d call them good old boys. You know, we would in the United States or Canada, we might think of these guys as good old boys. And there was one guy in particular, they kept making fun of him because he was supposed to be the old man of the group. He was the old man. He was quite tall and kind of fat and not very adventurous. And so they were always teasing him. And it turns out he’s my age. They kept, you know, making fun of this guy for being so old, but he was actually my age. And then he seemed to be the least, like I said, adventurous, the least experienced of the bunch. So they were constantly looking for ways to shock him. So of course, the one thing they had to do was durian. They always got to spring the durian on the unsuspecting foreigner. So, they made him promise when they were in Ho Chi Minh City, it was like a handshake that at one point he will try durian. And I guess this was a big deal for him because like I said, he’s not a very adventurous guy. And then there, as they’re going along, they would stop off and then they have, you know, frog legs and prawn, kind of challenging local food, and he’s sitting there eating Pringles and M&M’s because he’s like, “Ah, I’m not eating that strange foreign food.” You know, that kind of guy. And then they got to Da Lat and they went out into the market. I thought I found their time in Da Lat quite interesting because I spent a lot of time there and I recognized the streets they were riding on. I knew the hotel where they went cuz I walked by it myself many times when I was there. And then they went out into the Da Lat Night Market and I spent a lot of time at the night market as well, and they found durian on display and they made such a big deal about how horrible it smells, right? Building up the durian, but then when they got near the durian stall, they couldn’t really smell anything. Or maybe they could just smell the nice fruit aroma and they were all kind of disappointed like, “Huh, I thought this was going to be a big event, right?” And they’re like, “No, it doesn’t really smell that bad at all.” Well, anyway, they bought some durian and they like fresh, like not a fruit, but they actually had bought it when it was already opened and the pulp from the durian was inside a package with plastic over it. And then they bought some of it and then they took a knife and cut it open and then they held it up to the guy that they’re always teasing and says, “Yeah, just give it a smell. Give it a smell.” And the guy, you know, held it up to his nose for like a quarter of a second, just sort of like, and then he went crazy. It was like somebody had hit him with tear gas or something or like, what’s that thing they crack under people’s noses when they’re unconscious to shock them awake. He kind of like, and he was just bouncing around, you know, like like he had been hit with a stun gun or something. He thought that was like the most horrible thing he had ever smelt in his life. So the whole durian sequence was very satisfying from that point of view. Though, as I’ve said before, I don’t understand the reaction. Even the first time I had durian in my life decades ago. I mean, it’s an unusual fruit. If you’re from Canada and you’ve never had durian before, the texture, the taste, the smell, it’s like, whoa. Yeah, that is different. That’s weird. That’s a… But it never hit me as shocking. And I like the taste of durian. Smells fine to me. Tastes fine. Texture is a little bit weird, but hey, whatever. So, when people smell it, like foreigners smell durian and they have this like intense reaction, like it was the most disgusting thing ever. I don’t really understand it. I don’t know what it is they’re smelling. But anyway, this guy in the group, he just about had a heart attack and he didn’t, he, to his credit, I guess he came through on the handshake cuz even though he smelled it and he wanted nothing to do with it, they told him like, “Hey, you said you would try it.” So then he grabbed it later on like this big hunk of durian and took a little nibble like really fast, just took a nibble and then he just like spit it out instantly like he was vomiting or something. For him, I guess it was like the most horrible thing he’d ever smelled or tasted in his entire life. So that was pretty funny. But yeah, so that’s them. The Auto Alex cars adventure in Vietnam. And that’s it.
Time to shut down this podcast. As I said, the only reason I started recording this behind the scenes podcast was because I wanted to test the Olympus app for controlling the camera. And I thought instead of just testing it on my own, I thought I might as well make a video about testing it, and that led to me talking about some other things. But yeah, my conclusion about the OI Share app, nah, it’s too many negatives. And the deal breaker is that when I use, if I used the app, I can’t tell if the camera is still recording or not. It will show recording in the app even when the camera has stopped recording for whatever reason. It doesn’t communicate with the camera so you’re not getting accurate. So time after time I think you just end up talking and talking and talking and then you find out it wasn’t recording all that time. So no matter how many advantages you might get, that one big disadvantage outweighs all the advantages. So yeah, basically can’t use it. And then tomorrow I’m moving back to the Raja Bot. And in a previous video I mentioned that a Planet Doug mystery subscriber, through a complicated set of circumstances, has ended up with extra GoPro batteries and an extra GoPro cage, a special cage from Ulanzi and some other accessories that they’re not using anymore, and they offered to donate them to Planet Doug and they’re on their way. So, I was just checking the delivery tracking and this package could be here on Thursday. Today is Tuesday. Yes, today is Tuesday and it could arrive here in Kuala Lumpur, having it shipped to my friend Kai’s house, and so I might have an unboxing of all kinds of GoPro goodies and yeah, could be here as early as Thursday, which is amazing. I thought it might end up being one of these big dramas, but anyway, fingers crossed the tracking is accurate. Like for all I know it will get stuck in customs at the border. That has happened to me in the past. Packages coming into Malaysia from outside. I think all of the ones I’ve had, just about big ones anyway, got stuck at customs. Took a long time to be released, and one time I even had to go all the way out to the airport and find the airport customs office just to get my package released. So it could be, you know, knock on wood, it’s going to work out. But according to the tracking, it could be here as early as Thursday. So that’s pretty amazing. And yeah, so that’s cool. And I’m moving back to the Raja Bot Hotel tomorrow, which I’m also looking forward to. A change is as good as a rest, as they say. So that’s it. Shutting down and I’ll see you in the next video.