VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
The sun feels like an angry death star, the wind is howling through my hotel window, and someone set off bombs at 3 a.m. Just another day easing into a bicycle tour around Malaysia. 🚲🌏
In this video, I’m holed up in my room in Rembau, recovering from the first couple of days of cycling and kind of sticking to my most important rule: on a long tour, the first day should only be about changing hotels. I talk about why Paddy Doyle’s bicycle tour attempt failed, the struggle of finding my camera batteries, and the physical hardships of camping that never translates on video.
But it’s not all hardship! I managed to get a great haircut using Google Translate (turns out the barber spoke Hindi, not Malay), and I found an awesome local burger joint, the “Rembau Youth Center Densuko Mokapot,” for a smash burger feast.
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▶️ The First Day of This Tour (The brutal one): • Cycling Malaysia’s Ancient Spine: First Da…
▶️ The Second Day: • I Survived a Night in the Malaysian Wild (…
VIDEO TOPICS:
The Angry Sun & The “Death Star” Effect
The Misery That Video Can’t Capture
Waking Up to a Windstorm in Rembau
Getting a Haircut with Google Translate (Hindi Edition!)
The 3 AM Bombs (Not Fireworks!)
Exploring My “Empty” Hotel & The Water Filter Gamble
Finding the “Rembau Youth Center” & Ordering Burgers
The McDonald’s CEO Took a Fake Bite (So I Took a Real One)
Editing the First Day’s Epic 4-Hour Raw Video
My #1 Rule for Bike Touring (The “Change Hotels” Day)
The Great Battery Hunt & Packing System Refinement
Plans for Tomorrow: The Bukit Climb to Kuala Pilah
📍 LOCATION:
Rembau, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia.
Burger Joint: Densuko Mokapot/ Rembau Youth Center
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
It’s a little bit after 7:00 a.m. here in my hotel room in Rembau. I think that’s the name of the town. And yeah, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the weather since I left from Port Dickson. The sun just beat down. I mean, it was like a death star trying to kill you. It felt offensive. It felt like the sun was angry with me and was just trying to set me on fire. The sun was that hot.
One thing I’ve noticed in the just the last couple of days of shooting video while cycling is that a lot of the hardships don’t really come across. Like the first night when I spent in my tent, the utter misery of that situation was apparent to me because of just how sweaty and hot and dirty I was. And then you just set up your tent and you crawl into the tent and you just lie there a puddle of sweat and you’re like, well, this is where I’m going to be for the next 10 hours and just soaking wet and I don’t know, it’s just such a very difficult experience, but it doesn’t come across on video. The heat doesn’t come across. You can sit there at the side of the road filming and talk about how hot the sun is and how you have to rest in the shade, but none of that really comes across on the video. It’s kind of funny.
But yeah, I’m still here in this eclectic hotel in yeah, I don’t know how to say the name of the town really. Ren Renba or something like that. But yeah, I’m all kind of settled in, but scattered gear all over the place. I just plugged in my kettle to make some coffee. Still in the middle of cleaning up my tent and all my other gear. And there’s Planet Doug Studio over there. Yeah, there’s no comforters or anything like that. So I broke out my sleeping bag, using my sleeping bag on this tent. But anyway, what I started filming because I heard this noise outside. I’m not hearing it right now, but let’s take a look. Yeah, windstorm. Yikes.
So yeah, I was thinking about the weather, the sun and the rain is mainly what I’ve been thinking about. How hot is the sun going to be or how much is it going to be raining? And then from my bed, all I heard was the sound of whistling wind. So it’s actually yesterday I spent the day here in Rembau yesterday and it was windy all day. It was like a huge windstorm moved in. So that’s hear that whistling. I guess it’s coming through here. This huge sign or something.
The wind is whistling. I’ve been listening to that all night long. But look at that. So windy. It’s crazy.
One of the things I did yesterday, of course, was get a haircut. So cut all my hair off. There’s a barber shop right here just downstairs. And I happen to be walking right by, which is kind of how I like to do errands. Like, if I went out deliberately to get a haircut, I wouldn’t be able to get it done. I wouldn’t find a barber shop. They’d be too crowded. It wouldn’t be open. There’d be some sort of a problem. But I just went out yesterday to grab something to drink at the 7-Eleven across the road over there. So I went out over to 7-Eleven to get a cold drink and there happened to be a barber shop right beside my hotel. So I thought, “Oh, okay.” I popped inside completely empty, got a haircut, a really nice guy there. He said he was from India. They clearly didn’t speak English. So I got out Google Translate and I wrote in Google Translate, you know, hello, I would like to have a basic haircut, nothing fancy, no fancy style, don’t worry about anything. Just however I look now, just make it a lot shorter. So I wrote all that in English, translated it to Malay because Google Translate was set to Malay. And I showed it to him and he was very high tech. I was very impressed about this. He took my phone from me and then he started tapping on it and he switched the language from Malay to Hindi and I said, “Oh, Hindi.” Yeah, Hindi. Oh. And I chatted with him a little bit and he’s actually from India, born in India and came here. Yeah. As an immigrant worker and ended up here up in the mountains in the windstorm. Yeah. Really nice guy. Did exactly what I wanted for a haircut. So that was great.
Yeah, last night I didn’t take any video of it, but this place was open until 3:00 in the morning at Seafood and they had something set up all the way along the road. This whole parking area was jammed with cars at 3:00 in the morning and they were setting off I wouldn’t even call them fireworks. I would call them like bombs going off. They were so loud they shook everything in my room and what woke me up of course, but I have no idea. It was like individual bombs going off. It was just like boom. And then 5 minutes later, boom, another one. I came out to watch, but I didn’t shoot any video.
So yeah, here’s my neighborhood. I’m in a strip mall. There’s some nice restaurants over there. I had dinner. I can show you my dinner. They had a Ramadan special. I am Bakar I think it was. Yeah, I can put a photo in of my dinner. Again, I didn’t shoot any video, but anyway, I just got out of bed and I heard the wind howling out here, so I just wanted to come out and record a little bit of the wind. Looks like it’s going to be a nice day, though. Unless it’s blowing in a storm from out in that direction.
Just need to get some water. A lot of these places have water filters like this, and I’m kind of curious about them. Looks like this one isn’t on. Okay. So turned on the power and it’s got hot and cold, but neither seems to work. So you don’t get hot water, you don’t get cold water. But these units, they get water directly from the city water supply, right? And then it goes through this series of filters before it goes in here. And you have to assume that these filters are being maintained and replaced and cleaned. But you don’t really know. How can you tell from the outside? I mean, I can’t.
But anyway, water comes out. And because it comes out of a unit that kind of filters, I drink it. And I’m still alive to tell the tale.
In most of the hotels that I’ve stayed in in Malaysia, I always have the feeling that I’m completely alone. Like, you know, these are the stairs going up. And I haven’t heard a single person going up or down, opening or closing the door. And it always feels that way. So maybe people show up late at night or leave early in the morning, like so early and so late that I never even spot them. I have no idea. But quite often you’ll try to book a room at one of these places online and it will say, you know, fully booked. There’s no rooms available. So they seem to be sold out every single night. And yet I never ever see another person staying in one of these low budget hotels. They just seem completely empty.
Yeah, I spotted this place on Google Maps and then I went looking for it yesterday, but it was later in the evening. I went out for dinner at a different restaurant that’s across the road, but when I came back, this place seemed to be open. There’s nobody here right now. But, yeah, look at that. Burger Single Smash. Burger Smash. The Mocha Pot Burger and Coffee and yeah, like I said, it’s the Rem Youth Center. Hello. Hello, sir. How are you? I’m good. How are you, sir? I’m okay. Where you from, sir? From Canada. In Canada. Oh, you have the menu here. You holiday? Yeah, just a holiday vacation. So, check that out. They have quite a detailed menu. So this is their classic burger single smash. I got one of those and I got one of the fried chicken burgers, one of each, and a lemon iced tea and touch and go. So exciting.
Yeah, it’s a very cool place. Like I said, it seems to be connected with a youth center of some kind, but I don’t really know how all that works. I noticed on Google Maps, like it said Rembau Youth Center. Yeah, I really like about people come here to drink and how to say gathering people. People play game online. Okay. We also have pool PS5 to play. And then but the burger place is connected to the youth center. When did you start doing this? 3 years. 3 years. So long time. Okay, that’s cool. You get a lot of customers from the hotel like me. Foreigners come here all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Sorry. Our this one already. Okay. And we have we can do this before. It’s the golden thigh burger. Chick Thai honey. Sure. I can try that one. All right. So it’s three more ringgit. Two more ringgit. Two more. That’s okay.
Yeah, actually I hesitated ordering the fried chicken one. I just I don’t know why. I just always have a feeling like the thing I order will be the one thing that they don’t have that’s available. Feels like frying something is more difficult than just throwing it on the grill. But anyway, but then he came over and said, “No, we can’t do that one.” So that’s fine. I just picked another one on the menu there. I guess I didn’t even mention the name of the place, but they have a sticker on their iced lemon tea. Denuko Mocha Pot right there. Densuko Mocha Pot.
Oh, that’s nice. I need to let it get a bit cooler. But yeah, very light lemon flavor.
Yeah, it’s funny. Even after like just 2 days of cycling, for days afterward, you feel like you’re on a liquid deficit, right? Like 2 days of cycling and then you’ll feel thirsty for the next week. The thirst just keeps going on and on and on. I feel like I could drink five of these again. Just line them up. I could have put them all down.
The burgers have arrived. When I was in Kuala Lumpur and when I was in Port Dickson, I had a lot of burgers from these stalls, you know, kind of like Ramly Burger, Otai Burger stalls, and I got used to that size and price and style. They’re quite inexpensive, five ringgit. The ones that I got in Port Dickson recently were really really big and elaborate for 5 ringgit. I don’t even know how they could afford to sell them at that price. They were clearly worth a lot more than that. These ones are a bit more gourmet-ish probably in terms of the patty, the beef. Well, they’re both chicken actually, but yeah. Anyway, so this one is 10 ringgit. This is their burger smash. And then this is the that’s quite a mouthful. Quite a giant one there. Quite often these days the food that I order comes to the table and I think ah I can’t eat all of that. You know I feel like you know my eyes were bigger than my stomach. But trust me once I start once I start eating I’ll power through both of these without any trouble at all.
Nice little tortilla chips.
Didn’t take long. I just sat down and ants are biting me already. The ants of Malaysia just don’t like me. They just want to bite me. Or maybe I’m very tasty. Anyway, let’s bite into this. There’s the chicken. A lot of lettuce on the bottom.
Nice sauce. kind of like Italian dressing, French dressing, something something along those lines.
Now, for the video, before I finish that one, let me take a bite out of this one. This one’s going to be Yeah, this is a lot. Good grief. Has everyone seen that McDonald’s video now? I find that hilarious. I guess the CEO of McDonald’s, he actually posted a lot of videos, like a lot of advertisements where he is on like social media and just takes he tries out his own food from McDonald’s. And I guess he’s made a ton of these videos. I wasn’t aware of it, but he recently made one about their new burger called the Arch Burger. So it’s the CEO of McDonald’s. Can you imagine? And he’s shooting like a social media video that looks like an Instagram video or a Facebook video, a YouTube short, and he’s talking about how amazing the Arch burger is. And then it came time to sample the burger and he literally did something like this.
Oh, that is so good. Like he took the tiniest nibble. Like you couldn’t even tell whether he actually bit into it or not. Just a tiny little and he talked about how good it was and everybody was making fun of that video. I thought it was really funny. And of course, what he’s supposed to do is what I’m about to do. Take a real bite. Yeah.
Mmm.
Wow.
That is a lot.
Mmm.
Who knew I could do a better job than the CEO of McDonald’s?
Bite number two.
Mmm.
Well, that’s all I’m going to capture on video for now. I’m going to make a real mess getting through the rest of these burgers.
I switched over to my Olympus camera down at the end of the bed just for fun. I have it in my bag, so I might as well use it. I was going to just take the GoPro. I had the GoPro outside shooting the wind and I thought I could just prop it up on the mattress, but hey, I’ve got the Olympus. Might as well use it. Got my morning coffee underway and I just thought I’d chat a little bit on camera while I’m getting set up.
I mentioned already that I edited the video from my first day when I rode from Port Dickson and then I camped out at night. I finished it, took all day yesterday. And if you see the video on my channel, you’ll probably understand why because I shot a lot of video. I just can’t help it. It’s what I do. Again, I kind of treat my videos like they’re journals, like a video documentary about my day. And I keep falling into that habit partially because that’s what’s become natural to me, but also because if I wasn’t doing that, I would get bored, right? I’ve got the entire day starting well whatever time my alarm went off 5:30 in the morning, 6:00, something like that until I finally was lying down in the tent which was around maybe 8:00 at night. So that entire day of activities, I mean, if I don’t keep recording all the time, then what do I do with all my time? Do you know what I mean? Like if all I did was shoot a short clip in the morning. Hey, I’m going for a bike ride today and then next thing you know it’s like 6 hours later and I say, “Oh, here I am at the beach.” Another 30 seconds of video. I mean, what do I do all those hours in between? I like to keep busy. So I end up just running cameras all the time and filming everything I do. And then in the end, it ended up being about 2 hours worth of raw video. But it’s actually 4 hours of raw video because I was shooting most of the time with the Hero 12 and the Hero 9. So I had two videos of everything that happened. So I ended up, like I said, with 4 hours of raw video to work with. And I got that down to like an hour and 40 minutes or an hour and a half or something like that. But anyway, it’s a long video. But there it is. I shot all of it, so I just included it. If in terms of editing to make it shorter, it doesn’t feel like I can take each section and shorten it because each section is just it is what it is. Like when I went swimming in at the beach, I filmed myself swimming and talking. And then it’s like it’s not like I can shorten it. I have a choice between deleting it or not deleting it. Like if I wanted to make the video down to half an hour or something, that just means this section has to be deleted, that section has to be deleted, that section, that section. You know, you have to just remove entire sections. So what I did instead was I just included everything and then I put in chapter titles, not a whole lot of them, but a few chapter titles and the viewer can decide whether they want to skip or not. Right. Anyway, so yeah, it was a lot of video and I’ve got my laptop here. I’m just going to be powering up my laptop because I have to upload that video. And what happens with running two cameras like the Hero 12 and the Hero 9 on the editing program, I load both videos into the timeline and then I switch back and forth between the two video tracks. And that ends up like when you export the video, it takes twice as long. You’re only saving video from one of the video tracks, but it’s actually processing both of them. So in fact, it takes a long time to export, longer than normal. And then the video itself ended up being about 50 gigabytes in size. So 50 gigabytes I now have to upload. I could have left my laptop running all night long and just uploaded during the night, but I find when I do that I don’t sleep as well because I’m thinking about the laptop and I’m always checking on it. How’s the upload going? I never go into a really deep sleep. So I just shut down. I figure I’ll upload today. I have to resume upload. The great thing about uploading from a laptop, if you start the uploading to YouTube on a laptop and then you shut down the laptop, YouTube remembers where you are and then when you reload YouTube, it gives you the option to resume upload. And then you just basically find the same video that you are uploading. It’s 51.2 GB. It’s a big file. And now I can resume uploading. I don’t lose anything. That’s the main disadvantage of editing with a smartphone. It would be nice just to have very simple videos and edit on a smartphone and nothing else because, you know, compare the size and the weight, right?
So, today after I finished telling you my brief stories, I’m going to dive into editing the second video, which will be a much shorter one. And the very first day was very complicated day because I checked out of my hotel in Port Dickson. I had to organize all of my gear. I thought I was organized, but then by the time it came down to actually packing up and hitting the road, there were still a number of things I had to do. And then while I was riding, I stopped constantly to adjust my camera mounting positions to check because you have to double check all the time. Is the audio being recorded, what does the video look like? And I wanted to use the two camera system. And I had so much trouble during the day with my smartphone running out of power and then overheating and shut down. I had to deal with that. It was just a very long, difficult but very interesting day at the same time.
And then when I woke up in the campsite, I had a choice between cycling a long distance or cycling a shorter distance. And it was pretty obvious to me I was going to cycle a short distance because one thing I’ve learned in my life, I don’t know many things, total dummy. This is like you think there’s a brain in there, but half the time I think it’s just empty space. My one brain cell is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I get a lot done with the one brain cell that I have, but still not very intelligent. But one thing I have learned over the years is that if you are going to be cycling, you have to ease into it. I kind of broke my own rule the first day. I talked about it in the video that my rule of thumb is day one all you need to do on the first day is change hotels. That is a victory. You don’t even have to leave the city limits. You’re in one hotel, pick another hotel on the other side of the city, book a room there, and spend the entire day doing nothing but organizing your gear, packing it up, riding across the city, testing all of your systems, making sure everything’s working, nothing is broken. Arrive at the new hotel, maybe you rode 5 kilometers at the most. And then when you get to the new hotel, unpack, go into the room and unpack and get organized. That’s all you should do on day number one. Nothing else. And I’ve seen cyclists my entire life fail because they didn’t do that.
A very famous example for me is Paddy Doyle, the very popular YouTuber from Thailand. He decided to go on a bicycle tour the entire north to south distance of Thailand. And he made a huge deal out of it, talking about it, organizing it, planning it. Everybody’s all excited about his huge journey by bicycle. He even met up with that British couple do the van life thing, their van, Trudy. I can never remember the name of their channel, but he met up with them. They were driving their van to the north of Thailand. He put his bike in the van, hitched a ride with them, and they drove him all the way to the most northern point of Thailand. And then, amidst much fanfare, he set off on his bicycle journey. But on the very first day, he decided to ride over 100 kilometers on day one. And reading between the lines, that was very difficult. He was pretty miserable doing it. I’m amazed he did it at all. I couldn’t do it. Like out of nowhere, I couldn’t just suddenly ride 100 kilometers in one day. I just couldn’t do it. Maybe I carry too much weight. I’m also older. Maybe I don’t have the leg power anymore. I know I couldn’t do it. But he set off to ride 100 plus kilometers every day, like right out of the gate. And he was on a major highway system. He didn’t go off onto the smaller countryside roads. And not surprisingly, after a week, I don’t know, after three days of cycling, 4 days maybe, he quit. And yeah, that happens to a lot of people because the very first day they think they’re going to ride 100 km and then day two 100 km, etc. And unless you are a super athlete and you’re dedicated to the world of cycling and you’ve planned to have a very lightweight fast bike that doesn’t take a lot of effort to move, unless you’re that kind of cyclist, you’re just not going to do it.
So a more reasonable approach is as I said, the one thing that I’ve learned in my life is day one all you should do is change hotels. Like just ride from one hotel to another hotel. I’ve done that my entire life. Almost every trip I’ve ever gone on just to make sure. And then day two, leaving from your second hotel. Well, just ride 15 kilometers on your next, just enjoy the day. Take your time organizing your gear, loading up your bike, go out exploring, hang out, have a good time. Ride 15 kilometers and then you’re done for the day. Day three, 30 kilometers or 20 km. See what I mean? Just go up by 5 kilometers per day and then after a week you might be doing 50, 60 km a day and it will actually take you 2 weeks of every day in the saddle before you start to feel comfortable. It takes that long to ease into it. And I think that’s why a lot of people break down when they go bike touring because they’ll often plan a two week trip. It’s like, oh, I got a two week holiday. I’m going to go on a bike tour. But in my world, it takes 2 weeks just to get over the agony of being on a bicycle. After 2 weeks, then you start to enjoy it. So having a two-week holiday bicycle trip for me, that’s just two weeks of misery. And then by the time you’re finally getting accustomed to riding a bike, then your trip is over, right?
Anyway, and speaking of spending the entire first day just organizing your gear, my Olympus camera, the battery died, so I had to put in a new battery. And for the life of me, I could not find them. I know I have four batteries for this Olympus camera, but with all the gear that I have, all the bags that I have, I had no idea where I put them. Like none at all. So I just had like a 45-minute break right now where I went over all of my gear bag by bag by bag and reorganizing everything because your very first one or two days on the road, you’re suddenly looking for items and it’s like, “Oh, where did I put that? Oh, that’s where it is.” And then you start moving things around based on what time of the day you need them and how often you need access to those things. You end up refining your packing system over time. Every time you set up the tent, crawl in there, you’re like reorganizing all your gear, and it’s like, “Oh, I need my flashlight at this point in the day. So it shouldn’t be buried deep in one of my bags. I better keep my flashlight here in a more convenient spot.” And you refine your system. I haven’t had time to do that. So I was like, “Where are my Olympus?” And I started thinking I lost them. That maybe they fell out of a pocket and they’re just on the road somewhere because I could not find them anywhere. So that’s when I reset and the only way I can find things is to just go over my entire set of gear. So bag by bag by bag, I took each bag, opened it up completely, went through all the contents, sealed it, put it aside, next bag, sealed it, put it aside, and after a very long time, I was like, “Ah, that’s where I put them.” Anyway, it took me so long to find the extra batteries and put it in the Olympus that I completely forgot what I was talking about. I don’t even know why I was talking about Paddy Doyle and how he rode 100 kilometers the first day. Nearly killed himself trying to ride so much each day right out of the gate and he ended up quitting the bike ride because it’s just too much. You just can’t do that. So my philosophy is, as I said, very slow and you just ease into it.
Anyway, I just had some thoughts on my mind here in Rembau. I’m going to fire up my laptop to edit my second video. And as I said, that video is going to be much shorter because I woke up in my campsite. I couldn’t really film much because I woke up before the sunrise and it was just pitch black and with the GoPro. I forgot that I had the Olympus. I should have set up the Olympus because it’s better in low light. It’s the whole reason I brought it with me, but I just never even thought about it. And then so breaking camp, I didn’t really film anything. I just talked a little bit in the morning in the dark and then the video jumps to my bike fully packed ready to go and then I started cycling and I only went a very short distance and a big chunk of the video I lost because my microphone ran out of power and I never noticed. So I was just filming and filming and filming and then there was no audio for any of that video. So a big chunk of the day is just gone, which is kind of funny considering how much time and effort I put into organizing. I still don’t notice when my microphone batteries die. But anyway, so yeah, I just rode a very short distance and I came here to this town and I booked this hotel room and that was a very short day all in all. So this video and because I had no battery power left, I used up all my GoPro batteries on the first day. I had like two batteries with a little bit of power left in them. So I used those throughout the day sparingly. I didn’t shoot with two GoPros. I only shot with one GoPro, so I could conserve battery power. So I didn’t film very much for me on the second day. And I have to edit that video today while I’m uploading the first one. 20% has been uploaded.
So that’s it for this morning. I’m going to dive into editing my next video. I’ll maybe I’ll take you out into the town later when I go get some lunch and some dinner and get organized for getting back on the road tomorrow. Hopefully. Yeah, there’s nice sunny weather tomorrow because when I get cycling again, I have a big climb ahead of me. It’s actually a climb here called it’s called Bukit of course because that’s the Malay name for hill and this is a famous cycling hill called I can’t find it but anyway there’s a section of road right out of town here where it has a very steep grade. That’s one of the reasons I spent the night here because as I said, I like to ease into cycling. Two days of cycling and then two days off the bike. That’s a good pattern for me because my legs are really stiff even from the short cycling I already did. And if I went cycling on a third day, it would you can blow out your knees, you can hurt your ankles, you can, you know, ease into it is what I do. So tomorrow when I cycle again, I think I’ll only be cycling about 30 km. There’s a really interesting looking town north of here called Kuala Pilah. I almost wish I was there already, but it’s only 35 kilometers away, but it’s a big steep climb to start with. So tomorrow I’m going to be riding to Kuala Pilah and it’s only 35 km away, but it looks like they have a nice selection of low-budget hotels. I may even stay there a couple of nights just to take advantage of the cheap hotels. We’ll find out. All right. Yeah, got to stop babbling, dive into video editing.