Thursday, June 25, 2026
8:45 a.m. Room A1 Makhota Vibe Inn
Melaka, Malaysia
Well, a decision was made. On impulse. I booked this room at the Makhota Vibe Inn for three more nights so that I can stay here in Melaka at least through the weekend. I did that because I want to attend the Dragon Boat Races. The Melaka Dragon Boat Festival is taking place over two days: Saturday June 27th and Sunday June 28th. There are 8-kilometer long-distance races on Saturday and then I think the main event consisting of 200-meter sprints is on Sunday. I don’t know anything else about the festival or about the Dragon Boat Races at this point. I’ll do some reading and research and investigating about all of this today and tomorrow. I want to find out about the history of the races and everything else about them before the festival kicks off. I was even thinking during the night that perhaps I can do this a bit more professionally than just standing on the shore of the river and pointing my GoPro at the river. Maybe I can find people associated with the event and talk to them. Maybe talk to one of the teams. Maybe even get permission to mount a couple of GoPro cameras on a boat. I have the gear to be able to do that on a simple level anyway. I don’t have true pro gear. I don’t have remote controls and battery packs and that kind of gear. But I could mount a GoPro relatively securely and hit the record button and then cross my fingers that it keeps recording for the duration of the race. With my luck and experience, the GoPro will probably glitch or overheat and not record anything, but it could be fun to at least try. I could also use my Olympus camera with its medium-telephoto lens reach and record some better quality video clips. Though I’m worried about my Olympus. It has been behaving oddly lately. The stabilization had been doing some strange things. I think bouncing around on my bicycle has damaged its internals.
And for a change, I booked the weekend rooms at this hotel in advance. That means I wasn’t hit with the rocketing weekend prices quite as much. I don’t even know how popular this festival is. It could be that Melaka will be swamped with visitors and all the hotels will end up being fully booked again with very high prices. In any event, when I booked this room and I paid for three nights in advance, the base price came to 52 ringgit. That’s a significant increase from the weekday price of 32 ringgit, but at least it didn’t jump up to 90 ringgit or 120 ringgit yet as in the past. Of course, the Tourism Tax and Heritage Tax brought it up to 65 ringgit/night. And I paid for Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night in advance. I will probably stay here on Monday as well because I will need time to edit the video. But I haven’t booked the room for Monday night yet. I’m hoping it will be cheaper to book that separately later on when the weekday pricing clicks back into place.
One thing is that when I booked this room last night, there was only one room left. Of course, Agoda could be lying to me. There is no rule out there that booking sites like Agoda have to tell you anything like the truth. Their job is to make you feel like there is scarcity and make you panic and pay as much as possible. “Hurry! Rooms are running out! Four room types similar to yours have already been sold out!!!” And then they show you the rooms that sold out at fabulously low prices, making you feel like by waiting you just missed out on a great deal. It’s all mind games. But in my experience, when they say there is only ONE room left at that price, it’s usually true. Wait two minutes, and that room will be gone, and the only room left will be a giant family triple-bed room at triple the price.
Today, I think I am going to shoot a follow-up video about my visit to the Fort of Melaka Heritage Gallery. In terms of YouTube popularity, it is probably a poor choice. But I really want to do it. The thing is that since my visit to that museum and while editing the video, I did some more reading and fact-checking, and more and more detail came to light that explained and added nuance to what I saw there. In fact, there was so much new information that you could argue that I was completely wrong in everything that I said. So I’m thinking about calling the video, “Melaka, I Apologize; I Was Wrong About Everything.” My plan is to walk through the museum a second time and stop at each exhibit and talk about what is on the margins of that exhibit, what was left out, and what is behind that story. From that perspective, I wasn’t wrong in what I said. I simply described the exhibits on the surface. I didn’t tell the backstory or the context even when I knew it. It was a surface-level walk through. But there are other exhibits that led me to certain conclusions, and it turns out I was completely wrong in what I said. And once you understand the nature of the exhibit, it all makes sense. So I want to talk about these things and expand on them.
However, the emotional drive to make this video is not coming from correcting mistakes. It’s coming from a growing realization that the story of Melaka is very exciting and far more detailed than I imagined. It’s an amazing story. And I don’t know if I’m just a dummy and everyone else is perfectly aware of this history. But I certainly did not know any of this. To put things at its simplest level, there are possibilities here for a dozen Hollywood-style blockbuster movies. The actual battle for Melaka between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate is just one example. It’s an amazing story full of military strategy and twists and turns and human drama and shifting alliances and a clash of technologies and politics and economics and religion. It is ALL there by the truckload. And yet when I wander around Melaka as a typical tourist, I don’t feel that story. I don’t feel like it is being told. And it is from that sense of absence that I came up with this idea to revisit the museum and at least dip my toe in the water of some of that story and history.
In going over the idea for this video, I came up with eight separate topics based on eight exhibits at the museum. Each one is fascinating to me even if it might not be interesting to a wider audience. And there is no way I can keep all of the names, dates, and historical facts straight in my head. There is simply too much information. It’s not like I’m planning to give a history lecture at a university seminar. But I can speak about each topic in a general way to get my point across. In trying to get my facts straight, I ended up discovering more and more interesting details I wasn’t aware of. In general, I had no idea that so much was known and recorded and that so much was left out of standard museum displays. It’s kind of astonishing.