VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
I wasn’t sure the day would ever come, but it was finally time to pack up the bike and leave Melaka to start heading south toward Muar and Johor. Or so I thought. After being off the bicycle for a couple of months, just getting all my worldly possessions packed up and mounting camera gear is a full day’s achievement.
But because of a massive holiday weekend, hotel prices tripled and my room was booked out from underneath me. As I was riding out of town through the historic Portuguese Settlement (checking out the local mud skippers and Kristang culture along the way), the infamous “Planet Doug Luck” struck.
What followed was a chaotic chain of events involving four failed accommodation attempts—including an Airbnb booking that fell through because a water pipe literally burst and flooded the building! A generous Planet Doug subscriber had stepped in as a mystery benefactor.
Thanks to their incredible hospitality, I ended up at the Time Hotel for a life of luxury (it has actual chairs and a kettle!). Even better, I got to join them for a great evening experiencing Melaka from a stunning new perspective—30 floors up—complete with a simultaneous sunset and full moonrise, and a feast of satay, kuay teow and fried rice.
It turns out I’m staying in Melaka just a little bit longer…
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I wasn’t sure the day would ever come, but the day has come to leave from Melaka. So, I’m standing outside my hotel where I’ve been staying for a while. It has a couple of different names. The Mahkota Vibe Inn and Hotel. You see it listed with both names online. Like Agoda has a separate listing for each one. I don’t know exactly how that works, but whichever one you book, you sort of end up at the same place. But yeah, I enjoyed my time here. I think it’s a little bit dependent on which room you get. I think some of the rooms are older and a bit more rundown and then some of them are nicer and bigger and better furnished. And I don’t ask for very much, so I’m pretty happy with almost anything I get. And yeah, so I like the location. It’s just a block away from downtown, the heritage city basically. And my experience packing up this morning and getting ready to leave on my bicycle is a good lesson probably in why it has taken me so long to leave Melaka. I like it here. I’ve really enjoyed shooting a lot of historical videos here. I have an interest in that. And I haven’t been on the bike for a couple of months. I had one month in Sumatra where I was staying basically in one city and now almost a month here in Melaka. So I’m out of the rhythm. And there’s a lot of rhythm involved in getting on a bike, getting it ready, packing up, mounting cameras on it. It’s a lot of work. And so if you have to choose between getting this ready and leaving town or spending one more day and exploring the riverside, it’s a pretty easy choice. So I kind of stayed here a long time, longer than I expected, but it is now time to go. I’ve been on my bicycle a lot. Of course, I’ve been doing a lot of riding, but that was just my bike without any luggage, without my camping equipment, without my laptop, without all of my heavy gear. So, this is the first time in a long time that I’ve been on the road with all of my worldly possessions, basically attached to the bike in one way or another. And one of the reasons I’m leaving, I mean, if I had a choice to be honest, I’d probably stay throughout the weekend because it’s going to be a fun and interesting weekend because it’s a holiday. But I basically got forced out of my hotel because it was booked, my room was booked out from underneath me. I waited too long and yeah, I couldn’t, there were no rooms available. And one of the reasons I waited was because I kept kind of waiting for the price to go down because it’s a weekend and it’s a holiday weekend. The prices of all the hotels tripled. So my room basically went from like a base fare of around 40 ringgit up to about 130 ringgit. And I didn’t want to, I can’t pay that much. So, I waited and then before I knew it, yeah, the whole hotel was booked. And all the hotels in Melaka are booked for the weekend. And I’m heading down the coast, by the way, towards the city of Muar and Johor. And then the plan if everything goes smoothly is to at Johor turn around and start heading north up the east coast of Malaysia to Kota Bharu. That could be the end of my trip, my bicycle ride. But if I’m in some kind of a rhythm and I’m enjoying myself and making videos is going well, I could continue from Kota Bharu onward through more of Malaysia, but we’ll just see how that goes. From here to Kota Bharu, I did a bit of math and I think it’s just short of a thousand kilometers to get to Kota Bharu. So that’s basically the plan as it stands. I sort of have a route out of the city plotted. What I want to do is just stop off briefly at the Portuguese settlement. It’s one of the larger more well-known attractions here in Melaka that I never got around to checking out. And my route out of the city takes me past the Portuguese settlement. I got to do a detour down to the coast. But yeah, I’ll just pop over to the Portuguese settlement, go down to the shoreline. My understanding of the history is that the Portuguese settlement itself was officially established in like the 1920s. I think there were of course what is going on here.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I thought I knew which way to go, but yeah, now I remember. I took this route to go to the prison museum, but I got confused there about where I was supposed to go. Yeah, there’s so many one-way streets in Malaysia. You get caught all the time, especially on a bicycle.
So, even for me to get to the Portuguese settlement, I have to do kind of a long loop to the north, go around St. John’s Hill on a one-way street, and then come all the way back down on the other side. You can’t really go along the coast much in Malaysia because there are so many small rivers and the rivers break up the coastline and there are very very few bridges along the coast because there’s so much shallow water muddy plains mangrove things like that. So there’s no roads down there.
But anyway, the Portuguese settlement of course is populated by the descendants of some of the original Portuguese colonizers and settlers here going all the way back to 1511, the 1500s basically and the Portuguese married, got married here had children and basically settled down here and from what I read most of them became fishermen so they were living along the shoreline and then at some point there was a campaign a fundraising campaign and they purchased a big plot of land along the shore and set it aside for this Portuguese community. I think I read I mean there aren’t very many of them now, maybe a thousand people in this community, but apparently if you know what you’re looking for, it feels like you’re in a kind of a Portuguese town. You see Portuguese names, Portuguese architecture, things like that.
Yeah, I can really feel it in my legs that I haven’t been on the bike with a heavy load for a long time.
I was just starting to get in half decent shape when I broke up my journey in Melaka and I went over to Sumatra for about a month by ferry and then I came back into Malaysia again. But I’ve been off the bicycle for quite a while it seems like.
Well, I’m having a heck of a time getting out of Melaka. Good grief. These roads, all the one-way roads I’ve had to navigate. I keep having to go from the right side to the left side to go around these corners and the traffic just never stops flowing. And I’m kind of on the wrong side of the road now. But I think I have to veer off to the right up ahead anyway or something. I got to stop and check.
Yeah, so much traffic this morning. Looks like a break. I can get across. Yeah, more comfortable over here on the left. This is where a bicycle is supposed to be. But because of these one-way streets, I keep getting forced onto the right.
Hello.
So, the Portuguese settlement is off to my right, but I’m not sure exactly how to get there. And again, I’m going to have to get across to the other side of the road.
Oh, I don’t hear a lot of traffic right now. If I move fast, maybe I can get across.
Thinking back to what I read, I think the people, the descendants of these Portuguese settlers are called Kristang.
And they speak of course Malay and English and all the local languages, but they also have their own language, a mixture of Portuguese and local languages, a kind of creole. That’s what I read anyway. But I don’t plan to spend a lot of time here and learning about it and exploring. Just since I’m here, I thought I would just ride down to the main square, Portuguese square, go down to the shore of the Melaka Strait, and just see what it feels like to be in the Portuguese settlement. So, yeah, of course, Portugal was or is still largely Catholic. So, I’m seeing a very large Catholic style statue of Jesus right there. And there’s the Portuguese square on my right.
Yeah, it’s right inside Melaka essentially. In fact, right from here, looking off to the right, I can see Melaka Island where I went, what I call the Ghost Island. That’s that huge building right there that’s been abandoned. And right over here, these huge buildings, it’s the Double Tree Hotel and then the Imperial Residence, I think, beside it.
So you can see we’re right down on the Melaka Strait and you can also see what I was talking about the mud flats, the shallow water, mangrove. So the coastline is not like a solid piece of land. So they don’t really build roads that follow right along the water for the most part. Oh, down here on this side of the coast. So the road that goes the main road you’d have to follow is the one that’s inland. So you don’t actually drive or ride along the coast. You have to go inland. If you try to ride along the coast, you keep running into river after river after river, and you keep having to go inland, cross over, go down to the river again, go back inland. Yeah, it’s just very slow, inefficient way of traveling. So, it’s not easy to stay along the coast. Looks like the tide is coming in. I can see the water. Yeah, you can see all the ripples here. So, the tide is actually coming in. And I’m sure this water gets much higher. There all kinds of interesting fish down there. You can see them actually like I think they’re called like mud skippers or something like that. They can crawl along on the mud as the tide goes out almost like their fins are like legs. All has dozens of them here that I can see.
I also remember from something I read that the Portuguese settlers here, they fought against the government plans to do the land reclamation because all of this land like Melaka Island, I think in particular, they were protesting against the development of the Melaka Gateway project to build that island, do land reclamation for all the cruise boats and things like that because it would interfere with the landscape here and the fishing habitats and everything. But I think they lost that particular protest and the construction of the island went ahead. So, I don’t know how many of the people here actually continue the traditional life of fishing, but I think to really experience this place as a visitor, sort of as a tourist, probably come here in the evening cuz there’s a Portuguese market right up ahead here in front of me. But, of course, here in the morning, it’s all shut down. So, there’s really nothing going on. All these places are largely empty or not open.
So, I think it’s the kind of place if you want to experience the Portuguese culture, try the food, you’d have to maybe plan to come here at a special time, maybe when they’re doing a festival or some sort of a presentation or on the weekend at nights and this place will be much more active. It’s a very fancy hotel here. The one the white one directly ahead of me. What’s it called again? The Lisbon Melaka. Obvious connection with Portugal, the city of Lisbon. Yeah, that’s it there.
It looks like there’s a museum here as well. Well, I see a sign for a Portuguese settlement museum.
And this is the Portuguese square right here.
I’ll just walk in for a quick look. I’m looking back to make sure my bicycle isn’t going to fall over. I’ve been plagued with that recently.
But yeah, here’s the Portuguese square, whole bunch of restaurants and a performance stage.
So if you come here during the off hours, which is what I always end up doing, this is what you’ll experience at the Portuguese settlement and the restaurant de Lisbon.
And I think a lot of these meals have been developed over the years. Combination of local style and Portuguese traditional cooking style.
And another big stage out here. On air stage, the Portuguese settlement. And then there’s the large statue that I mentioned.
All right. I’ve been hearing some rattling coming from my bike. I’m not sure what’s happening. I think I have to check it over. Seems to be coming from the front. Hopefully, there’s no broken spokes or anything like that. But anyway, it’s time to get on the road and start heading south. I don’t have a room booked in Muar or anything like that. Again, all the hotels there are super expensive right now. So, I didn’t book anything. I don’t know where I’ll spend the night tonight. Might just be in my tent down by the beach somewhere. We’ll see what happens.
A couple of update notes here. One is that I was looking at those fish. I called them mud skippers, and I think that really is the name for them. And I got out my Olympus camera to try and get a little bit of close-up video. So, this is what they look like. And I was reading about them and yeah, I mean, they’re fish that somehow develop the ability to come out of the water for a while. So apparently their skin can absorb oxygen directly through their skin. They also have the ability to hold water inside their gills to keep them moist so they don’t dry out. And yeah, they can go in and out of the water. They can use their fins to walk along the mud. They even climb up mangrove trees short distances. So yeah, really cool animals. The other update is quite exciting because I’m here at the Portuguese settlement still. I’m sitting here in the shade right now. So that’s where the mud flat is over there. The mud skippers are over there. The Portuguese square is over here. And this building here, that’s the Double Tree Hilton Hotel. The Imperial. And then while I was here, while I was riding my bike down to the Portuguese settlement, I got a message from a Planet Doug subscriber. And this subscriber said, “Hey, I’m in Melaka for the weekend, like, would you like to get together for lunch or dinner or coffee or something?” So I rode back and said, “Well, I’m actually on my way out of town. In fact, I’m arriving at the Portuguese settlement and then I’m heading down south to Muar. So, yeah, it would have been great to get together, but yeah, I’m leaving Melaka today. And I explained that, yeah, there’s just no rooms available. The rooms that are available are really expensive, so I’m heading out of town. And then they replied and said, hey, don’t worry about it. We’ll book you a room for a night. So, I have a new mystery benefactor here in Melaka and they are currently booking a kind of an Airbnb like a room. I think it’s in a tall building like up on the 27th floor or something like that down in this Portuguese settlement area. And then so basically I’m staying in Melaka for one more night and that’s pretty exciting. and I’ll get to meet my mystery benefactor while I stay here. So, yeah, that’s really cool. It’s going to be a totally new experience. I don’t know where this place is, where the room is going to be booked. I don’t know whether it’s accessible on a bicycle, how you get into the place, locking up a bicycle, getting my luggage up there to the 27th floor. All of that stuff is all going to be fun to navigate. So, yeah, that’s what I’m going to be doing next. And I guess tomorrow I’ll be hitting the road heading south. And it turns out that works out really well. As I explained to my mystery benefactor, just packing up the bike and getting on the road is like for me that’s like a whole day’s effort. I mean, that’s enough achievement for one day. And then I left pretty late in the morning for me because it took so long for me to get ready this morning. Longer than I expected. So now it’s kind of cool that I managed to pack up, get everything organized, leave from my hotel, ride partway out of town, and then right here, this is as far as I’m going today, and then I’ll be moving into a kind of a really nice place for another night. And that gives me a chance to ease into life on the road on the bicycle. So I’m pretty excited about that. The 12 is running now. The nine. Okay.
Well, the luck of Planet Doug, which usually isn’t good when it comes to these small things, reached out and has caused a problem. Yeah, my mystery benefactor booked a room for me on the 27th floor of a fancy building here in this neighborhood like near the Portuguese settlement, I guess. And then after it was all booked and arranged, then he got a message back saying that a pipe had burst in the building and that whole thing was just shut down. Yeah, flooding, burst pipe, the whole floor or the whole building or whatever was shut down. So, and then my mystery benefactor, it all started off pretty easy because my mystery benefactor is in a building right here and he just says, “Hey, you know, we got rooms in our building here. I’ll book one for you.” But then it turned out his building because of the holiday weekend is completely full. There’s no rooms available and then he branched out to a nearby building and that’s when the pipe burst and the whole building is shut down. So yeah, on Planet Doug these things these simple things never work out quite as easily as you would expect. Yeah, this is a funny This is a good example of what I was talking about. I’m still in the Portuguese settlement and when you look at Google Maps, there’s like a road going down here and then you can cross over to the other side. But as you can see, there’s no road here at all. So yeah, I guess I think on Google Maps it’s marked as a pedestrian walkway, but I was just pointing out this little creek here, this river, and you find that all up and down the coast of Malaysia, which is why you can’t really travel along the coast because there’s yeah, no road following the coastline. you just run into river after river after river.
But yeah, my mystery benefactor, he promised me a room, but then it’s turning out to be a much more difficult thing than he had anticipated. So, I hope he’s not regretting the offer cuz now he’s out there scouring the Airbnb properties to find a home for Planet Doug. It was supposed to be easy, you know, just book something in his building, but then we ran into trouble there. So, but yeah, that is generally how things go in my world on Planet Doug. But that’s all right. It gave me the opportunity to hang out here at the Portuguese settlement.
It’s quite a busy little area. I see a lot of local people going in and out on scooters and motorcycles. So, yeah, I’ve just been cycling up and down some of the side streets, exploring the neighborhood. It’s very quiet back here.
Yeah. And even all these streets here are all dead ends. This whole Portuguese settlement area. Wonder whether it was designed that way to make it kind of an isolated private Portuguese little city or something. I’m not Yeah, there’s dead ends on all of these small streets. I keep hearing something on my bicycle rattling. making a noise that it shouldn’t be making
bunch of guard dogs. I startled them. Something I’ve learned in my life is don’t ignore things. Like you hear a sound like that, there’s a rattling. Pay attention to it cuz it means something’s wrong, something small. And then if you ignore it for too long, it can turn into something major.
But I have so many bags on my bike right now, it’s hard to isolate the sound.
I’ll track it down eventually. Yeah, this little side road heads back to the coast.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful area. this little residential neighborhood.
Here’s a nice little road going right on the shore. Oh, there’s a dock out there, but the first section of the dock has fallen apart. It’s just not even there anymore.
This is nice. There’s a small bridge over another one of these rivers.
Yeah, you can see the entrance to this creek over here.
I just pulled over just because it’s such a scenic spot right here with the the dock all broken and there’s a Bellaana Beach Shack here. I’m guessing it’s no longer operating. A lot of these places would only open on the weekend or busy weekends, but this is the weekend and a busy weekend but it doesn’t look like it’s possible to open. Yeah, just thought this looked very scenic down here. And there’s the ghost island. And I think the room that I was eventually going to get was in a building here, like one of these tall towers out here. And it was in one of these towers that the water pipe burst. So my home on the 27th floor got flooded just as my mystery benefactor booked it for me. But yeah, it’s really nice here.
It’s one thing about wildlife nature that you really have to slow down to see it.
So, when I stopped at the Portuguese settlement on the coast there and spent a few minutes looking out over the mud flats, that’s when I saw the mud skippers. And then here, you know, you’re not going to see them on the GoPro, but there’s a lot of these white birds. So, actually, you can see them out here on the dock. I should know the name of these birds, but I can’t think of it. But the longer you hang out in a place like this, the more wildlife you’re going to see, especially in mud flats. You know, from a distance, you’d say, “Oh, there’s nothing there.” But stay here for a while. There’s a whole bunch of small mud skippers I can see already. It’s probably full of crabs and then when the tide comes in be a lot more fish. I think a lot more creatures will show up. I assumed I’d see a whole bunch of monitor lizards here, but so far I haven’t. Maybe they don’t live in the mud flats, but I think they do.
I was reading about Muar, the town up the coast about 40 kilometers away. That’s where I was going to go today. And the founder of Melaka, Parameswara, he I think he landed there and he stayed well I think he maybe he went to the like the Singapore area first maybe and then he just started moving up the coast and he stayed for a while in Muar and that was before he decided to found his new town at Melaka but he was in Muar for a And then in the historical records, I guess he said, “Yeah, I’m not going to live here. There are too many lizards is what it says in the historical record. There’s too many lizards.” As if having a lot of monitor lizards, you know, was a problem. But I think a lot of people they interpreted what he said about too many lizards, meaning there were just it was just too wet that that area. the Muar River and the shoreline was just too muddy, too many swamps, low water like this, muddy flats. And because it’s all mangrove, there were many many monitor lizards. And that’s what he meant when he said it wasn’t suitable for him to live there. He didn’t mean he didn’t like lizards. It was just there was way too wet, way too many mangrove swamps. Yeah. Very beautiful here along the shore. Got a couple of local wild dogs enjoying the shade.
So yeah, I just have another day in Melaka to enjoy. So I’m just exploring the Portuguese settlement area while I’m here. I think I figured out where the rattling is coming from. It’s where my trailer hitch is located. That’s the sound. And I think that’s because I haven’t used this for a while.
And I don’t have it set at the right angle.
So I think I just have to adjust it a little bit. like that maybe.
Huh. Still making doesn’t seem to be clamping as strongly as it used to.
Yeah, that doesn’t
Huh? Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on there.
The 12 is recording now. The nine. Oh. So, there’s the nine.
No, that mystery rattle wasn’t from the trailer.
Huh. It’s going to take a while to track it down. Well, good news from my mystery benefactor. Apparently, he finally gave up on Airbnb. I never use Airbnb myself because it seems so complicated. Like, when I go to the website, actually, most of the properties seem more expensive than low-budget hotels. So, that’s the main reason I don’t use Airbnb. But then, there’s always the issue of how you get into the place. the contacting the owner, getting the codes, getting the address at the last minute, not knowing how to get into the building. I don’t know. It always seems very complicated. So, I’ve never been an Airbnb kind of guy. I was telling my mystery benefactor, I think that the one time I can remember using it maybe in my entire life was when I went to Penang after crossing the border from Thailand. So, I didn’t have a SIM card yet. that I didn’t have internet access. But then even though I’d booked an Airbnb in Georgetown, I didn’t know where it was. Like they wouldn’t give me the address until I showed up and then I would show up and then I have to contact them and then then they were going to tell me the street address and then I could track it down and then they would have to give me all the instructions on how I get in through the door and where you get the key, if there is a key, etc. But of course, I just arrived in Malaysia from Thailand and I didn’t have a local SIM card at that time. So, I had no internet access. So, you’re basically stuck. Like, what do you do? You know, it’s not like going to a hotel where you just show up and go into the hotel lobby and go up to the front desk. It’s much simpler. But anyway, my mystery benefactor yeah, I feel sorry for him. His original idea was such a simple one. He said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s meet for dinner and yeah, stay for another night in town. I’ll just get you a room in my building.” But then it turned out his building was fully booked. And then he booked a room in another building right across the street. But then a pipe burst, so that was lost. And then he tried to do another Airbnb, but the people wouldn’t get back to him. So him getting me a room turned out to be a lot more difficult for him to do on his end than he anticipated. But he finally gave up on Airbnb and just booked a room for me at a hotel not far from where I am right now. But it’s a check-in at 2:00 p.m. So can’t quite I could go there early. might be able to get early check in, but I might ride my bike around a little bit longer just to enjoy the day since I’m out.
Well, I was riding around this neighborhood just exploring and I noticed that my hotel is right here. I didn’t realize it was so close. Let me aim my other GoPro in that direction. So, that’s my hotel, the Hotel Angsana. And yeah, so it’s still early. It’s about 1:00, but I think I’m going to pop in anyway just to see. Maybe my room is already ready and they’ll let me check in. We’ll see if any more of the classic Planet Doug bad luck follows me.
and the reservation is not under my name. So, we’ll see how that goes as well.
Yeah, I think there it is. The Hotel Angsana. So, I think I’ll just pop in and see whether I can move into my room or not. Take a picture of the place.
Planet Doug luck is continuing. So this is where my mystery benefactor booked a room for me after the first place being sold out, the second place being water pipe burst. The whole building is shut down, third place booked and reserved, but nobody would contact him. No, the the owners of the Airbnb wouldn’t get back to him. Fourth place, this place. And it turns out there was a glitch in the matrix. They have no rooms. I have a reservation. It’s booked and paid for through my mystery benefactor. And many, many other people keep showing up while I’m here. People keep coming through the door. I have a reservation. I have a reservation. And they keep telling them, “Yeah, we don’t have any rooms.” They They’re very nice about it. They’re very polite. They’re trying to do the best they can. But they said, “Yeah, they filled up all long ago and they closed their bookings on Agoda. They shut it down, but Agoda is still open for their hotel. So, people keep booking rooms here, booking rooms here, even though there are no rooms available and they keep shutting it down, but it’s not closing on Agoda’s end. So, say goodbye to the Angsana. Very nice people there. Though, I watch so many movies and TV shows where, you know, other things happen. I kind of expect I walk in and I say, “Oh, hello.” You know, “Welcome, sir.” And I have a reservation. Here’s a copy of my reservation. Here’s my passport. And then they say, “Oh, we’re terribly sorry, sir. There’s been a mistake in the booking system. We have no more rooms for you. But here, have a seat in the lobby. Let me get you a cold drink while we figure this out.” Like, I keep waiting for my cold drink from like customer service. I’ve never ever like you know how in movies you go to a nice restaurant and something goes wrong with your meal and the manager comes over and says oh your meal your everything is on us or here’s a bottle of wine on the house you know some little thing to make you feel better I never get anything so I was I was really thirsty and I was hoping for like oh you know nice to have a cold drink I got to thinking you know if I if this was a movie they would come over and say well sir we’re so sorry for the problem. But here, here’s a cold iced vanilla Coke, you know, to enjoy while we figure out a refund or deal with the whatever the problem is. But I’ve never gotten a free drink. Anyway, I sat in the lobby for a while. Luckily, I could do that in its air condition. And my mystery benefactor’s booked a fifth place. So, five times lucky. So, I have to ride my bike back into town. And then there’s a hotel called Time. Oh, by the way, I’m meeting up with my mystery benefactor for dinner tonight. So, you know, I have that to look forward to. And I have this new hotel to look forward to. So, hopping on the bike and let’s ride to the Time Hotel.
Luckily, Melaka is a pretty compact city, very dense, so I never have very far to go. Just a kilometer and a half at most to get back into downtown to the Time Hotel.
Actually, just have to follow this road back to the the prison museum where I was the other day. And then at the prison museum, go around the corner. Left and a right and I should be there.
Yeah, the one-way streets are such a challenge. If you don’t grow up in the city and you don’t know exactly how they work, you end up being pushed way out of your way because you have to follow the one-way streets.
I’m already back at the museum, St. John’s Hill with St. John’s Fort is over there on my right.
Welcome to Bandar Hilir. Right back where I started from.
Yeah, it’s going to be hard to get across this road, I think.
Yeah, I can’t get across. The traffic never stops. Just there’s something about the way they have the traffic lights set up in Malaysia in general. You never get that break for some reason. I keep waiting for the red light to stop the traffic so I can go across, but it just never really comes to a stop. It’s just like a constant flow. I don’t know why that is. Yeah, I’ve been waiting to get across, but can’t do it.
Yeah, I have to make a right-hand turn up ahead here, but good grief. The right hand turn lane is backed way up now. I’ve got a huge bus coming up.
Got to get off the street to make room for that bus. The roads are just too narrow. Look at that.
Yeah, I’m still stuck.
The right hand turn lane, it never empties. I can never find an opening.
Oh man, look at that. The traffic just goes on forever.
There’s never a break.
I can make a left-hand turn if I want to, but that doesn’t do me any good cuz I’ve got to get over one more lane.
Another big truck, buses.
Yeah, as I said, I can make a left-hand turn, but that doesn’t do me any good.
This is crazy.
I guess it’s because it’s the holiday weekend. Maybe that’s why the traffic is unusually heavy even for Malaysia.
I’m never going to make it until Monday. Well, next Tuesday, I think, or Wednesday, the holidays are over. Maybe life will go back to normal.
There’s a little bit of a break in the left-hand lane,
but then there’s nowhere for me to go. Ah, very nice people. They made a space for me.
Yeah, there’s a car was going to make a left-hand turn, but they knew what I was trying to do, so they they waited and they waved me to go ahead of them. Really nice of them. Otherwise, I’d still be there. I’d have to set up my tent on that corner. But now, at least I’m in the right hand turn lane.
And there just happened to be an opening here between two cars,
but I have the Time Hotel to look forward to. All right. Got an advanced right-hand turn signal. Got a green arrow up ahead. I just have to keep up with traffic.
There we go. Right hand turn. This is probably the most difficult turn to do in Malaysia.
Looking ahead, I see a big white building. That might be the Time Hotel. I think I have to get over to the right again and make another turn on the other side of this road. But this one isn’t as busy.
Not sure if that’s the Time Hotel or not. I think it is.
So, I have to get across this street now.
There should be I shouldn’t have to wait quite as long.
But when I came to a stop, I forgot to put it down into a low gear. So, I don’t have a lot of speed to rely on. I have to wait for a big break. Here we go. Yeah, I’m still in a high gear. There we go.
Ah, so exciting. There it is. Hotel Time.
One, two, three, four, five, six stories. It’s like a nice building.
And I’m told they’ve been dealing with someone named Chris at the front desk. And the room has been booked in my name. So, of course, that means the tourism tax comes into play. But I think that was covered by my mystery benefactor. Tourism tax and the heritage tax. So, it was very generous. And there we are. Hotel Time.
Yeah. Looks like a good place for me and my bicycle. So, here we are.
Hello. Hi. How are you? Yes. Your name is My name is Douglas. Yeah. I’m from Canada. Yes, that’s me.
Your room. Oh, okay. Level one. Level one. So that’s one floor up. Yeah, it is there. Oh, right over there. Okay, so that’s it. All done. Oh, you need to put it in there. Oh, okay. No need. Okay.
That was so easy. I’m so surprised. I even offered them my passport and they said, “No, no, no. We don’t.” One woman took it and the other woman says, “No, no, we don’t need to do anything. Room’s all ready. Here’s your card. There you are. You’re all done.” Just like that. Yeah. Really great service, customer service here. She came out to check up on me like where where did he go? Cuz I was asking them about the bicycle. Where can I park it? I keep hoping there’s a special place, but there never is. And they basically says, “Well, you can put it here. Like if you have a lock, I can just put my bike right here on the other side of this pole and just put it there.” But anyway, that’s the scooter parking over there. I could put it over there as well, but this is in front of their window so they they can keep an eye on it. But yeah, there’s the hotel. It’s got some old bones. Not super super fancy from the outside, but a step up in Planet Doug. There’s my neighbor building. And there’s a double tree. That’s where I was going to stay somewhere over there. in those tall towers. But and then the water pipe burst. So that dream ended. And my poor mystery benefactor keeps having to rebook, cancel, rebook, cancel, rebook. Poor poor fellow. He’s helping me out so much. So I’m all moved in. My GoPro overheated again and shut down right there. So I didn’t record bringing my bags up to my room, but you don’t need to see that. You can just imagine what that looked like, me going up and down the elevator with my bike bags and my trailer. But yeah, here’s the room. I rolled my trailer in, my two pet bags, double bed, and two chairs and a table. Got a little counter over here with some complimentary water, which is nice. Complimentary coffee mix and a kettle, which is nice. Air conditioning, of course. Yeah. Ah, the window is open. I didn’t real I heard some voices. I was like, where the heck are those voices coming from? Yeah. I just don’t want the mosquitoes coming in. So, I’ll close that. This is definitely an older hotel. It’s older than I expected from when I was looking at it online. It kind of when I I just kind of glanced at it on Google Maps and it just looked like like a modern fancy boutique place, but it’s more like an older fancy boutique hotel. So, when I took a picture of it with my smartphone, like wide angle lens, the room looks quite a bit larger than it is in real life. I don’t know how it looks exactly on the GoPro, but for someone like me, yeah, tons and tons of room. So much more room than in my usual low-budget accommodation. Chairs, actual chairs and a table and a counter and a kettle. This is living a life of luxury on Planet Doug for a change.
Nothing else to say about that. A small adventure right now. Now it’s just time to unpack and then relax. Yeah, I got surprisingly hot. Just like all I did today was pack up in my hotel in the morning. I left quite a bit later. Getting out of my room, getting out of my hotel was oddly complicated. I don’t know what it is about me and my life, but I went downstairs to start, you know, getting my bike ready and water bottles and all that kind of stuff. And there was a big crowd of people out on the sidewalk, like people who were waiting to come into the hotel, apparently. I guess the front door of the hotel was locked. I don’t know what was going on, but there’s all kinds of people there with suitcases. I’d never seen that before. and they were just spilling out all over the sidewalk all crowding around my bicycle waiting to get into the hotel. I was like, “Huh, I don’t.” Anyway, I had to fight through that crowd to unlock my bicycle and put the water bottles on and check it over, make sure it was good to go riding today. And then I went back up to the room and got my trailer and I just rolled the trailer down the stairs. Like with my trailer, I can move the wheels to the rear position and then it’s just like a suitcase. So I just rolled it down the stairs, you know, thump thump thump. I got all the way down to the bottom and the door into the hotel lobby was locked for the very first time ever. It was like, “Oh, I can’t even get out. I can’t get from my room into the lobby.” So I was like I can’t even get out of my part of the hotel. That was kind of weird. So then I’m knocking on the door. It’s a glass door. I can see the front desk clerks at the desk. And I’m knocking and they kind of look up and I knock again and they look up and I’m knocking. I’m like, “Hey, over here one of your guests, you locked me out for some reason. Like can you unlock this door?” And they kind of looked at me like I was asking for something unreasonable there. I was like, “What?” I was like, “No, I don’t know what’s going on. I need to go through the lobby to go outside. I’m checking out.” And anyway, they finally came and unlocked the door so I could get out. And I was in any other situation, I would ask them. It’s like like, “What’s going on? Why is the front door locked? Why is this door locked?” But I knew with that particular hotel with those front desk clerks, you’re not going to get any answers. So, I was like, I didn’t even bother trying to ask them. just now that the door was unlocked, I could actually go outside and get my bike ready, pile on my bags and start cycling. And then yeah, I went to the Portuguese settlement first. And then while I was there, yeah, I got the message says, “Hey, yeah, um you know, if you’re still in Melaka, do you want to meet up for dinner tonight?” And then I said, “Yeah, actually I’m on my way out of town. Like I’m at the Portuguese settlement and I’m just about to ride south.” and they says, “Oh, yeah. We’ll book you a room right there and then we can have dinner tonight.” So, awesome. Worked out great. So, yeah. Now, it’s time for me to unpack here and I’m going to have a cup of coffee, relax, and yeah, spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing, I think, preparing for tomorrow and for meeting up with my mystery benefactor.
So, that was me unpacking in my room here and getting organized. And it looks like something exploded. I mean, everything was relatively neat and then all of my stuff I Yeah, it feels like in a lifetime or in a life there isn’t room for everything that I end up trying to do. So, I mean, I’m trying to go on a bicycle trip in the heat of Malaysia. I mean, that is an absolute killer right there. And then so far anyway, I haven’t done much camping, but I do have camping equipment with me, which is probably too much. And then shooting YouTube videos, meaning you have to carry all the camera gear and laptops and chargers and extension cords and power adapters and on and on and on. You combine all of those things and it’s like, yeah, you can’t do all of those things. You got to pick one. either you’re cycling around Malaysia or you’re shooting YouTube videos or you’re, you know, camping out and going on a wilderness journey. You know, don’t do all three or don’t at least carry enough gear for all three. So, yeah, that’s apparently why I have so much stuff with me. But anyway, that’s what’s happening. and my mystery benefactor who booked this room for me and invited me to stay one more night so that yeah, we could get together and have a dinner. Yeah, he’s coming this way in just a few minutes. So, I have to head downstairs and I obviously I don’t think I’m going to film him and our dinner and where he lives and all this kind of stuff. you know where he’s staying, but we might be quite high up and then maybe I can go out on the balcony and film a little bit of the coastline, a little bit of the city from up there. Maybe if where we’re going has a balcony or something. But yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see how the evening turns out. Well, this is all very exciting. Just a brand new world for me meeting someone like my mystery benefactor. A whole different life that he’s led. actually very similar life to mine in many ways, but another side of Malaysia. So, yeah, we’re just parking his car and I noticed from the parking level, look at that view of Melaka, a whole different part of the city. That’s amazing. The sun is just perfect.
And I guess originally he was trying to book me a room up here like 27th floor and that’s where the the water pipe burst in this tall building behind the Hilton Double Tree. But I just love going up high seeing places from a new perspective. So this is the city side. Get my GoPro out there as far as I can. so we can see everything.
We’ve jumped up to the 13th floor and they have a pool. It’s kind of odd being beside the pool. I was just saying that it feels like I’m on ground level. I’m not used to something like this being so high up. But you’re saying it’s the longest pool in 60 m. 60 m. Okay. Across all the buildings. There’s the view. Yeah. Melaka Island. I was calling that ghost island with the Yeah. The floating mosque over there. Now you can really see what Melaka Strait is all about. All those ships out there. You don’t normally see them. Yeah. And that’s the the big building that I pointed out quite a few times. They just stopped building it. And I think they had plans for developing all of this over here. It looks beautiful right now with the sun setting. Really nice colors.
Couple of boats over there. Yeah. Yeah. If I’d stayed in Melaka longer, I had this section in my mind cuz I only rode here and then that way. and I thought, “Oh, I didn’t even notice that I could have gone out in this direction.” So, it’s a great spot for the pool. And he was pointing out the design of this building, the interior here. Very cool space. And a full opening on that side, too. Looking out over the city. Yeah, I’m not in Kansas anymore. Yeah, this is a very Yeah, it’s fun to have an experience like this. Takes me out of my normal world completely. And the kiddie pool. Nobody’s over here.
So, we’ve gone up to the 30th floor, part of the way by elevator, and then the last four floors some stairs. But look at the view from up here. It’s incredible. The sun is just about to hit the horizon. Don’t know if my GoPro is capturing the light, but it looks incredible. And from up here, yeah, get a really good view of Melaka Island. Again, the causeway. Everything looks so different from high up cuz I rode my bike across that causeway, but you don’t really get a sense of where you are. This is sort of like going up to the 30th floor is the the poor man’s drone, I guess. So, you see everything from up above. But yeah, it’s incredible timing. Right there we’ve got the sun right on the horizon. You turn around and look at that. There’s the moon almost at the exact same spot coming up. What timing. the sun on one side, full moon on the other. I don’t know how often if is that a common thing to have a sunset on like behind me and the moon on the other side. That looks incredible.
Now, I was just talking about how I noticed this part of Melaka Island on Google Maps. I didn’t know it was there when I rode my bike out here, but I had plans if I was going to come back. I was going to ride back to Melaka Island there, but then come off in this direction on my bike and just to see what’s down here. But look at those two boats down there. That’d be kind of cool to explore.
Yeah, the world looks different from up here. Over there at the double tree, you can see they have a pool halfway up the building. You know, look at that. From down on the ground level, you’d have no idea that was up there.
There’s Melaka. And I just noticed at the very top big roof rooftop sky bar sky bar. It’s a little bit reminiscent of the famous one in Singapore, right? The the ship. Hatten is a Singapore developer. So they kind of, you know, scale it down, copy it and becomes a little little copy of Singapore.
look straight down.
Yeah, there’s a shot of the sun right through this structure on the roof. We’re just about to lose the sun, so I better get over here to the other side again.
And then from up here, you get a real sense of the geography as well that you just don’t get from the ground level. Yeah, to my eyes that sunset is much more colorful, a lot more variety in the colors. But maybe if I could reset the GoPro, I could capture it. But that’s what I’m getting right now. So, I’ve got an angle here on this building that we’re in. Looking down over the pool, and you can see the structure of all of these units there. Yeah. So, a lot of them have Yeah. Like a little jacuzzi on each level. Almost like steps going down here. One, one, one, one down, down, down, down.
Ah, what a great view from up here.
All right, the end of the day. Yeah, really wonderful day. A surprising day turned out. Went in a completely different direction from what I intended. But yeah, I’m back in my room at the Time Hotel. And as you saw from that short the video clips of the building that I got to experience going all the way up to the the 13th floor where they have the swimming pool there and then all the way up to the rooftop 30 floors up above Melaka. What an amazing experience just to get the sun setting from up there, the moonrise and then seeing all of Melaka down below. That was really incredible. And my hosts for the evening were amazing. They put together an incredible meal of kuah. I don’t know how they knew that kuah was one of my favorite all-time things. Fried rice and then satay, chicken satay, beef satay, the big bowls of the peanut sauce. Yeah, an amazing meal. We were talking about the meal earlier. They were asking me, you know, what kind of food do you like? And all I said was well like fancy seafood haute cuisine would be lost on me. I don’t have the palate to appreciate that kind of food. I’m all about whatever is simple and easy and filling. And it’s like they read my mind and they put together this meal. You have satay and kuah and fried rice and it was really really nice. And then we spent the evening chatting about all kinds of things over dinner. had a cold beer or two while I was there. And then post dinner. Coffee, really nice coffee they made in this nice machine. The kind of machine that takes the little the little cups that you put in one by one and it gets punctured and makes one cafe latte. And I had a cafe latte and an Americano. Both of them really, really good. And then we started talking about my plans for the next day. And my original plan, of course, was to get up early and be on my bicycle and then exit and ride down the coast of Malaysia. But I was having such a wonderful time with them over dinner. And we just started talking about, yeah, I don’t really want to get up early and get on the bike. So my mystery benefactors, they reserved my room here for a second night. So, I get to really relax tonight and let all the events of tonight sink in, have a really good night of rest here, and then I have all of tomorrow to spend in Melaka as well. And hopefully we’ll planning to get together again with my mystery benefactors for yeah some at some point for going out and doing something or something in Melaka. We’ll see. We haven’t made definite plans about that yet, but hopefully we can work that out. So, yeah, pretty amazing day waking up supposed to be cycling down the coast of Malaysia. Quick U-turn and then we as you saw in the video, we went through four different reservations before we settled on this place because Melaka is so busy right now with the holiday and the weekend traffic. reservation after reservation after reservation was falling through. And of course, because of the Planet Doug luck, things like booking an Airbnb in a tower on the 27th floor, and that particular tower has a burst pipe that floods the whole building. Like, how often does that happen? But apparently on Planet Doug, it happens quite frequently. So, yeah, that was amazing. Yeah, my mystery host, my mystery benefactors worked really hard to find me a place to stay and I really appreciate that. So, thank you very much to them. And with that, yeah, it is time to shut down for the day. Shout out to everyone out there who has been supporting Planet Doug, of course, through Touch and Go, through the Planet Doug Patreon and, buy me a coffee, my coffee posi out there. Thank you very much to all of you. I appreciate it very much. And, shout out to the Crunch Club. If you made it all the way to the end of the video, that makes you a member of the Crunch Club. Put CC in the comments to let me know. I love to see that. Planet Doug is a bit unusual on YouTube in terms of the length of the videos that I put together and it’s nice to know that I have the Crunch Club out there who stick with it all the way to the end at least once in a while, you know. Shout out to the Crunch Club. So, that is it. Shutting down and I’ll see you next time.