VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Welcome to a Planet Doug behind-the-scenes storytelling video.
I just returned from a trip across the Melaka Strait to Dumai, Sumatra. No new travel videos were filmed while I was there — I stayed quiet on camera and focused on editing Melaka history videos and completing one big technology project. But of course the usual Planet Doug small adventures still happened.
In this video I tell the full story:
- My Canadian bank permanently cancelled my only debit card after one wrong PIN
- The complicated workaround that finally got me cash (PayPal → Xoom → RIA)
- Ferry trip with the bicycle, visa-on-arrival quirks, and immigration conversations
- The midnight electrical fire that started inside the key-card slot of my budget Dumai hotel room
- The return ferry where my passport landed in the toilet… and then I crushed my special glasses against the wall in rough seas
- How the bicycle itself helped me get through Malaysian immigration for another 90 days
- The quiet technology project I worked on the whole time I was in Dumai: finally migrating 1,300 posts and 17,000 photos from the old Cycling Canadian WordPress site to planetdoug.life — with a lot of help from AI
I’m safely back in Melaka at the Mahkota Vibe Inn. Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed to my Touch ’n Go e-wallet and PayPal — without that support I would have been completely stuck after the bank card disaster.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to a Planet Doug behind the scenes video, just a storytelling video on Saturday, August 22nd that I’m recording this. And the bulk of the stories are going to be about a visa run that I just came back from. If you’ve been popping in and out of my YouTube channel, keeping track of where I am, what I’m doing, you might have gotten the feeling that I disappeared from Melaka and went somewhere and did something. Well, the reality is that my Malaysian tourist visa expired again and then I had to leave Malaysia. So, I chose a destination for my visa run. Went there, but I didn’t shoot any video while I was there because I’ve been there a number of times. I basically I took the ferry from Melaka across the Melaka Strait to a city called Dumai in Sumatra. And yeah, I’ve been there before. I’ve taken the ferry before. I shot video there. So, I decided that as far as Planet YouTube channel is concerned, I would just pretend it never happened. I wasn’t going to record the experience. And that worked out pretty well because I still had like three or four videos from Melaka that I hadn’t edited yet. So while I was in Dumai not shooting new video, I just kept editing Planet Doug videos, my history videos from Melaka, just sort of finishing up that series. And I shot the Planet Doug ask me anything video while I was there. So that’s the only video I shot while I was in Dumai. And then I stayed there just for a little while. I had another kind of a technology project I wanted to work on. And I’ll talk about that later on in my behind the scenes technology section. But first, let’s talk about the visa run.
Overall, the visa run was a success. I’m back in Melaka right now. I’m in a new room at my old hotel, the Mahkota Vibe Inn. They actually have two or three different buildings and I was in their main building before. This time, my old room wasn’t available. I could move back into my old room today if I wanted to, but I’m already unpacked in this room and in a different building and it’s perfectly fine. So, I am back in Melaka. So, I did not have any issues with immigration with granting me another 90-day social visit pass for Malaysia. But I’ll talk about how all of that turned out. So, yeah, the visa run went fine. I enjoyed it as always. I love Sumatra. I love being in Indonesia. It’s just such a It’s got a vibe. It just has an active high energy vibe where I can’t go outside without stuff happening all around me. So, I really enjoyed just sort of being there. Even though I didn’t go off on any big adventures, I did have all of the typical Planet Doug small adventures along the way. And those are what I’m going to be talking about. And those adventures started when I was still here in Melaka preparing to go to Sumatra because of course I had to book a ferry ticket. That was no trouble. I just go down to the ferry dock here and buy a ticket in advance through the Indomal Fast Ferry Company and a one-way ticket including the fee for a bicycle which is 20 ringgit. I brought my bicycle with me and opting for the VIP class. They have like a lower deck and an upper deck and it’s not very much money to get the upper deck which is a lot nicer. So I went for one-way ticket, bicycle fee, luggage fee, VIP, and now because of the increase in gas prices, they charge a fuel surcharge. There’s an extra fee on top of everything to cover the high cost of fuel right now. And I think the total came to 218 ringgit one way to go to Dumai. And I didn’t have to get a visa for Indonesia because you can get a visa on arrival for 30 days and you can do that at the dock in Dumai. And that costs 500,000 rupiah, about $30 US. So yeah, those are sort of the costs involved. But of course, I needed money to cover my day-to-day living expenses. And I went to an ATM here in Melaka to withdraw money for the trip. I had no cash, so I needed money. So I went to an ATM and you saw if you watch the previous video, you already know this story. I was a little bit distracted. I wasn’t paying attention. The lobby where the ATM was held was a bit crowded. The machine was hard to read. The screen was a bit hard. And to see the keypad was difficult because it’s very low down and has a covering over it like a privacy screen. So all of that combined that somehow I entered the wrong PIN. I must have gotten one of the numbers wrong. I did something wrong. I entered the wrong PIN and my bank in Canada blocked the card permanently. And then this is a theme if you’re a Canadian. I find that every bank, government, anything to do with systems in Canada is very antiquated. Most of the world seems to have sped ahead into the future. Everything is advanced. The technology works well. Everything in Canada just seems sluggish, broken, and the banks apply so many security layers. They end up hurting their customers more than protecting them. So, I mean, normally what I would expect is, oh, you entered the wrong PIN. Oh, they cancel the transaction and you try again. Now, you enter the right PIN, right? You might get two attempts or three attempts, but my bank in Canada and I didn’t know about this. I’d never entered an incorrect PIN in my life before, so I didn’t have this experience. It turns out that my bank in Canada gives you one attempt and then you’re done. And it’s not like you’re it’s a temporary block. You just have to wait 5 hours and then you can try again or wait 48 hours. No, they block your card permanently and cancel it. One wrong PIN, you’re done. The card is now garbage. And you can’t even get it reactivated because every time now I try to put it into an ATM, the ATM doesn’t even try to read it. It just spits it out. You put it in, boop, and it says this card is defective. Because I did try again at this ATM and it just spit it out and said, “No, we there’s this card is not genuine or something. There’s something wrong with it.” I went to a second bank, put it into their ATM, and as soon as I went in, it just went boop, kicked it out, and said, “This card is defective.” So, I can’t even call my bank in Canada and say, “Oh, I put in the wrong PIN. I need to reactivate it or clear the block.” Because they can’t do it through the ATM system, right? I can’t put it into an ATM in Malaysia and then reset it because the bank in Canada has cleared it. It doesn’t work that way because they physically altered the chip on the card itself that it cannot be read by any ATM any and again the only way to get beyond this problem is for me to get a brand new debit card from my bank. And I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t even tried. I was so annoyed. I was so stressed out. I didn’t call my bank. I haven’t done anything about it since that happened. I just I was so fed up. The absolute worst time. Like I was one day away from leaving Malaysia. I’m all organized. I bought my ferry ticket. I’m on my way to another country and I have no money. I can’t get any money out of the bank like out of an ATM. Of course, I had emergency cash. I had some US dollars. I talk about that a lot in other videos where I criticize other travelers for never having emergency money. So, I mean, I wasn’t completely stuck. If I wanted to, I could go to a bank and take my US dollars in cash and then change them into Malaysian ringgit at the bank. So, I mean, I wasn’t stuck immediately, but long-term I was stuck because that’s the only bank card I have. I only have one for one bank account in Canada. Now that that card was blocked, cancelled, I’m stuck forever. So, I’m assume what’s going to have to happen is my bank in Canada will have to issue a new card, but they will only send it to my address in Canada. They won’t send it overseas. And that card has to be inserted into an ATM in Canada to reset the PIN. It has to be activated in that bank’s ATM in Canada. So, they’re going to have to send it to my address in Canada, and I’m going to have to get someone in Canada, someone I trust, to take that card, get it out of the mail, reactivate it for me by going to an ATM, and then mail it to me here in Malaysia. And it’s just, you know, these things that happen on Planet Doug.
In the end, I figured out a way to get money. And I won’t talk about it in detail because I shot a whole video about it. I did tons and tons and tons of research. And I couldn’t figure out a way to get by this block. Like, I had money in my bank account in Canada. I had a PayPal account with money in it. The PayPal account is linked to my bank account and I was trying to think how can I somehow access my PayPal account which can access my bank account and I couldn’t figure out a way to do that and I have a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet in Malaysia. So, if I could somehow get money from PayPal to my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, then I can use my Touch ‘n Go Visa card to withdraw money from Touch ‘n Go. So, I was trying to go from my bank to PayPal to Touch ‘n Go ATM Visa card, Touch ‘n Go Visa card, and I can get cash that way. But, of course, it wouldn’t work. There was a block between all of those systems. You can’t, as a foreigner, I cannot link my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet to a foreign credit card or a foreign bank account. It can only be you can only do it from within Malaysia. So anyway, I looked and I looked and I looked. I consulted every forum online, spent hours trying to figure this out and I finally figured out a workaround where I used PayPal. They have a send money feature called Xoom. So I can send money around the world from PayPal to Xoom to somewhere else where I can just pick up the cash. And here in Malaysia, they have a company called RIA, R I A, and you can send money to RIA and then someone can pick it up. So, I worked out all of this and then I figured out how to get money from my bank account to PayPal. Well, there’s already a PayPal balance anyway. And I send money from PayPal to Xoom, from Xoom to RIA, and then I went to a RIA office here in Melaka and then presented them the transaction ID number. I had to fill out a remittance form, passport, all of that stuff. And then I was finally able to get cash, but it wasn’t through my bank ATM because it doesn’t work anymore. I got it from my bank, PayPal, Xoom, RIA cash pickup. So, oh, what a what a nightmare all of that was. And there’s a whole video about my adventure trying to find a RIA. The crazy thing is the nearest RIA office to my hotel. I went there, they had no money. Like I went in, gave them my passport, gave them my transaction ID, said I sent myself money, and I’m here to pick it up. And they says, “Oh yeah, we see your transaction. Everything is fine. We can give you money based on this but today we don’t have any you know I mean I was just sort of what what do you mean no we we have no money here today and if you want to hang out I mean if you want to wait around all day maybe some other customers will come in and change money and then if they give us money then we can give it to you but in our drawers in our till in our vault we don’t have any money today.” Anyway, that was kind of that was a Planet Doug experience as well. So, I had to find another RIA office which turned out to be like a thousand miles away and it was quite a big adventure getting there. But in the end, I finally did get money. So, before I even started going on my trip to Sumatra, I had to deal with all of that. So, that was the first Planet Doug adventure.
So now that I had money I had ringgit by the time I got the cash from RIA of course I got it in ringgit then I went to a money changer and I changed it into rupiah and I like to do that if I go to a country that I’m familiar with and I know things are going to work out fine. What I like to do is get local currency in advance so that when I land in that country, I already have local currency. I’ve seen way too many YouTube videos where a YouTuber arrives in a new country, goes to the ATM like I did here, tries to withdraw money, local currency, and it doesn’t work, and then they’re stuck. So, here in Malaysia, I got Indonesian rupiah in advance, and then I know I’m okay. Plus, in order to get the visa on arrival, when you arrive at the dock, they have you have to pay in cash. There’s no ATMs at the dock. There’s no money changers. They don’t accept any kind of cards or e-wallets or anything like that. You have to get your Visa on arrival, at least in Dumai, with cash. And you can pay in US dollars, Malaysian ringgit, or Indonesian rupiah. But for whatever reason, the US dollar and the Malaysian ringgit fee in particular is much much higher. You save a lot of money if you pay in cash in rupiah, like 500. It’s 500,000 rupiah for a 30-day visa on arrival. So, yeah, I made sure I had rupiah in advance. And then, yeah, the trip there was really, really simple. The ferry left at 2:30 in the afternoon, which is like the perfect time because you can max out your hotel stay, right? I paid for my hotel for the night until 2:00 in the afternoon, right? 2:00 in the a No, noon. Yeah, noon is checkout time. And if your flight or your boat leaves at 6:30 in the morning, you miss out on that entire morning that you’ve paid for. But because my ferry left at 2:30, I was able to relax the day before, go to sleep at a regular time, have a long luxurious night, wake up in the morning, and then I’ve got the entire morning from whatever 7 a.m. until noon to just relax, have coffee, do some work, pack up, get organized, get ready to go, and then at noon checkout. I check out. I maximize my time in the hotel. And then at noon, I checked out, hopped on my bicycle. I had two pannier bags and a knapsack. And the pannier bags were pretty much half full because I wasn’t bringing all of my gear with me. I was only bringing a minimum amount. And I didn’t plan on shooting videos. I brought all my GoPro gear with me just in case. I made sure I had all my GoPro gear, microphones, and of course, my laptop, everything of real value. I brought all of that with me because there was the chance they wouldn’t let me back into Malaysia. And if that’s the case, I don’t want to be cut off from my YouTube gear, right? So, I made sure I brought everything important with me so that if I was stuck in Indonesia, I could just continue traveling from there. And if I fly to some other country, fly to Vietnam, at least I have all of my camera gear with me and my laptop and my SSD drive, all the important things. So, I brought that with me. But camping equipment, bike tools, bike spare parts, all that kind of stuff. I just left it all here in storage at the hotel. So, I had a really lightweight setup. Rode my bike down to the dock here. Got there at like 12:30, something like that. And then I had two hours until the 2:30 departure. And yeah, everything went really well. It cost 20 ringgit for my bicycle. That’s the fee from Malaysia to take a bicycle, which is one of the reasons I brought my bicycle. I love having a bicycle wherever I am, but also that means I don’t have to worry about getting a Grab car or taking a taxi or or you know a rickshaw kind of deal, a becak. I don’t have to argue with people about the price. I don’t I won’t have any problems with transportation. I have my own transportation. And if it only costs 20 ringgit to bring your bike, I mean, it would probably cost more than 20 ringgit to take cars, you know, to summon a Grab, you know, to get to the dock and then from the dock to my hotel and that sort of thing. So, it saves a lot of hassle and pretty much it saves money, too. And I just love having my own freedom to go anywhere I want. So yeah, I just rolled up my bicycle, handed it over, paid 20 ringgit. I had to pay a luggage fee. They weighed my two pannier bags. Came I think it’s like one ringgit per kilogram. So it’s very very reasonable. The luggage fee as well amounts to next to nothing. And then I was on the ferry for I don’t know 3 hours. I guess it’s a 3-hour trip maybe. So that would have had me arriving at 5:30. But Indonesia, Sumatra has a different time zone. So even though it was 5:30 Malaysia time, I landed there at around 4 or 4:30 somewhere in there. And there’s a little bit of chaos and confusion when you get to the dock there. It’s a little bit crowded. You know, it’s Indonesia. You’re going into a little bit of a chaotic place, so you expect that. So, I have to find a place to park my bicycle and then I have to somehow get through this crowded area in front of immigration to get to the visa on arrival window and it’s not always clear how to get there, what you’re doing. The visa on arrival guide may not even be in the office because it’s very unusual for someone to get that. So there’s nobody there and you kind of got to, you know, look around. Oh, what are you doing, sir? Oh, I’m trying to get the visa. Oh, we’ll find him. And you got to wait for him to get there. And and again, you have to pay in cash and they don’t have any change. So, you have to have exact change as well. That kind of thing. But anyway, I got my visa on arrival, went through immigration. A few alarm bells got set off at immigration because they remembered me from previous trips. And I think on my previous trip, I was wearing my favorite shirt, my red Canada shirt, and it stands out. Well, I stand out obviously. And so the immigration officer was like, “Hey, you were just here, weren’t you? You know, you’re that YouTuber.” Because that came up in our discussions. You know why are you coming to Indonesia? What are you doing here? And the last time that I went there, of course, I always tell the truth. There’s nothing wrong with the truth. I’m a tourist. I just came to Indonesia on a tourist visa and I’m a tourist. And but then when I was leaving last time, they asked me, “Oh, okay. So, where did you go? You’re a tourist. Blow me away with tales of all the amazing tourist attractions you visited. Did you go to Bali?” And I was like, “No, I didn’t go.” Did you go to Bukittinggi? Did go did you go to Lake Toba? Like, did you go snorkeling, scuba diving, surfing? You know, tell me about all these tourist things that you did. And I had to admit, well, I stayed the last time I was there for 30 days and I spent the entire 30 days in Dumai. I never left Dumai. And of course, from an Indonesian perspective, that’s insane. It’s like, why would you do that? There’s nothing in Dumai. There are no beautiful sites. There’s no tourist attractions. Why didn’t you go to Bali where all the tourists go? And I have to explain to them, well, in my life, I don’t really enjoy places like Bali. I love hanging out in a place like Dumai. I get to explore all the local neighborhoods, meet the local people, go down to the docks, see the boats, the fishing boats, fish markets. That’s what I enjoy doing. That for me, that is tourism. But of course, they’re looking at me like, come on, you know, what are you really doing? But, you know, my YouTube channel often saves me in these situations because they don’t believe me. But then I say, “Well, I’m recording these experiences for YouTube and like, “Oh, you have a YouTube channel.” I give them the name card for my YouTube channel. They can get out their phone, call up my channel. They see all the videos which look very much like tourism videos, and they’re like, “Oh, okay. Okay, that makes sense.” Now my story makes sense to them. Stamp stamp stamp in you go. But now I was returning a second time and like, “Hey, we know you. We had that long long talk about you and your YouTube channel. You know, what are you doing back here?” And then again, I have to tell the story about Yeah, I really enjoy Indonesia. I love the culture, the food, the people, which is all I’m being honest. It’s all true. But anyway, eventually they stamped me into the country and and there I was back in Dumai. Rode my bicycle. It’s about five six kilometers from the dock to my hotel. Had a little bit of a Planet Doug adventure along the way because very near my hotel there’s a big roundabout, big one. They have a number of these big roundabouts in Indonesia in these cities, but they don’t use them like roundabouts. They actually have traffic lights on every street. So instead of just I mean a roundabout, you’re supposed to use it with no traffic lights because everybody just filters and integrates naturally and it makes everything much more efficient. But for some reason in Indonesia, they never mastered the roundabout technique. Everybody. I mean, it just caused too many accidents. So, they just says, “Okay, let’s put in traffic lights anyway.” And the lights go around one at a time to let people do their thing. So, it should be relatively safe. I’m waiting at a red light for my turn, for my route to clear so I can go. And I hear a big smash. There’s something about a traffic accident, like when a car hits another car or a motorcycle or two motorcycles collide. There’s something unusual. There’s something deep, almost guttural about that sound, if you know what I mean. I mean, there there’s sounds about things hitting each other, but when there’s a car accident or a motorcycle accident, it it’s kind of a shocking sound. You know what it is instantly. It’s a deeper more it’s a brutal kind of sound. And I heard the sound. I heard this huge crash. And I look up just in time to see this what turned out to be an elderly man sliding across the pavement. And it was a really kind of a shocking image because he clearly had been knocked unconscious the moment of the crash or the or the moment he hit the pavement. He had a big helmet on so that was, you know, fine. I don’t know how much those cheap helmets protect you anyway. It was probably more for show than anything else. But he was clearly limp when he hit the pavement and then so this body limp body hit the pavement and then just went sliding a long distance. So he must have been moving at a really fast speed and then just stopped dead and his body just kept going and then he just skidded face first across the pavement and then when he came to a stop he just lay there. He he wasn’t moving. And I eventually saw that he had collided with another scooter. It was actually two scooters and two men were on the other scooter, two younger men, and both of them were upright. They didn’t look to be as hurt. And they they were limping though, so they were both walking and limping around their scooter. And then the old man was lying there motionless. So that was that was my arrival. And it was a bit of a funny moment, too, because I often end up contrasting real life with movies and TV shows, right? If this were a TV show, a movie, and since I’m, you know, I’m basically a nice guy, I’d like to be helpful. If it was a TV show, I would be the hero of the story, right? I witnessed an accident. I see an older man unconscious on the pavement. I would rush to help. And then that would signal to everybody watching the TV show, oh, he’s the hero of the story. He’s a good guy. He’s going to take charge and help people. But in real life, all I did was watch because what else am I going to do? You know, I thought about, oh, I got to go help that guy, but I can’t speak the local language. I have no medical training. I there’s nothing for me to do. And in fact, the most helpful thing I could do was get out of there. Because if I park my bicycle and then go running up to this guy, join the crowd of onlookers, all I’m doing is making it more difficult for emergency personnel to get there. Like if everybody parks their car, stops, get out of their car, forms this big crowd around the accident, then now there’s a big traffic jam. And if there are police coming, an ambulance, firefighters, if anybody’s on their way, if you’re just standing around watching, you’re causing more trouble than help. And again, like, what am I going to do? Go stand beside this lifeless, well, not lifeless, but unmoving elderly man and direct traffic or something. I’m a foreigner in a foreign country. I have no, you know, there’s nothing I can do. So, I cannot help out. I can’t do anything. The best thing I can do is just keep moving. So when the traffic started to flow again, then I just kind of rode by and then I could see I got closer and I could see it was an elderly man because of his face and beard, things like that and a really really skinny skinny man, skinny arm, skinny body. And I could see the two scooters that had collided and the other two men that were involved in the accident. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know who hit who, why they would have hit with such force. It would make sense if it was operating like a roundabout and someone was coming this way and then someone was trying to go the other way and they hit, but all the traffic would have been going from one green light forward. So, I I don’t know how the accident could have taken place, but it did anyway. So yeah, that was my arrival and I went to the Wisma Cemara Hotel and that’s where I stayed last time and I had a lot of trouble last time because they had no Wi-Fi. Like my room for whatever reason was completely cut off from the hotel Wi-Fi. So I had no signal. So, I had to spend a lot of time tracking down cafes where I could spend the whole day in this cafe and then use their Wi-Fi editing video and uploading video, things like that. This time, for whatever reason, they had Wi-Fi, so that was really nice. I made a reservation in advance through Agoda. It’s kind of nice to be back in Indonesia because the everything is cheaper, which is really, really nice. The food is so much cheaper. The quality of the food that I’m eating goes up because good food is much much cheaper. I don’t have to worry about spending money on food as much and hotels are cheaper, but also no taxes. Like the price you pay is the price you pay. It’s not like Malaysia where they add another 30 40% on top of the base fare the because of all the taxes. There’s so many service charges and taxes. It’s it’s really getting out of hand. But at least in Indonesia, if the room costs 25 ringgit per night, you pay 25 ringgit per night and there you are. You’re done. It’s not like, oh, now it’s 50 ringgit because we had to double it because of the tourism tax and the service charge and the state tax and the heritage tax and the, you know, there’s so many taxes and fees. So anyway, that was really nice. Of course, for that cheaper price, you’re getting less, of course, cuz I I look for the cheapest hotel I can find. That is the cheapest hotel in Dumai that I have ever been able to locate, the Wisma Cemara. And I think my base fare was like 30 ringgit per night was what I ended up paying. And so it actually has air conditioning, has a private bathroom, but beyond that, everything is kind of broken. You know, the air conditioner kind of works. The bathroom is really dirty, moldy, you know, it’s got mold everywhere on the walls. And the sink in that room was like a the cheapest plastic sink you can imagine. Cost next to nothing. And the whole thing had broken free from the wall. So, it’s like dangling down like like this. And of course, there’s no mirror on the wall. There’s no counter, nothing like that. And then underneath it, the the downpipe, you know, that’s supposed to carry the water away from the sink and into a pipe somewhere. All of that is missing. So any water that goes into the sink just pours onto the floor, right? It basically pours onto your feet, which I always find that kind of funny because Yeah. I mean, you’re So it’s such an instinct to pour water into the sink, right? And you would never go into the bathroom and you’ve got, I don’t know, a cup of of water or whatever, some drink that you didn’t finish. You wouldn’t just dump it out onto the floor. You would pour it into the sink. But because the sink isn’t attached to anything, it just comes out the bottom of the sink and pours onto the floor anyway. You know, you’re brushing your teeth. You got toothpaste foam. You wouldn’t just spit it out onto the floor. That feels kind of gross. You spit it into the sink. But in a lot of these cheap hotel rooms in Sumatra, the sink isn’t connected to anything. It’s just a it’s just a container with an opening at the bottom and it just pours onto the floor anyway. Anyway, it’s just kind of a weird weird thing. The you know, the toilet doesn’t really flush. And the shower head doesn’t really work. It does have a shower, though it wasn’t a like bucket bath kind of room. It did have a shower head. Only cold water though. There’s no hot water at that price either. So, it’s just like cold water, but the shower head is so old that all the little holes have been plugged up by calcium over the years, right? Lime, calcium builds up and all the holes are plugged. I think there was something like 10, 11, maybe as few as seven of the holes were still letting water through. And then that water was like spraying in all kinds of weird directions. So what I end up having to do when I move into one of these hotel rooms, I clean the bathroom. I I bring soap and I got a scrubber, you know, wipe clean everything down, get rid of as much of the dirt and the mold as I can. Unscrew the shower head and I just sort of sit on the bed with a needle and there’s like, I don’t know, 150 pin holes in the shower head. And then while I’m watching a TV show or a movie or something, I just sit there and then just poke through all the holes one by one, just methodically go over the whole shower head, clear out all the block the blockages on all these little holes. You know, I do all that, clean everything up, put the shower head back in place, and now you’re getting, you know, cold water when it hits you in a tiny stream is really kind of shocking. So, you want to have as much cold water hitting you as possible. Then the shock is reduced for some reason. So, anyway, I cleaned out all the holes. And now the shower head was working. Yeah, I do a lot of stuff like that in these hotel rooms. Oiling the door hinges so they don’t creak anymore. I fix whatever’s broken. I tighten up the screws everywhere. Yeah, I just kind of give the room a makeover. So I did all that and it’s yeah it really stands out in contrast to the hotel rooms here. I mentioned that you know it’s more expensive here even like this Mahkota Vibe Inn is a low-budget hotel here in Melaka. So you could compare it to the room I had in Dumai. But at least this room everything works. The air conditioner is brand new. It’s really working well. I’ve got some nice windows, blackout curtains. The bathroom has a real sink, a porcelain sink. And it’s still attached to the wall properly and it has a pipe that goes down into the sewage system. So, everything kind of works. It is kind of weird though. Little things are different. Here in Malaysia, I find the bath towels, they give you towels in the room, they’re always horrible, horrible towels. They’re like made of nylon and when you try to dry yourself it just sort of squeaks against your skin it just ah it really gets to me. I can’t stand the feeling of those nylon towels. And at this cheap hotel in Dumai they had really nice cotton towels which feel great are super absorbent and really work. These towels here are just I can’t I can’t I hate even touching them and they don’t absorb water either. Anyway, lots of little things, but anyway, the story goes that I got this room at the Wisma Cemara. Wisma Cemara, really good Wi-Fi, cleaned the whole room up, fixed the shower head, tightened everything, moved in, unpacked, got everything organized, and I was there for two nights, I think. And then on the third night, I had another Planet Doug adventure.
The new Planet Doug Adventure started at about midnight. I was in my room and I was taking a shower. So, I was in the bathroom taking a cold shower, getting ready to go to bed, you know, to get get rid of all the sweat. It’s pretty hot over there. Always is. And so I’m in the bathroom taking a cold shower and suddenly I hear this weird sound almost like a like a thrumming electrical kind of sound and the lights dimmed and then got bright and dimmed and got bright again. Like what the heck? It was like a I don’t know. I don’t know what I didn’t know what was going on. And then it stopped. I was like, “What? I What the heck was that?” And again, this was around midnight. So, I continue with my shower. Now, I’m paying attention to the lights. I’m listening. Hm. What was that? And then I started to smell smoke in the bathroom. Smoke is coming from somewhere. So, I rush out into the room and I go to all the outlets. Again, this budget hotel room used to be higher class. I think when when it when this hotel was built, it was a little bit higher class. And then they just let it fall to pieces over the decades basically. But when it was built, it was a bit higher class. So they actually had in my room I think three maybe four outlets which is very unusual cuz even this room here in Melaka a more expensive hotel there’s no power around the bed you know you got I’ve got an outlet by the door and that’s it. So that room there actually had a lot of outlets. So I went up to every outlet looking cuz I could smell smoke and no I smelled every outlet in that room. There’s nothing like I touched them. I could feel them. There was no heat. There was no smoke. I had a few things plugged in but nothing was on. Like my laptop wasn’t on, tablet wasn’t on. Nothing was running. I have an electric kettle but it wasn’t on. But I went to each one of those and picked them up and smelled and no I nothing was on fire. Nothing there was no smoke, no heat anywhere. So I was like, “Oh, okay.” I figured it must be smoke coming from outside. So, I went back into the bathroom, restarted my cold shower, and then the smoke smell started getting stronger and stronger and stronger. So, I thought, there’s something going on in this room. So, I go I rush back out into the room, got no clothes on, soaking wet, dripping with cold water, and I’m running around the room again, going to all of the outlets, looking looking. Maybe there’s an outlet I never noticed. Like, is the wall hot around the outlets? Is the air conditioner on the smoking? What is going on? I couldn’t track it down. So, I just sat down on the bed thinking about this like the smoke must be coming from outside. And then I looked towards the door. And this hotel also had one of those key card mechanisms. Like they give you a card you put into a slot and that turns on the power for the room. Like I said, this is a low-budget hotel, but when it was built, it was a bit more high-end. So, it had one of these systems, the power control using the key card. And I looked over towards the key card slot. Smoke was billowing out of the key card slot. That is where the smoke was coming from. And that was such a surprise to me because I’d never even occurred to me that the key card could be the source of fire, could be the source of danger. I never ever considered it before. Never even thought about it. So, I go up to the key card slot, and now I’m not really sure what to do because the slot goes into the wall. And I kind of looked up above the card, looking down into the slot, and I could see flames. And the flames were inside the wall. And that to me is like one of the scariest things. I mean, if my kettle was on fire, short-circuiting, and it was overheating, well, I can unplug the kettle. I can grab the kettle, bring it into the bathroom, throw it outside, I can get rid of it, the source of the fire. But if the source of the fire is built into the wall and the interior of the wall is burning, I mean, the first thing I thought of was, okay, this is going to get out of control. The whole room could burn down. The hotel could burn down. Like, what do you do with this and one thing I know about myself is I’m not good in an emergency. For some reason, I’m not a Jason Bourne type. You know how Jason Bourne is being attacked by the bad guys? Someone’s trying to kill him. He can think clearly like Sherlock Holmes, Jason Bourne, you know, James Bond, all these superhero spy types, they think clearly in an emergency. I don’t have that capability. And if there’s like a time thing, like the clock is ticking, there’s time pressure. I I can’t really think things through. So, I just don’t know what to do. And my mind just started racing around all the possibilities. One, of course, is well, you want to put the fire out, but it’s an electrical fire, so I don’t want to touch it. I’m going to get electrocuted. Then I’m thinking, well, okay, how do you put the fire out? Your instinct is to go get some water, throw water on the fire, but again, it’s an electrical fire, and you’re not supposed to do that. The last thing you do is pour water onto an electrical fire because the electrical short will travel through the water. You’ll get a big arc, electrocute you, the fire will probably explode and get worse. And then I’m looking around the room. Okay, if I have to flee, you know, what are my valuables? What bag do I grab? What do I get? And I start thinking about, okay, I got to get this bag, put my laptop, I got to get this, I got to get that. Got to get this. You know, all the all like where’s my passport? Where’s my money? My ID cards. And my brain is just racing all of these possibilities while I’m standing there doing nothing trying to think what to do next. And there was a lot came out of this experience like all of these fire prevention tactics, things to think about in the case of a fire. What do you do? I thought about it in the moment and then I thought about it over the days afterwards. So, I ended up with quite a few thoughts about this. Anyway, I’m standing there in the room looking at the the smoke and the fire the flames are starting to come up out of the slot. They’re starting to get bigger and the flames are crawling up the wall and I’m like, well, what do I do? And right then all the lights went out because like the first thing I thought of was take out the key card and if I remove the key card that will cut the electrical circuit and maybe that will put the fire out but at the same time reaching into that fire to pull out the card. You could electrocute yourself. So, I was pondering pulling out the card, but I didn’t do it right away. And then I guess the the short that was causing the fire got to such an extreme that it tripped the breaker because this room had like a breaker box on the wall, which is also very common in Indonesia where you can actually see the box with all the like the they’re not fuses, but they’re breakers that can trip. So now whatever was going on with the electrical system, it tripped the breaker and now I was plunged into pitch black. The room was completely dark. And now what do you do? Because the fire there’s still a fire. The wall is on fire. The key card slot is on fire. I can see the flames coming out of the wall. And now I’m in pitch black. And the last thought I had was, I better start gathering up all of my valuables so I can run out of the room, save anything I can. But now I’m in an unfamiliar room in the dark because the lights went out because it was an electrical fire. And I’d never ever thought about that before because in movies and TV shows, you see people fighting fires all the time. You know, fire, fire, and there’s a fire because a candle fell over and it lit the curtains on fire. So, you can do things. You can pull down the curtains. You can smother the fire. You can put things out. You can run around the room, get water, but that’s because the fires always happen in the daylight or if it’s nighttime, the lights are on. You can see what you’re doing. And it never occurred to me that, okay, you’re in a room with a fire right beside the door and now you’re plunged into darkness. Now what do you do? Right? It’s like, holy crap. I I never I never thought about this before. I can’t run around and gather up all my gear anymore because it’s dark. I don’t know what I’m doing. Luckily, I’m not a total idiot and I do plan ahead for certain things. My, you know, passport and money and bank cards, all of that was all in one bag that I keep locked with a padlock. My, you know, laptop and electronics and GoPro gear, all of that was scattered around, but if I needed to run out of the room, I just needed to grab that one bag and at least I would have my most valuable things with me. Plus, I always keep a bedside bag on the bed. This always sits basically beside my pillow. And in here, I have a headlamp. So, I know I have a flashlight here at all times and I know where it is. So, in the room in the dark with a fire, the first thing I realized was, okay, I need light and I know where this is. I went over to the bed and I could feel around. Grab this, pull out my headlamp, and then I can put it on, you know, put it on my head, turn on the light, and now I’ve got my hands free, and I was able to look around the room and and I had light to work with. So, I was prepared to that extent. So, I’m making it sound very, very dramatic. It wasn’t really that dramatic because as soon as the breaker tripped and all the electricity was turned off, that removed the heat and the fire in the key card slot. I the flames are getting higher and now they started to drop down. Well, it got smaller and smaller and smaller and then they disappeared inside the key card slot. I pulled out the key card. Now I could get a better look inside and there was still flames in there but they were getting smaller and smaller and then I was able to just blow them out like a candle. I just kind and and the flames went out and you know the smoke was still coming out but the flames went out on their own because the source of the fire had been turned off. You know, when the when the breakers tripped at that point, of course, it was time to find someone from the hotel to tell them what had happened. And my mind was already racing with what the consequences were going to be because, yeah, this was the end of the day. It was midnight. I was exhausted. I was tired. I was done with the day. All I was doing was going to bed. I I wasn’t mentally prepared to be dealing with a fire and now clearly I can’t stay in that room anymore. And the hotel is probably going to be fully booked. So now what’s going to happen? Am I going to be out on the street cycling around the city trying to find another hotel that I can check into? You know, it just seemed like this was going to be a cascading problem for me. And all I really wanted to do at that point was just take a cold shower and go to sleep, right? But anyway, even finding someone to talk to is not the easiest thing at one of these low-budget hotels because it’s not like there’s a front desk staff at night in a crisp uniform and a concierge or anything. At night, everybody just goes home and then there might be like a teenage boy lying on a mattress in the hallway like he would be the night staff basically. So anyway, I went out into the lobby area and I found the teenage boy who was in charge during the night and of course I couldn’t really speak to him in Indonesian to explain but I basic you know using whatever language I I can’t even remember what I said but I said something and then I I indicated with sign language body language something about you know you there was a fire and you know you come come I need to show you. And he could tell from my demeanor that something was wrong and he had to go look at it. So I I brought him down to my room. And this is something else I started thinking about at that time and throughout over the next couple of days that let’s say you’re in a a little bit more expensive hotel and in a lot of expensive hotels when you leave your room the door swings shut behind you automatically and locks, right? So, like let’s say you’re in a in a hotel room at night in the dark and there’s a fire and if your instinct is to run out of the room and go get help, well, the door is going to close behind you, lock you out of your room, right? So, now you’ve got a sealed room with a fire building inside. So, when you leave your room when there’s a fire, you probably should think about that and put a shoe or something in the door to prop it open. So, anyway, I left my room and I made sure the door was unlocked. There’s no spring or anything on that door. It’s so it’s not going to close on its own, but maybe the wind could close it or something. So, I didn’t want it to lock behind me. I was thinking clearly enough to do that. And then I found the guy, brought him back to the room. And the funny thing is the difference between my reaction and his reaction and the reaction of everybody else who eventually came into my hotel room because to me it was a pretty big event. Like a fire in my room. It’s like, yeah, that’s it’s a big event in my life. He came into the room. I pointed at the key card slot with all the the the wall was black above the key card slot and the smoke was still coming out and you could smell there had been a fire and I pointed to that and he kind of looked at it and went, “Oh, okay.” It was like no reaction at all. Like he had seen it a hundred times already. This was nothing new to him. I guess this happens all the time. Anyway, he did not react at all. And then luckily the first thing he said he turned to me and he said something in English like change room change room. So luckily another room was available room. It was just down the hall from me and then I said yeah yeah if I can just change to a new room that would be awesome. And then they showed me the new room. And that was also kind of funny though because another element of this, a Planet Doug perspective on this whole experience is that when I’m hanging out in my room on my own working on YouTube videos, all I wear is a pair of shorts. I have one pair of blue shorts. I’m wearing them right now. I bought them at Decathlon years ago in Kuala Lumpur. And when I left my room to go find someone from the hotel, I pulled on that pair of shorts. I hadn’t been wearing any clothes up until that point cuz I was dealing with this emergency. Anyway, I pull on these shorts. But what I had forgotten was about, I don’t know, 2 or 3 weeks ago, the back of the shorts had ripped open. The seam had let go. And every single day I look at those shorts and I think, “Ah, I got to get out my sewing kit. I have a sewing kit in here as well.” And I’m I’m often sitting here on the bed working on a YouTube video and I’ll be sewing something. I’m repairing my clothing. And yet, ever since the rear of my shorts tore open, I never got around to repairing them. So, as I was running up the hall going back to my room to get the guy to look at the fire and then all these other hotel people or other guests, I don’t know who they were, they all came into my room. I’m standing there with my butt hanging out because the rear of my shorts are like ripped wide open. And now it’s pitch it’s just dark. The only light coming in is from the hallway and I’ve got my headlamp on. But now with all these people in my room, I have to move to a new room, but I have no privacy to do that, right? Like I’m normally a very methodical person. And if I’m going to move from one room to another, I do it very carefully, very methodically. Pack everything up, put them into bags, pick up the bags, carry them to my new room, unpack. But now I’m doing it in the dark in a room where there was a fire. There’s no electricity and all these strangers are in my room and my butt is hanging out the back of my shorts. And now with this big audience of people, I have to grab all of my stuff and move it to a new room. So instead of having the luxury of slowly packing up, organizing, getting everything, all I did was run around the room with my headlamp looking for things and just grabbing armfuls of stuff, carrying them down to the new room and dumping it onto the bed, going back for another armful, carrying it back to this new room. And every time I was going down the hallway, I was thinking about anyone looking at me would see the tear in my shorts as I’m walking up and down the hallway. Anyway, this went on for a long time because I I really unpack when I get into a room. I have so many electronics and my kettle and coffee and clothing and GoPro gear. Everything that I have is spread out everywhere and I have to gather bits and pieces of it. Many, many, many trips back and forth. Yeah, that was quite an experience. And then I’m in the new room. Close the door. I can now I have to get organized in this room. I probably have to fix the sink, clean the bathroom, fix the shower head, unplug all I have to redo all of that renovation work that I did in the new room. And I’m in the new room and then I’m looking around and I was like, there are no towels in this room because they often don’t provide towels. In my original room, the one where there was a fire, there were towels waiting for me, but that was because I contacted the hotel in advance. I sent them a WhatsApp message just to confirm, okay, I’m coming on this date. I booked a room for a week and I’m coming and you remember me. I was there before. And I was kind of hoping that by telling them I’m coming back, they might take more effort with the room. And they did. They made sure my room had bottles of water in it, had towels, these sorts of things. But my new room was just prepared normally, and they normally don’t put any towels in the room. So, I had finally moved into my new room and I was going to take a shower and it’s like there’s no towels here. So, now I snuck out of my room, went back down the hallway hoping that my old room where the fire was would now be empty. Everybody would have left and I can go grab my old towels, right? Turns out they had left. The door to the room was closed, but I could open it. It wasn’t locked, luckily. Open the door and I go in there like a thief in the night and I’m grabbing the two towels and now I’ve got the towels tucked under my arm and I’m like scurrying back to my new room hoping no one cuz how do you explain what you’re doing now? It’s like what is that weird foreigner up to now? Why is he carrying wet towels under his arm going down the hallway? Right? I I always seem to end up doing these embarrassing things. But anyway, nobody saw me that I’m aware of. And I brought the towels back to my room. And I’m about to take a cold shower to recover from all of this. And I realized this room also doesn’t have a bath mat. There’s nothing on the floor outside the bathroom. And that might seem like an in an insignificant thing, but as I’ve talked about before, in my experience, the biggest danger I’ve faced being overseas is slipping and falling because the bathrooms are usually really awkward. They’re they’re weird in the way they’re designed, the angles of everything. The door is blocked. There’s like a a a a raised ledge between the bathroom and the rest of the room because these rooms in Asia, they’re wet bathrooms, right? The the drain is in the middle of the floor and all the water from the shower, from the sink, everything pours onto the floor and goes down to this central drain. So, they have to have like a raised ledge between the bathroom and the rest of the room. So if the room if the bathroom fills up, the water doesn’t flow into the rest of the room. And anyway, and usually the door doesn’t work, water sprays from inside the bathroom onto the floor outside. And then you step out of this awkward bathroom in bare feet onto a wet, slippery tile floor. Your feet slip out from under you. You go crashing to the ground. It’s happened to me several times. So, the biggest danger I’ve ever faced of like a broken leg, broken arm, concussion, getting cut open or something has always come from stepping out of the bathroom onto a slippery floor. It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever faced being over overseas. And my original room had a bath mat, which makes the room infinitely safer. So now I thought, “Yeah, I want a bath mat.” You know, it seems ridiculous, but it’s a safety concern. So again, I already got my towels, but now I’m sneaking out of my room again, padding down the back to my original room. I go in there and I grab the bath mat and running down the hallway with a bath mat under my arm, trying to hide it so nobody knows what it is I’m doing. And I I I scurry away and bring the bathmat to my new my new room. And then finally, I’m able to settle down in my new room and put the fire behind me. A lot of food for thought came out of this experience. I was even going to shoot a YouTube video about it, kind of like a travel tip kind of video, but then I I just never got around to it. I’m just I’m just telling the story here with my hiccups. But yeah, like I said at the very beginning, it never occurred to me that key card slots could be a source of fire. So that’s something to think about when you’re in a hotel room and you’re thinking about the possibility of a fire breaking out. I did some research into it and apparently there are two different types. A modern expensive type works in a way that the when you put in your key card, it just triggers a tiny switch almost like a battery system and a very very low voltage is delivered to another relay that turns on the main 220 volts. Like in Indonesia, everything runs on 220. So that is kind of a safe system where the actual switching mechanism where the 220 volts runs through it is outside the room somewhere. But there’s a cheaper type which just has a switch inside the key card slot and it engages the switch inside that mechanism and the full 220 volts runs through it. And I think that was the system they had at the Wisma Cemara. So the electricity running, the air conditioner, if there is a water heater, you know, the water heater, whatever you have plugged in, the full amperage and 220 volts, all of it is flowing directly through that key card slot mechanism. And then over the years the screws loosen, the tire the the the wires loosen and you get a short circuit in there and it starts to overheat and it bursts into flames. So that’s something to think about. If you smell smoke and you’re looking for the source of the fire, consider the key card mechanism. That could be it. And then the other things to think about is because it’s an electrical fire, it could trip a breaker. You could be in the dark and the key card slot is beside the door, right? So now you could have a fire blocking your exit from the room because if it’s a big fire, it’s right beside the door. How do you get out the door? And with the fire with the electricity going out now, you’re in total darkness. So you need access to your own light, some kind of an emergency light. So yeah, just little things to think about in terms of safety in a in a cheap hotel room. I mean, it was lucky the Wisma Cemara was all concrete. The walls are cement. So it’s not even though the fire was inside the wall, it didn’t grow inside the wall because there’s nothing in there to burn really. But if your hotel is made of wood and has plaster, yeah, that could trigger a pretty major fire inside the wall. Very very difficult to put out and you might have to run out of the room to safety. So yeah, quite a quite an interesting experience on Planet Doug.
My small Planet Doug adventures continued when it finally came time to return to Melaka. That was yesterday by the way, so the events are very clear in my mind. Where I took the ferry from Dumai back to Melaka. And the trip itself did not work out as well as my original trip there. For one thing, the ferry was scheduled for 8:30 in the morning. So, I did not have the luxury of just hanging out in my hotel until noon. I had a lot of trouble going to sleep the night before. So, you know, I set my alarm for 5:00 in the morning so I could pack up and get on my bike and ride to the dock early enough to get on the ferry at 8:30 in the morning. And I just wasn’t able to sleep. As soon as I set an alarm for like 5:00 in the morning, I’m already thinking ahead to that time and then I just cannot fall asleep. So, I was exhausted when I was when I was setting off and I had trouble getting my ticket when I was in Dumai again because as I talked about earlier, my bank card from my bank account is cancelled. And as it turned out, I didn’t bring enough money with me to pay for my expenses there and buy the ferry ticket to come back. So now I needed to get more money, but I couldn’t withdraw money from an ATM using my bank card cuz it was blocked and cancelled. Luckily, Touch ‘n Go came to my rescue once again because kind Planet Doug subscribers have contributed money to my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet and there was enough in there to pay for the ferry ticket. And I had my Visa card and my Touch ‘n Go Visa card allows me to withdraw money at an ATM overseas and it draws directly from my Malaysian e-wallet. So, I went to an ATM in Dumai to withdraw money. The problem with that is the fees are pretty hefty. So they actually charge you the Touch ‘n Go system charges you a fee for this and then the bank in Indonesia charges like 50,000 rupiah per withdrawal. So it’s a little bit of a yeah it’s expensive to do but I was able to withdraw enough money to pay for the ferry ticket. So yeah, Touch ‘n Go saved my neck once again. Anyway, I get to the dock. I rode my bike there early in the morning and then a bunch of weird things happened. They have a table outside the dock where you drop off your luggage. And I’ve done this in the past, so I’m familiar with the system. And I rode my bike up to up to this table. So, here’s my bicycle. I’ve got my two pannier bags attached. I pull them off the bike, put them down near the luggage scale because they have to weigh the bags in order to figure out how much to charge you. And I went up to the woman and said, you know, here’s my ticket, here’s my passport, and I would like to check in the bicycle and these two bags and pay for them. And she started working on her papers. And then she handed me a receipt and said for the bicycle it’s 25,000 rupiah which is about I think $5 or $6 US. So it it’s quite quite reasonable. And that was it. And then I said okay that’s for the bicycle but how much for the bags? And then she said to me or indicated to me oh no no no we don’t take the bags. You can just take them on, take them yourself. And she did, you know, body language to tell me that I’m supposed to I can pick up my bags and just carry them with me. But and I guess on the theory, you can do that. Like you can bring a lot of luggage as carry-on bags, but I don’t want to do that because I’ve already got my knapsack. The knapsack is quite heavy because it has my laptop, tablet, smartphones, has a lot of heavy things in it, and that’s all I want to carry. I don’t I don’t want to carry two more bags to go through immigration, the waiting room, and then on the ferry, where do you put them? There isn’t any overhead compartment or anything. So, I went back to her and said, “No, no, no, no. I don’t I would like to pay to check them in.” Cuz I thought she was telling me, “Oh, it’s okay. You don’t have to pay. You can just take those bags onto the boat. They’re small enough. You can take them yourself. Like, she’s doing me a favor. And I’m saying to her, “No, no, no, no. It’s okay. I don’t mind. I want to check them in. I want to pay the extra luggage fee so that I don’t have the hassle of carrying them around all the time.” But she would, she said, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” You know, and she kept telling me to go away to take the bags with me. And I thought, well, this is really weird. And she finally called over someone else who spoke English, another employee of Indomal Fast Ferry or works at the dock or whatever his job is. And he said to me, “Oh, no, no, you don’t have to. You don’t have to pay. You can just take the bags yourself.” And again, I explained to him, “No, I want to pay because carrying all these bags is just going to be such a hassle. So, I want to check them in.” And then I guess I got through to him. He talked to the woman and then she went, “Oh, okay. Okay.” But then she wouldn’t charge me for them. She’s she’s basically said, “Oh, you paid 25,000 for the bicycle. That’s enough. You can just go away now. Leave your bags here.” But of course, now I’m worried about that because, well, I haven’t officially checked them in. I don’t have a luggage tag. I don’t have number. I have nothing. I didn’t pay to check them in. So, I have no paperwork connecting me to these bags. And that seems a little bit risky. And but they both insisted, “No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. We’ll take care of it. We’ll take care of everything for you. You just go.” So, I did. And now I had another problem because you have to pay a port tax of 75,000 rupiah port tax but they are cashless. They will you cannot pay with money. I had Indonesian rupiah. I can pay with cash but they don’t accept cash. So again the only way I can pay is with my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. But to do that, you have to be connected to the internet. And when I was in Sumatra this time, I wasn’t going to be there very long and I wasn’t going to be doing anything. So, I didn’t bother getting my phones unblocked by customs. Like normally every time I go to Sumatra, I have to go to the mobile carrier and get my phone unblocked by customs and then pay for the SIM card and mobile data. But I didn’t want to bother with that because it’s quite it ends up being expensive over time. And I had no use for it. I I wasn’t going to be going out exploring. I didn’t need mobile data. So, I didn’t I I didn’t have a SIM card because my phone was still being blocked by customs, the whole IMEI thing. But then when I got into the terminal, the guy told me, well, I kind of found out beforehand and I was asking him like, do they have public Wi-Fi? So, I need the password so I can log into the public Wi-Fi. Once I’m on Wi-Fi, then I can pay the port tax using Touch ‘n Go by scanning their QR code. But it turned out they had a QR code on the wall with a poster saying free Wi-Fi. Just scan this QR code. So I figured that out, scan the QR code, that log me into the port, public Wi-Fi. Then I managed to pay the port tax. So that was another small adventure. Then I I got through immigration and immigration was okay. They asked me a lot of questions. I had the the same problems that I always have where he asked me, “Oh, so what were you doing in Indonesia?” And I said, “Well, I was a tourist.” So he says, “Oh, where did you go? Tell me again about all these places you went to. Tell me about your surfing, your snorkeling, your scuba diving, your lovely beach condo in Bali. Like, where did you go? What did you do?” And again, I had to confess like, I didn’t do anything. I just stayed in Dumai. And I had to explain to him, well, I enjoy this. I prefer to stay in a local town and just explore the neighborhoods. It’s what I do. That’s my version of tourism. And he took a long time to convince him, but anyway, he eventually went, “Okay, I I believe your story.” And the day before I got a haircut because I wanted to look neat for immigration both in Sumatra and in Malaysia. And I worked out this system where when I rode my bicycle to the dock, I wore this shirt, but then I brought another shirt with me, put it into my knapsack, so that when I got into the dock, into the port into the ferry terminal, then I before I go through immigration, I can go into a bathroom, take off this shirt, which is all sweaty anyway. It’s drenched in sweat. And then I can put on a different shirt. I guess I’m thinking, well, they know me quite well and if they see this shirt, it will remind them of all the other times I went in and out. So, I thought at, you know, it’s not like a disguise or anything, but maybe I shouldn’t wear my Canada shirt again because that will trigger their memories and I’ll just put on a different shirt. So, I went into a bathroom and I changed shirts and I got my hair cut kind of like James Bond. And who knows whether that had any effect, but he stamped me out of the country. No, with no issues.
So, then I walk out this long dock. It’s a very long dock above the ocean, the Melaka Strait to get to the ferry where you board the ferry. And then I had a thought while I was walking along the dock because and this thought ties into a story coming up next. I was still holding my passport and my ticket because when you get on the boat, of course, they’re probably going to ask, “Can we see your boarding pass? Can we see your passport?” And they compare them. Oh, okay. Okay, you can board now. So, I’m walking along this dock with my passport and ticket still in my hand, and I was thinking, man, this is a really dangerous thing to do. If I trip and fall or I accidentally drop my passport, there’s a good chance it’s going to fall into the ocean, right? So, I’m like holding on to my passport tightly, like, don’t drop it, don’t drop it, don’t drop it. I get to the ferry and then I see something really, really weird because all the other people were carrying their luggage, all of their suitcases, they were rolling them along. And when they got down to the boat, then some people from the boat said, “Let me see your boarding pass. These are your bags.” Yes, they are my bags. And then they took away the bags and put them into the luggage hold. They go into the bottom of the ferry through this big hole in the ground in ground in the floor. So I guess that is the new system. So that’s why the woman wouldn’t take my bags. She wasn’t telling me that I had to carry my bags onto the ferry. She was telling me, “Okay, we don’t check in bags outside the dock anymore. You have to carry your own bags through the waiting room, through immigration, all the way out to the boat, and then they take your bags and put them in the luggage hold.” But as far as I could tell, nobody was paying for their luggage and nobody was getting a luggage tag of any kind. So, the whole thing was weird. It’s like they have a new system now where you get free luggage if you carry it out to the boat and they put it into the luggage hold themselves, but you have to carry it out there. The whole thing seemed really, really weird to me. I don’t know what was going on. I noticed later on when I picked up my bags in Malaysia, my bags actually had luggage tags on them. So, the woman at the counter, she didn’t take any money from me, but she did put an official tag on them with my name. All the other people who carried their bags to the boat, nothing happened. They didn’t pay either. And they didn’t get any luggage tags to identify which bag belonged to who. That was all very, very weird. But I guess that’s the new system, free luggage. Very strange. Anyway, I get onto the ferry. I go up the stairs to the top deck because I paid for VIP seating again. And then I drop off my knapsack on my seat and I decided since the boat was like I was one of the first people on the boat and there weren’t crowds of people yet and I needed to go to the bathroom. So I thought, ah, I’ll take advantage of this moment when the boat is like nobody’s using the bathroom. I’ll pop in the bathroom, use the facilities, then I can sit down in my seat in comfort and just wait for the boat to leave. So I drop off my knapsack. I’m walking back to the bathroom. And when I get to the bathroom, I’m going to open the door and I realize I’m still carrying my passport and my ticket because I didn’t take the time. Like normally I sit down in my seat first and I get settled, put away very carefully, put away my passport, put away my ticket, get everything organized. But this time, because I wanted to use the bathroom first, I just dropped off my knapsack in my seat. They have reserved seating now. And I went back there and I just as I’m reaching for the bathroom door, it’s like, oh, I’m still holding my passport. So now I open the bathroom door. I go into the bathroom. Close the door behind me. And now while I’m in the bathroom, I start putting away my passport.
Planet Doug mistake. So what I do is I have a Ziploc bag. I keep my passport and my ticket in this Ziploc bag. I seal it and then I put it away inside like a money pouch that I put away in another bag. This is my routine. So now I’m in the bathroom. I had the Ziploc bag in my pocket. I pull out the Ziploc bag, open it, put in the passport and the ticket. But you know how with a with a Ziploc bag, you kind of have to give it a little shake so that the contents fall to the bottom because they kind of get stuck at the top. It’s a very tight fit. So there I am. I put the passport, my ticket into the Ziploc bag. And I give it a little shake so that they fall to the bottom. The bottom of the Ziploc bag ripped open or had already torn open. So I gave it a little shake. My passport and my ticket fell out of the bag. Where did they fall? Right into the toilet. Just splat. Slap. I could not believe it. I’m so dumb. The dumbest things happened to me. And as fast as I could, like a snake reflex, you know, I I put my hand into that toilet and grab them as fast as I can because you never know with these boat toilets. You don’t, this one, you don’t flush it. It just has water flowing constantly in and out. There’s a pump pumping water in out into the ocean. And there was a very good chance my passport was just just going to get sucked into the pipes and disappear. My heart just about exploded when I saw the passport go into the toilet and I got in there as fast as I could and oh luckily I grabbed them both before they got sucked away. Could not believe the trouble I nearly caused for myself. Pro tip, don’t bring your ba your don’t bring your passport into a ferry’s bathroom. Don’t do it. Cuz I mean, even if it fell on the floor, it would have been bad because the floor is soaking wet. It’s like a giant puddle in there. So, even though I managed to grab my passport out of the toilet, it still got sucked under the water, water pouring on top of it, and it was soaking wet. And now I’m thinking, okay, what have I done? Now, I pictured myself arriving in Melaka, going up to the immigration officer, and I plop this soaking wet thing on his desk, and they’re they’re not going to be able to stamp the page because, yeah, it’s soaking wet. All the ink is going to run had I destroyed my passport. I could not believe it. So now my dream of just relaxing on the boat going back to Malaysia had turned into this life and death rescue mission where I have to somehow dry out my passport before I arrive in Malaysia. So, I get back to my assigned seat and I’m sitting there and I’m flipping through the pages. They’re all stuck together, you know, and I’m peeling them apart carefully just cuz they’re soaking wet and now they’re going to tear because they’re wet and I’m peeling and I didn’t want them to be stuck together. So, I’m going through this like 48 page passport carefully peeling the pages across trying to like flutter them through the air. Could not believe I was in that situation. Another bit of luck came my way though. While I was sitting there, more people came on and my entire row, I was in the aisle seat. My entire row filled up with Indonesian women. There’s a big group of women all traveling together. And Indonesian women can be well all Indonesians are very high energy and they seem to be going to Malaysia on some kind of a holiday maybe a a group tour of some kind and they are just laughing and joking. Everybody’s taking selfies. They have to get by me to get into their seats. And there was just like a lot of noise, a lot of chaos. I’m in here and I’m trying to peel apart my passport, blowing on the pages, fluttering the pages, wondering. I got out paper towels and I’m dabbing every page very carefully so that I don’t I didn’t want to like rub it cuz if I rub the page I’m going to wipe off the ink of the stamps and I’m going to tear the page. So I’m dabbing I’m blowing I’m It’s just the ridiculous things I do. And then when the boat started to move, it left from the dock. So I knew everybody who was going to board was already on board. Then I spotted a front row of seats completely empty. So I quickly jumped up out of my seat, changed to this empty row, and now I got a window seat and the window had a a window sill with a curtain. And now I was able to put my passport right on the window sill with the sun coming in. It was very, very hot between the window and the curtain. And I put my passport on the window sill. And then slowly but surely, page by page, I waited until the page dried. And I turned, peeled apart the next two pages, left them open for the sun to dry them out. And I worked my way through the entire passport, and dried it all out. And to my amazement, it survived more or less. The covers were bent because of the moisture. Now pages were kind of bent and then so the the passport didn’t really fit like a nice little booklet anymore. It was all kind of puffy, but all the pages were dry. They were more or less in okay condition and the ink hadn’t hadn’t spread on any of the passport stamps, you know, immigration stamps. So in the end I managed to save my passport. Could not believe it.
Unfortunately, my adventures on the boat weren’t over yet. Had the whole passport in the toilet thing. I was dealing with that. But I had another problem in that I had a bit of an upset stomach. I think I I have a very sensitive digestive system. I I don’t know when it started in my life, but I have a lot of trouble with that. And when it comes to a day when I’m going to be on like stuck on a ferry all day, I’m very careful with my diet. And usually like the day before I will fast like I won’t eat anything. Won’t drink. I’ll I’ll drink milk. Maybe that’s about it. Instant coffee because I don’t want to be sick during the trip when you’re trapped on the bus, trapped on the airplane, trapped on the ferry, however you’re traveling. So, I’m very careful about that. But then on that particular morning, for whatever reason, I can’t tell you why, I could feel it that on my way to the dock while I’m riding my bicycle, I got stomach cramps. Something was wrong. And I knew, yeah, I could be in trouble here. But, oh, it’s such a pain. Like, you know, those bathrooms on boats are pretty uncomfortable. They’re very small, wet. There’s water flying in all directions after a few people have used it. It gets pretty dirty, pretty out of control. And on this particular day, we hit rough water. The wa the waves were it’s kind of a funny thing when you look out the window when you’re on the Melaka Strait. The waves don’t look like anything at all. It’s not like this is the Deadliest Catch or anything like that, but a small amount of wave can take one of these ferries and really send it rocking and rolling. And this boat was really really unsteady. You could even feel like a seasickness building. People around me were getting seasick. It’s very common on that ferry. So, the whole trip was like a three-hour trip across the strait. I’m feeling this need to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to do it because I knew it was going to be an awful experience. I thought, it’s not really that bad. It’s not that serious. Maybe I can wait until I arrive in Malaysia, get through immigration, ride to my hotel, and then I have the comfort of my hotel room to deal with the call of nature. But then as the boat was getting very close to Melaka, yeah, things started to get pretty serious and I thought, “Oh yeah, I better take care of this now.” And I had this thought that maybe when I try to get into Malaysia again, immigration is going to give me a hard time because I’ve been in and out of Malaysia so many times. It’s it was a possibility, a real possibility that they were going to pull me out of line, take me to a back room for an interview, an interrogation, like, okay, like explain to us why you want to come back to Malaysia. Who are you? What are you doing? It’s happened to me in the past. And I thought, well, if that happens this time and they bring me to a room for this official interview, I don’t want to have to say to them, listen, I’m really sick. Can I go to a bathroom first before, you know, that’s not the time to start asking for bathroom favors. So, I thought, okay, let’s take a chance and use the bathroom on the ferry. So, I get get up out of my seat and I’m being thrown from side to side like a rag doll. Luckily, they have all these poles with foam around them so that as you lurch your way to the back of the ferry to where the bathrooms are, you know, you can sort of grab hold of these poles, grab seats, grab a pole, grab a seat, and you can kind of hold yourself up. Otherwise, yeah, you’re going flying. So, I get into the bathroom. I’m holding on to the walls. I’m holding on to everything. I managed to slide the lock on the door. I kind of physically turn around. I let go of the walls because you got to unbuckle your pants, right, to use the toilet. And the moment I let go of the wall, the boat like practically flips over and I get slammed against the wall. Like the there there’s not much room in these bathrooms, but like I’m standing up here and the wall was like right about here, just like a foot a foot and a half away. And I get thrown off my feet, slammed into that wall like just wham. And I wasn’t physically hurt, but I had my glasses on this cord and I had them like pulled up a little bit. So, my glasses were like midchest and my glasses ended up between me and the wall and I smooshed them flat. Just totally like the the arms on the on the glasses. You can see it’s bending down quite a bit right there. They just basically got flattened. So, I wasn’t hurt. I didn’t have a ble bloody nose or anything. I hit the wall pretty hard, but I wasn’t hurt or injured. But then I looked down and I’d completely destroyed my glasses. And I was like, “Oh, come on.” First the passport, now my glasses. And these are very special glasses. Like I normally have trouble with these reading glasses that I wear because I buy the cheapest ones I can find. Like in 7-Eleven, they have a rack of reading glasses for like 10 ringgit or something like that. And I just try on a bunch of them until I get the the ones that allow me to read a smartphone, you know, at at the right distance I need reading distance. And then I buy the cheapest ones I can find and I wear them around my neck and I break them over and over and over again. Usually it’s my mistake where I’m not wearing them because I don’t need to wear them when I’m walking. I only need to wear them if I’m sitting and reading or I’m on my laptop. So, they’re dangling on my chest. And then if I’m traveling, I often pick up a backpack or something and I hold the backpack in my arms and I don’t realize it, but I end up crushing my glasses between my backpack and my chest and these cheap reading glasses. A little bit of pressure and the arms snap right off. Just snap, snap. And it happens over and over again. You put the glasses down on the bed and you happen to put your knapsack on top of the glasses. Snap, snap. You break the arms off over and over and over. So, I keep having to buy new reading glasses. Happens all the time. And then some very kind and generous Planet Doug subscribers noticed I had this trouble with glasses all the time and they bought me a very expensive pair. So these are actual branded I think they’re Fosters. So I went, you know, with their guidance, I went to the Fosters website where you can actually try on glasses and see how they look. You upload a photo of yourself and they put the glasses on your face and you can see what you look like and you pick out the frames that you like, that you think look good on you and then you pick the right strength and all that kind of stuff. And they brought me and gave me these glasses as a gift. So, these are not your typical piece of junk cheap glasses. These are expensive glasses that were a gift. And there I was. I’d crushed them. And I assumed, I mean, I was amazed that the arms were still attached because they they bent completely down. They were completely parallel with the lenses. They were the glasses were completely flattened and I was amazed that they hadn’t broken off, but I was convinced that now if I want to bend them back into position, they’re going to snap off. But on the ferry, I got back to my seat after I I dealt with my illness, which was a very lucky thing that I did because yeah, it was it was an emergency. And I did not want to deal with that when I was in immigration. So then I went back to my seat and then I took the glasses off from around my neck and then very carefully using steady pressure I bent them up as far as I could bend them and I got them back to that. They’re not quite in the right position. They should be more parallel like this 90°. But I managed to bend both of the arms back to here and now I can wear them. So I was like, h, you know, cuz these glasses are incredibly well built here where they’re attached. Like on cheap glasses, all there is is a hinge. A hinge with a small pin. And if you move them at all, they just snap off. But these glasses, because they’re more expensive, they’re better made, they actually have a very elaborate hinge structure in here, which has a whole bunch of play in it. It actually moves. So if it bends just a little bit, it doesn’t snap off. So something about the higher quality steel, the very elaborate hinge mechanism meant that even though I bent them completely flat, I was able to bend them back almost into position. So I can wear them and they they seem okay. Disaster averted. But man, I had a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble in that on that boat, that bathroom, the passport and my glasses. I almost destroyed both of them.
Luckily, my actual arrival in Melaka went pretty smoothly. The ferry arrived. It does this interesting thing at the very end where it goes up the Melaka River, but then because the door is on one side of the ferry in order to line it up with the dock, it actually has to do a three-point turn and then back into position. And then once it did, we had to wait a while because the way these ferries work, they take all the luggage out first and they put all the luggage on the dock and then the passengers are allowed to exit and then all the luggage is out on display. So, yeah, I had to wait for quite a while, but then I went down and out and I I right away saw my bicycle. It was there waiting for me. It had one pannier bag attached, which was kind of funny, just one. And I was like, “Well, where’s you where’s the other one then?” Because when I gave it to them, they weren’t on the bicycle. It was separate from the bicycle, but somehow they figured out how to put one on, but the second one wasn’t on the bike, so I had to go searching. I eventually found it. I was kind of worried about that because in the past, I’ve done this with my bicycle and when they try to put the pannier bags on, they don’t know how to do it. There’s a very special way. They lock into place and they’ll end up getting one hook on but no other hooks and that’s it. So the whole bag is dangling off this one hook putting way too much pressure on that one hook and I’m worried it’s going to tear off or something. But in this case the one bag that was on whoever did it put it on properly. They didn’t use the lock but yeah they wouldn’t know how to do that but they put it on with the full hooks. It’s kind of cool. Anyway, then I put on the second bag and rolled my bike into the immigration arrival area. I did this one other time and at that time I just assumed you can’t bring your bike right up to the information desk. That just seems weird. So, I parked my bike by the door and then I got in line figuring I would go through immigration and then go back and get my bike to go through customs. But when I was waiting in line, it was almost my turn. They came and talked to me. So, no, no, you get your bike first. So, oh, okay. So, I guess it’s okay. And I got the bike and I rolled it right up to the immigration counter, put down the kickstand and then dealt with the guy at immigration. So, this time I didn’t even worry about it. I just rolled my bike right up into the line and then I kept it with me. Went up to the immigration guy and then I realized that my bicycle, especially when it has pannier bags on it, is also very good for immigration because it tells your story. Like in the past, like I’ve been called out of line before where I had to talk to immigration officials and explain who I am, what I’m doing, prove to them that I’m a tourist, that I’m not working illegally in their country, I’m not a smuggler. You know, I have to prove I’m a tourist basically. And I’ve had to do that in the past. And I mentioned my YouTube channel has lately come in very handy for that because it’s physical evidence of how I spend my time. They can scroll through all the videos and go, “Oh, okay. You have been to every single tourist attraction that exists in Melaka or in all of Kuala Lumpur or Penang, wherever I am in Malaysia and they can see, oh, or in Sumatra, wherever. I’ve had to show photos on my phone in Sumatra. They said, “Okay, you say you’re a tourist. Prove it.” And this was back in the days before I had a YouTube channel, but I did a lot of photography. So then I would call up on my phone. Okay, here’s me, you know, posing in front of this at Lake Toba and I could show them tourism photos. But now that I had a bicycle, clearly a special bicycle that’s built for bicycle touring, it’s like physical evidence of who I am and proof of my story. So when the immigration officer interviewed me, asked me a few questions like, “Why are you coming to Malaysia? How long are you going to stay?” And I gave them a number that I just made up out of my head. I’m going to stay for how many days? And then he says, “Oh, and where are you going to go after Malaysia?” Because that is the most important thing as far as immigration is concerned. All they really want to know is that you’re leaving. If you give them some idea that you are going to leave Malaysia, they’re much more likely to let you in. So when he said, “Where are you going next?” Again, I just kind of made up a story and I said, “Well, I’m on a bicycle tour. There’s my bicycle. See, and then I’m going to ride through Malaysia and cross the border into Thailand. And from a travel perspective, well, that makes a lot of sense. People do that all the time. They enter Malaysia from Singapore, ride their bicycle or their motorcycle up to the border with Thailand, cross the border, and then continue on Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. So, it’s like a believable, reasonable story. And the way the reason it worked for me was because I had the bicycle with me. Everybody understood perfectly who I was. And then the guy, he asked me like three questions, the most important one being, where are you going after Malaysia? And I just pointed at the bicycle and said that’s what I’m doing. And then he Oh, okay. Okay. Stamp stamp. And I got another 90 days stamped into my passport. And by then my passport had fully dried. It was a bit puffy, but yeah, I’d managed to save it. I did not the toilet experience did not actually destroy my passport. So then, yeah, I went through customs. I have to put my bags through the X-ray machine. And then they go over my bicycle. Well, I got a couple of small bags tied to my bicycle where I keep my lock, sunscreen, tools, things like that. And they opened up all those bags and looked inside them. Okay, he’s he’s okay. He’s okay. Funny thing is that when I go through customs and airports or wherever, they always compliment my bicycle. Like, everybody admires it. And the guys at customs, they did as well. We he went over all the bags and then he looked at the bike and he looked at me. Wow, that is an amazing bicycle. That’s a great bicycle. So cool. I love your bicycle. And that always strikes me as kind of odd because I know that bicycle is almost 30 years old now. It’s like 27 years old. I bought it back in 1998. It’s so old. It’s pretty much a piece of junk. It’s so outdated. The technology is Yeah. 30 years old. So, I know it’s not a good bicycle at all, but everybody really admires it. I guess it looks like a very good bicycle, even though it’s very, very old. So, that was kind of funny. Went through customs, got on my bike, rode to the hotel Mahkota Vibe Inn, checked in, moved into this room, and here I am telling you my story.
Just to round up this behind the scenes video and tell my full story, I did mention at the beginning that when I was in Dumai, I had a project I wanted to work on and I spent some time there doing this and it involves technology. So, I’m just going to go back. I I don’t want to tell this whole story because it’s way too long and way too complicated. But basically what I wanted to do was move my website. A long time ago when I was living and working in Taiwan and I was going to go on bicycle trips, I created a blog using WordPress called the Cycling Canadian. And I maintained that blog with stories and photographs for many many years until I started the YouTube channel and then I just sort of gave up on the on the website. But since then my the old website has fallen to pieces. So the Cycling Canadian it still exists but the theme that I use the WordPress theme is no longer supported. The company that built it went out of business. They went bankrupt. And so everything broke. So if I try to update the blog using my old theme, I can’t do it. The menus don’t work. The controls don’t work. Everything on that site is old and broken. The PHP is out of date. The the version of WordPress is out of date. I can’t update any of that because all the plugins are broken. The links are broken. Everything had fallen to pieces. But since I started the YouTube channel and I changed the name of my channel to Planet Doug, wisely or unwisely, I still don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but I changed the name to Planet Doug. And I bought a new domain. I bought planetdoug.life, which is an expensive domain. You have to pay for it every year, but I purchased it. I couldn’t get planetdoug.com. That was already reserved or taken. Or I can’t remember anymore. But anyway, I bought this domain and I put a new my idea was to build a new website called planetdoug.life connected with my YouTube channel and make it a very professional sort of thing. But it turns out that running a YouTube channel takes all your energy and all your time. So I never really had the time to develop planetdoug.life. I would I tried to do it. I tried to combine YouTube and planetdoug.life with Patreon. Like there was a plugin you could use where every time you posted something to Patreon, it automatically reposts it to your website. So I only had to post something to Patreon and it would automatically show up on my website. That’s what the plugin was supposed to do, but it never ever ever worked and was so complicated and so technical. I just gave up on that. And because I have the Cycling Canadian and planetdoug.life and I bought my own name as a domain, dougnienhuis.com, which again I’ve never used because it broke and I’ve never been able to fix it. But because I have multiple domains, I had to pay for an expensive hosting package. Like you have to pay a hosting company to keep your website. They store it on their servers. And because I had three well I had four domains in total to do that I had to buy their power plan which was very expensive. So what I decided to do was consolidate all of this. Take all of the content from the Cycling Canadian, move it, migrate all of that content from the Cycling Canadian to planetdoug.life, and once all of the content has been moved, then I can delete the Cycling Canadian, just dump it, you know, stop paying for the domain. The hosting company no longer has to host it. And I was going to consolidate everything down to planetdoug.life one domain then I can use their cheaper hosting package which I thought would save me a lot of money. So that was my goal and I would I had this goal for a long time but I was never able to do it because I could not figure out how to do it. I mean WordPress, website hosting, cPanel, all of that stuff. I don’t understand any of it. The second I try to do anything, something goes wrong, I don’t know how to fix it, and it just becomes a disaster. So, I was just completely helpless. No matter how much research I did, no matter how much work I did, I would work on it for weeks extending into months doing research, research, research, and I never managed to figure out anything. So, I I just basically gave up. But the world has changed. We now have AI systems and I use AI to help me navigate all of this technological stuff and for me personally it has been amazing. So I sat down in Dumai. I checked into that hotel there and my main goal for the time I was in Mel in Dumai was to finally migrate all the content from the Cycling Canadian to planetdoug.life and I started off with one of my AI buddies. I used Gemini for this mainly and I just wrote to Gemini and explained what I was doing. I have these websites. I have these domains. I’m hosting it on the with this company and I want to delete the Cycling Canadian, get rid of it completely. But before I do that, I want to move all the content from the Cycling Canadian to my new website. And I said to Gemini, “How do I do this?” And then Gemini walked me through the steps. And to my amazement, I figured out how to do it. And I was so methodical because an AI is very powerful and very intelligent, but its intelligence is very, very specific. If I ask it, how do I do this? It will tell me how to do that. But it doesn’t take the big picture and it doesn’t ask, well, do you even need to do that? Maybe there’s a better way, right? It it it is unable to take a step back and get the big picture. So, it took a long time to work through all of the options because I would ask the AI, “How do I do this?” and it gave me an answer, but then I would start questioning it and saying, “Oh, like, do I have to do that because of this? Can I do it this way?” And then we had this long in-depth conversation until we finally figured out the best way to do it. And every time I did a single action like the AI would say click here which will open up this menu then click here. Instead of doing that I would click and open up the first menu but then I would take a screenshot and upload it to the AI and say okay this is what I see on that menu. Is this the right menu? And the AI is able to read it and go, “Yes, you’re in the right place.” However, I see that it has a new option I wasn’t aware of. Maybe you can do it this way. Click here. And the AI actually got trained in this system of working with me. And it would even say, “Okay, click here and tell me what you see.” So, I click on it, opens up a new menu. I take a screenshot, give it to the AI, and the AI reads all the options. Like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe we can do this in a more efficient way.” And hour after hour after hour, I was working with the AI, questioning and answering, question and answer, screenshots, uploading, and I managed to transfer all of the content. Again, I won’t go into all the details cuz it was it’s very very very technical and it wasn’t straightforward. And the AI did seem to make a few mistakes. It would tell me something that turned out not to be true. So I ended up transferring, I don’t know, 1,300 posts that I’d written over the years, mainly from Taiwan. So 1,300 posts got transferred to my new site and 17,000 photographs. My entire media library. I managed to transfer from my old site to my new site. And of course, when you do that in such a bulk way, things break. Like a lot of links don’t work anymore. And when I was trying to re like rebuild the menu system and choose a new theme and I was going over to make sure that everything was still working, there were a lot of things that were broken when I made the move. And then I had to methodically go through the entire website post by post, fix all of the links, all of the connections, rename things because I had a lot of links in there and the link had the Cycling Canadian as part of the link and it still worked, but it was referring back to my old site. So, what I had to do was come up with a way to do a massive search and replace, take all the links that referred to the Cycling Canadian and reroute them, redirect them to planetdoug.life. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. It was like a lot of cleaning up after I was done. But yeah, I only tell that story because it was the main thing that I did in Dumai. I wasn’t shooting any new videos. I spent all my time working on the planetdoug.life website. And to be honest, it was probably a complete waste of time because nobody visits the website. It doesn’t have any real function in my life, but I kind of like having it as a personal project anyway. Every time I post a new YouTube video, I post a link to that on Patreon and on my website. I keep Patreon and my website, both of them updated as I post new new new YouTube videos. But the most interesting thing about that story was how for years I could not do this. I could not figure out how to do it on my own. But now that I have AI, I could use AI and it AI walked me through all the steps and I absolute miracle, but I managed to get it all done which is pretty incredible.
All right, that is it for Planet Doug behind the scenes. That is not the entire story of my trip to Sumatra and back, but those are the highlights of all the the small adventures that I had. And yeah, I hope that was entertaining for everybody out there on Planet Doug. Yeah. And here I am back in Melaka, back in Malaysia. So, thank you for hanging out with me. Thank you to everyone who made contributions to my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet and to PayPal while I’ve been here in Melaka because without that money, without being able to access it, I would be stuck. I wouldn’t even have had the money to go to Sumatra because my bank card was canceled and I wouldn’t have been able to come back because I don’t have access to money. But I was able to use my PayPal account with Xoom and RIA and then my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet with my Touch ‘n Go Visa card to get enough money while I was in Sumatra to buy the ferry ticket to come back. So yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much for everybody making those donations, supporting Planet Doug, and of course everyone who has joined the Planet Doug Patreon that I mentioned. Yeah, that helps out a great deal. Keeps a Planet Doug spinning in orbit. And of course, my coffee posi on the Planet Doug buy me a coffee platform. Thank you very much to all of you to everyone supporting Planet Doug. Thank you. And shutting down for now. See you in the next video back in Malaysia.