Welcome back to another Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast video. And today, to be honest, I didn’t know if I had enough stories to tell or whether my stories were big enough to bother making a behind-the-scenes video or not. But yeah, I think so. And I’m kind of in the mood to talk today. So, I fired up my GoPro. Of course, I had all of my usual technology struggles just getting set up. Lately, I’ve gotten a buzzing sound in the audio on my GoPro, and I’m busy trying to track down the issues, and it’s really, really hard to do. You have to troubleshoot, right? And then I have my GoPro sitting on the bed here in this hotel, a very nice hotel, which I will talk about in a little while. And then I wanted to use a lavalier microphone, so I have this one. It’s a half decent brand. And I keep forgetting the name of the company that makes this lavalier mic. It’s handy because if I use my Rode Wireless Go, that depends on battery power and then it runs out and I don’t notice the battery died. And at least with a lavalier mic, you plug this into the GoPro, hook this onto your shirt and you never have to worry about it because it’s powered by the GoPro. And I have the GoPro plugged into USB-C power. It’s not running on battery because when I run it on batteries, it overheats and shuts down even in an air conditioned room. So, I got to do all these things. Got to take the battery out. Got to plug in USB-C power. And then I tried this microphone, but I got this loud buzzing in the background. And I couldn’t figure out why. But then I tried I have a much more expensive lavalier mic. This is the official Rode lav mic and it has a really nice sound and it wasn’t providing a buzzing in the background which is nice. But then I forgot this one broke. The cord is really thin because it’s like a studio mic I guess. And the cord looks fine. There’s no cuts in it. There’s no breaks. There’s nothing. But somewhere in the middle, I guess it bent and then the wire inside is very, very thin and it broke. So sometimes it works, but then if I bend over or lean over and the wire bends, it just disconnects, connects, disconnects. So this is basically garbage now. So this is garbage. This is garbage. These things that go on. And now I’m back to using my Rode Wireless Go, which I have underneath my shirt here. So, it’s connected wirelessly to the receiver on the GoPro. And let’s see how that goes.
The first story for today is a technology story, and I want to start there because it sort of kicks off everything that happens next here on Planet Doug. And the thing is, we were heading into Malaysia’s independence weekend. It’s actually Tuesday, September 1st today. So, we just had the Hari Merdeka weekend. It just came and went. And when I saw that weekend approaching, it gave me the impulse to leave Melaka because during holiday weekends here, the hotel prices just skyrocket, double, triple, the hotels all get booked out, things like that. So, I thought it’d be nice to be on the road and just get out of the city. And but then you run into the problem. The next town down the road from Melaka is a little place called Muar. And I would like to spend a couple of nights there, a couple of days there, maybe three nights, two days, something like that. But then if I leave Melaka and I go there, well then I’m going to be there for the holiday weekend and all the hotels there are fully booked and the prices went through the roof. So that didn’t make a lot of sense either. So I started thinking about taking advantage of my camping equipment, which I do have. And I thought I could just ride out of Melaka. And I know a couple of places along the coast because I’ve been down that way before. And I thought, “Oh yeah, I remember those little inlets, those little spots where I could put up a tent and just spend the night outdoors, save some money.” But as soon as I started thinking about that, then I started to consider, well, how are you going to edit any videos? Because I could edit a video cycling to the shore, setting up my tent, having all my daily adventures. Okay, I’ve got the video. It’s on my GoPro, but now I need to edit that video. How do you do that in a tent with a laptop? I mean, you could do it in a way sitting somewhere with a laptop on your knees. But the problem is electricity because my laptop, as powerful as it is, the battery is not designed to last a long time. It’s a laptop that’s meant to be plugged in. I might get an hour out of the battery if I’m lucky. So, you can’t edit video while you’re camping using a laptop. So, that got my wheels spinning. And I thought, you know what? Maybe I should experiment, dip my toes back in the water of editing on a smartphone. Not fulltime. I would normally use my laptop because I need the power of the laptop in order to make my videos, but if you happen to be sleeping in a tent for a couple of nights in a row, hey, it’s nice to have the option to edit on a phone. So, that sent me down the rabbit hole of figuring out, okay, if I want to edit on a smartphone, which app am I going to use? And then I’m doing all this research, testing all these different apps, and I eventually bought one. But then before I can go out into the wilderness and sit in my tent and start editing on my phone, I have to learn how to use this app, right? You got to become familiar with the controls. And because all of that was happening, then that took me right into the holiday weekend. Anyway, so I realized, well, now I’ve spent a few days getting set up for mobile editing and now the weekend is here and then I knew I was going to stay in Melaka over the weekend. So, that’s kind of what’s been happening lately. But to go back to the technology side of things, a long time ago, I did all of my video editing on a smartphone and I used an app called KineMaster. And I liked KineMaster because it was one of the few apps where you could hold your phone sideways in landscape orientation and the editing program was laid out landscape. And what that does is it gives you a bigger video preview window, gives you a really long timeline, and it gives you enough real estate to show all the buttons and the menus and the controls. When you use a phone like in portrait orientation, like up and down like this, your timeline has a very narrow space. So, you don’t really see what you’re working on because your timeline is so narrow. And but with a landscape program like this, you’ve got the full length of the phone this way. So, you got a nice long timeline, which is why I like to work this way. Plus, I realized in the past that when I tried to use an editing program that was in this like portrait orientation, you have to hold the phone like this. You basically have to pinch your fingers and grip your phone all the time that you’re editing. And if I did that for an hour or two, my fingers just ended up in agony. They became a claw because I’m holding the phone all the time. And my hand just got exhausted. But if you hold the phone landscape, your hand acts just like an easel, a pedestal kind of thing. Your phone just sits on your hand like that and then you can work and work and work and work and your hand never gets tired. Plus, when I did the portrait apps like this, my fingers curl around the side of the phone because the screen is wrapped around the side and then my fingers would keep triggering controls on the editing app. But when you’re holding it like this, that never happens. Like nothing touches the screen. And I like to use this phone for video editing. This is the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus. And I like it, of course, because it’s a big phone, has a big screen, and it has a stylus. So, I basically just hold the phone here, and then I can just go tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap with the stylus. And so, I started looking into what app to use this time. Like I said, I used to use KineMaster, but then KineMaster started falling apart. They raised the price to $120 US a year, which is pretty expensive for considering that a lot of mobile apps that are pretty good are completely free. Things like, you know, I think everybody uses CapCut. There’s a whole bunch of these video editing apps that are full powered and they’re completely free. So, it’s hard to fork over $120 US every year to use KineMaster. And the KineMaster company started moving towards more short form content. I like the program because it was a full-sized editor meant for editing long form videos. It operated in a similar way to Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. So, it’s a very similar environment for me, but I guess they decided that the TikTok crowd, people making short videos on their phone, that’s a more lucrative market. And they started altering the program to be more suitable to short form like templates and fancy stuff and things that I just don’t use my phone for. But then the final problem with KineMaster was that when you had a long form video towards the middle and end of the video, when you exported your final video, the audio and video would slowly go out of sync. So if you see me talking on the video, the audio doesn’t match my lip movements, and that’s kind of a deal breaker. So when I finally got a laptop, I stopped using KineMaster because it just wasn’t suitable anymore. There was one other program, its main competitor back in those days was PowerDirector for me because PowerDirector was also landscape, but PowerDirector right out of the gate had a big deal breaker. I don’t know why it was designed this way, but I discovered that with PowerDirector, if you line up several video tracks and audio tracks, and then you delete something from your main video track, like you’re editing and you think, “Oh, I want to cut this piece out.” And you cut it and delete it. The video moves over to take up the empty space, but nothing else moves over. So, if you’ve put in like 15 photographs and 15 Google Maps screenshots and B-roll and music, every time I made an edit in PowerDirector, everything was out of position and I had to go back and move every photo, every screenshot, every audio track, every song because everything was now in the wrong place. And then you make another cut and delete some video from the main video track. The main video track moves over, but nothing else moved over and you had to re it was just a nightmare. So the way these programs normally work, everything moves over as a block. So if you delete something, your main video track moves, but it takes the photos and screenshots and music with it. It all moves together so nothing gets out of alignment. So anyway, because PowerDirector worked that way again because it’s focused on short form content and people who make a 30-second video for TikTok, it doesn’t matter to them. They can fix everything. But if you’ve got like an hour-long video, it’s a nightmare to work with. So back in those days, KineMaster was my only option. And this time here in Melaka when I started looking again I looked at PowerDirector I rejected it. I looked at KineMaster looked at they reduced the price now to $60 a year but I don’t really trust KineMaster because of that audio video going out of sync problem. I don’t know whether they fixed it and I didn’t want to spend $60 and then discover that it still has this problem. And then I found out that there was another option, a program called LumaFusion. And I knew about LumaFusion from the past. It was widely considered to be the best, most sophisticated, the most powerful mobile video editing app, but it was only available for iOS. So if you had an iPhone or an iPad, LumaFusion was the one you wanted. In my opinion, it was the best, but it wasn’t available for Android. But when I was doing my research this time, I learned that they produced a LumaFusion for Android. So, that seemed like a very good option. And then I learned that they don’t have a subscription model for payment. It’s a one-time payment. $30 US. You buy LumaFusion for Android. You can download it to all of your devices because it’s connected to your Google account, right? So, I have a tablet and two phones that I use for video editing sometimes. And I can download LumaFusion to all three of them. It doesn’t really work on my tablet because it’s not powerful enough. The tablet would be ideal, but my tablet it’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab S5, which is an amazing tablet for consuming media. This is my device for watching movies, TV shows, planning trips because Google Maps is nice and big, all that kind of stuff. So, I use this is my workhorse tablet, but it’s not powerful enough for video editing. I’ve tried in the past and it can’t handle 4K video. So, but I do have two phones that both can handle it and I can now download for $30 US. I can download LumaFusion to both phones and my tablet. And I saw something about a laptop version just today. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but maybe I’ll look into that as well. So yeah, it worked out to like $45 Canadian, which are the dollars that I live in and work with. So $45 is not a small amount of money to spend on one of these things, but I decided it was worth it. And I bought LumaFusion. And I can show you what it looks like. And a really interesting thing about LumaFusion, as I said, it works in a landscape position, landscape orientation. So that’s it there. So this is your timeline here on the bottom. So you get this beautiful, you see that waveform, that audio waveform that is essential. And LumaFusion is really nice because the audio peaks and the troughs, the high points and the low points are really sharp. So that’s how I edit. I have to see where I start speaking and where I stop because that’s where you make your cuts and put your video edit together. And a lot of the programs I was testing in the past, they didn’t even show you an audio waveform. And that’s a deal breaker. Without an audio waveform, I can’t edit. Other ones that had an audio waveform, it was more like a rounded line going up and down. Kind of gave you a vague sense of what the audio was doing, but it wasn’t sharp and clear. And I couldn’t use it to judge when I started speaking and stopped speaking, things like that. But this has a beautiful, beautiful waveform. Really nice. And then you have a video preview screen up here. Media screen over here. And of course, it’s really really powerful. So, I can move all of this around. I can make everything bigger or smaller. So, if I want to make the video, this preview screen bigger, I can make it bigger, make this one smaller, move everything around. But after I bought it, the interesting thing that I discovered is that yes, it has a landscape orientation, but it also has portrait. There you go. So, it has both of them, which I didn’t realize. So, if I feel like it, like sometimes if you’re like standing on the subway or something, it can be more comfortable to hold your phone like this because if you’re out in the public, it’s more secure, right? You’re holding your phone. So if I’m out in the real world and I want to edit like this in portrait orientation for a few minutes, I can do it. And then when I’m sitting in a hotel room, I just flip it landscape and then the phone automatically goes from landscape to portrait and back again. Very, very cool. So anyway, I started learning how to use LumaFusion and so far I haven’t come across a deal breaker. I’ve come across some things that are a little bit annoying, but I think it’s going to take time for me to figure out all the ins and outs and the shortcuts, how to use it the most efficiently. It’s a pretty complex program, probably more complex than anybody needs or most people need, but I really like it mainly because it does so many things that other programs don’t do. So for example, let me call up so here’s a set of normal video files for a video project up here in the screen. And the really amazing thing about LumaFusion, one of many amazing things is right on the thumbnail, it shows me whether it’s a photo or a video. There’s a little icon says, “Okay, photo, video, video, photo.” And it has the file name which to me is absolutely essential. So I can see okay there’s file 185 186 187 188 all in order. You can change the sort order. So it operates like a computer where you’re looking at all your files. You can sort it by date, sorted by file name, ascending, descending, alphabetical, whatever you want. And most mobile editing apps don’t have that capability. And on the thumbnail, it tells me the resolution. It says right on there. So I’m looking at a thumbnail. Oh, it’s video. There’s the file name. It says 16 by 9. Tells me the aspect ratio. Tells me the resolution. Says it’s a 4K video file. And it tells me the duration, how long the video clip is. All of that information is right on the thumbnail and that is very very rare. You just do not see that in mobile video editing apps. So that was very very important to me. And then the details go on and on and on where once you take one of these clips and put it on the timeline, I’ve added it to the project. It gives a little yellow check mark in the media area. So, I can tell at a glance which clips I’ve already added to the project and which I haven’t. And it puts a yellow line across the thumbnail to show you what parts of the video clip you put into your video project. So, you may have only inserted a small part of it or the whole clip. And when you look at that yellow line, it tells you exactly how much of the video ended up in the final edit and which parts of that video clip. I could go on and on and on. There are so many powerful features in LumaFusion. Now, as I said, I think for the average person, it’s too powerful. It’s probably too complicated, too many buttons. Most people don’t want to invest day after day learning a new UI like learning what all the buttons do. So basically I sit down with YouTube tutorials, tutorial after tutorial, tutorial, watching people teaching me how to use LumaFusion and then while I’m watching the video, I’m experimenting. Oh, okay. I see. Learning how to use it. I’m willing to put in the time to invest that amount of time to learn how to use it. If you don’t do that, this would probably be bewildering. Glancing at the screen, I just remembered another feature which for me is essential. Underneath the video preview window, there are two arrows, one pointing in that direction, one pointing this. And those arrows jump you from clip to clip to clip. So, and you don’t actually have to scroll and scroll and scroll to finally get to the next clip. All you have to do is hit that button and I jump to the very beginning of the next clip. Hit it again. You just basically jump, jump, jump, and you move through the video very very quickly. And the arrow in the opposite direction, you go back clip by clip by clip. And if you hit one of these buttons two times, you jump all the way to the beginning of the video project. Hit the other arrow two times. Throws you all the way to the end. So, it has all these navigation shortcuts which makes editing a video so much easier and so much faster. So, so far I’m pleased. I’m not I don’t have buyer’s remorse yet spending the $45 of my hard-earned cash on this app. So far, I’m pleased with my choice. And assuming I do a lot of video editing on a phone in the future, I think this app will be the one. It’s going to be my workhorse in the future. And as I said, I paid for it with a one-time purchase price, and I own it forever. You don’t have to fork over $100 a year to keep your subscription updated or anything like that. So anyway, there you go. LumaFusion, my new mobile video editing app. I actually did edit a complete video on the phone, even though I didn’t need to. I was in a hotel room and I could have used my laptop, but just to get the experience, I committed to editing a full video. Typical Planet Doug video all on LumaFusion. And I kept waiting for the gotcha because my videos are pretty long, right? They’re all at least an hour long. I keep trying to make them shorter. I hear people out there constantly telling me, “Your videos are way too long. You got to get them down to 20 minutes or 25 minutes.” But I try and try, but it’s really hard for me to do that. It’s not my natural voice or rhythm. But anyway, my videos end up being an hour long. So I was thinking by the time this video timeline reaches an hour now, the program is going to start falling apart. It won’t be able to handle it. And then when you do the video export, it’s going to freeze. It’s going to glitch. The audio is going to go out of sync with the video or it’s going to take 10 hours to export. But anyway, I’m happy to say that my first experiment editing a full 1-hour video worked flawlessly. It never slowed down. Even when I got to like 1 hour long, everything was responsive. Some of the other programs I was testing, like there’s a program called VN Editor, which is completely free. So, I thought, “Oh, okay. I should try using VN Editor just to see whether it feels good to be editing on a smartphone again instead of wasting money. Just give it a try out first. But I noticed on VN Editor though, well, VN Editor is only portrait, so I don’t like it for that reason. But every time I imported a clip, it had to convert the clip from 4K into like a 480p proxy version. So all of my videos had to be downscaled to like 480p or 720p before the program could even run it. And that took forever. And I might have 50 60 video clips. And if every one of them takes five minutes to convert into a usable format, I mean, I’m there for hours and hours just converting the video before I can start editing. LumaFusion, not a worry at all. I took all of my 4K video, dumped it in an hour of 4K video and buttery smooth. Like no glitches, no lagging, everything. Just play back is instantaneous. St. Paul’s Hill and the Church of St. Paul, it’s just yeah. So far, so for that reason, no problems with LumaFusion. And then when I did the export, it went really fast. It exported faster than my laptop. Though there one reason for that might be I think the final export the file size was smaller than from my laptop so I think with the laptop from DaVinci Resolve you’re getting a bigger beefier export this might have done some video editing magic to like remove some of the sharpness I don’t know it looks fine to me but anyway the video size seemed to be smaller after the export, but it exported really fast, really smoothly, and as far as I can tell, the audio and video are still in sync. I was watching it really carefully, and I started to convince myself that it was a little bit out of sync, and I was like, is that lining up with my mouth or not? And but I think the average even if it is like a millisecond or so out of sync, the average person is not even going to notice. I just pay really really close attention to that. But as far as I can tell, everything works fine with LumaFusion. So that is my main technology story. And it was researching these mobile editing apps, deciding which one I wanted to buy, then buying it, then learning how to use it through all the tutorials and then editing my first video using LumaFusion. That is why I ended up staying in Melaka through the long weekend. And because I stayed in Melaka through the long holiday weekend, that led to the other Planet Doug adventures that I’ll talk about next.
Once I’d committed to staying in Melaka a bit longer yet again and probably staying throughout the holiday weekend. Yeah, I can’t spend all day every day just learning about LumaFusion. Of course, I’m going to go out exploring and shooting some more Planet Doug videos. And the videos that I’ve shot in the last week or so, they probably didn’t absolutely need to be shot. You know, it’s not like these were topics that were crying out to me that, oh, you got to find out about this and make a video about that. But since I was here and I had the time and the amazing city of Melaka is all around me, I thought, “Oh, let’s continue making editing posting videos about Melaka.” So, one of the ones I did, it’s already on my channel. It’s already gone live. May have been the last one that I posted, was a trip to the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. And that was kind of a funny video to make because I’d set off to make that video once already because it’s a well-known attraction in Melaka. And a lot of people had said to me, “Oh, you got to go there. You got to go there.” But then I realized, I mean, I’m not a huge I’m not hugely interested in just seeing a bunch of furniture in a house. I like I realized that if I went into this house, which has been preserved as a museum, I wouldn’t really get a lot out of it unless I knew more about the background. So, I took a step back and I investigated like where did this building come from? Like what is its history? And then I uncovered a very fascinating story, fascinating to me about again Heeren Street, that street where this museum is located and Jonker Street and the whole history of that part of Melaka starting with the Melaka Sultanate and the Portuguese when everything there was made out of wood and they all kept burning down. All the houses and the warehouses were at risk of fire. And then when the Dutch came along in 1641, they started putting in building codes that now everything had to be made out of brick and tile roofs so that things don’t burn down all the time. So, I learned about that. And I learned about the history of these houses because they’re quite unusual in that they’re long and skinny houses 60 m long but only 15 m wide. It’s like where did that design come from exactly? And so I did a lot of reading about that, a lot of research into that. So then once I understood some of that history, then I thought, okay, now I’m ready to truly appreciate the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. But then when I started to walk towards that museum, I realized that I’m so hung up on this history that my main focus for even going into the museum is not I’m not really that interested in the family, the life, the history of this Nyonya family. That really wasn’t what I was interested in. I wanted to get inside this house just so I could see the interior in terms of the engineering and the architecture. I’d learned all these things about how these buildings were designed, but I’d never I had rarely had a chance to go inside one and see the interior to see the result of all these engineering and design choices. So, that’s what I was interested in when I was going there. And that ended up kind of making the video a little bit of a mixed up video because I’m like marching along. I’m on my way to the museum. And again, I had it in my head. Okay, Doug on Planet Doug, let’s make this video short and snappy and to the point. And what do I do? I end up spending 30 minutes rehashing everything I’d learned about Heeren Street, the construction of these houses, the original Dutch style of house, what they looked like originally and then how they evolved over the years and the Chinese Peranakan community bought these houses and sort of tore some of them down and built new grander houses or renovated the old house that was there. Anyway, I went through the whole song and dance all over again because I had all that information in my head and I knew I was going to talk about it when I’m inside the museum. But as far as that one video is concerned, if a viewer only saw that one video, they don’t know any of these things. So, I thought I had to review that at least. So before I even got to the museum, I spent 30 minutes rehashing everything I’d talked about in two previous videos. So in a way it was like three videos in a row where I talked about the history of the houses of Heeren Street. So that was a little bit much, but that’s just what ended up happening. And then I went into the museum. It’s 25 ringgit. And I really wasn’t sure how things worked on the inside. I did some research and some reading looking at reviews and a lot of people said that well you get a guide. It’s like a guided tour and oh so like you have to show up at a specific time and join a tour group. But other people said no it’s an audio guide where they give you a QR code. You scan the QR code and then it takes you to a website with an audio file and then you just listen to the audio file. So, you have to bring your own earphones and then you walk through the house listening and it guides you through the house. That’s what other people said. And I didn’t know who was right. I didn’t know who was telling the truth about anything. But anyway, I go in there and then I pay my 25 ringgit Touch ‘n Go. And then this woman standing there who clearly works at the museum, you know, she’s like, “Come, come with me. Come with me.” And I think, “Oh, I’m getting a guided tour as part of my 25.” And I was the only person. I’m not like part of a big group or anything. So, I was really surprised that she was like, “Come with me, sir. Come with me.” And I was happy about it, but also not so happy about it because I was there not to learn about the family and the furniture. I was there to look at the air well and the firewall or what I thought were firewalls and things like that. I was interested in the architecture, the engineering, and the design. And if she’s taking me on a tour of the whole place, you know, talking talking about the owner of the house and how many children he had and how many a wife and six concubines and the Chinese culture and how it evolved, mixing with the Malay culture for the Peranakan. You know, I’m sure all of that is interesting, but that wasn’t my main interest. So, I thought I don’t really want a guided tour, but apparently I’m going to get one. But then this woman just takes me into the very first room, and I guess her job is to just give me a quick summary. Basically, she handed me a brochure. Okay, here, sir. Here’s your brochure. And then she pointed to a QR code on the table and said to me in very rapid English, but with a Malay accent. I have a hard time understanding what people say when they speak really really quickly. The way local people here speak English quite often is very fast and very staccato and it feels like a lot of connecting words are left out or something. I have trouble following them basically and I couldn’t really follow her but she was speaking really fast and she okay scan this QR code here’s the WiFi and then she was gone like oh oh okay okay okay that’s I wasn’t getting a guided tour so okay now that makes sense to me and I was free to do what I wanted to do but I’d also read that you could only use your camera or smartphone in one room a lot of people said that in the reviews. You’re allowed to take pictures and video here, but nowhere else in the house. And I was worried about that because I’m there to shoot a YouTube video. But as it turned out, she the guide told me just don’t use a flash. She didn’t mention video specifically, but she did talk about, you know, taking pictures. And you’re free to take pictures, just don’t use a flash. A lot of museums have that rule. And then I just sort of took that to mean, okay, it’s a free-for-all. You can take video, you can take photos, you can do whatever you want. Just don’t use lights, don’t use a flash. So anyway, that was kind of cleared up for me. And then I scanned the QR code and to my surprise it actually started up a video I mean an audio file because these things never work for me. Works for everybody else. They never work for me. But I scan the QR code in the first entryway and I listen to this two-minute audio track welcoming me to the museum giving me a little bit of the history and that was it. It was like two minutes long and then it was done. And then as I went through the rest of the house, I started seeing QR codes spread around. So there might be a table in another room and there’s a QR code on that table. Then there’s another QR code on the wall, QR code over here, on a column, on the stairs, on a door or something. So you basically it wasn’t a long audio guide, which is what I was hoping for because I wanted to start the audio, dial it in, put in my earphones, and then have that guide me through the whole museum, and then I would follow the audio guide, complete a tour, and then I would go back to the beginning now that I know everything, and then take out my GoPro and start filming and talking and things like that. But it turns out the audio guide is divided up into dozens of little pieces and you have to scan all the QR codes one by one. And that QR code, it’ll tell you about this table, how where it was purchased from, the artistry of the table, the where it was, all that kind of stuff. And now that might be 2 minutes long. And then there’s another QR code at a desk and you scan that one and it tells you, oh, this is the desk that belonged to the man who bought the house and renovated it and he ran all his businesses from this desk. So, you basically had to scan all the QR codes individually, which I guess is not a huge deal, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. I didn’t know about that in advance. And then for whatever reason, the first QR code worked for me. None of the other ones did. I scanned and I scanned and I scanned and then I was doing some research trying to figure out like why isn’t it working? One of my AI buddies gave me a clue to maybe what was wrong. My AI buddy said that a lot of these museums that have a QR code on display, they have it connected to like a local network inside the museum. So, for example, when I was there and none of the QR codes would work for me at the time, I thought it was because my internet connection wasn’t reaching like my mobile internet was not making a connection, which it wasn’t. And then I tried to log into their internet and I think I did, but I still couldn’t get the QR codes to work. But what I did while I was there is I took a picture of a whole bunch of them, like a dozen of them. I took photos of them, very clear, big close-ups of all the QR codes, thinking I can just scan them when I get back to my hotel when I know I have a good Wi-Fi connection, and then I can listen to the audio tracks at least afterwards. But those QR codes won’t scan anywhere. So even I have them all on my phone now. I try to scan them, they won’t work. And then my AI buddy was saying, “Well, that’s because yeah, they do that on purpose. You can’t take those QR codes and use them anywhere else. They only work inside the museum. It connects to some sort of Wi-Fi internet in I don’t know how it works. But anyway, even with the AI buddy telling me, “No, you have to connect to their Wi-Fi signal in order for it to work.” I connected to their Wi-Fi signal, but they still wouldn’t work. So, I was unable to listen to any of the audio files, which was not a big deal to me. Thinking back, it probably was a big deal because without that information coming from their audio files, you’re just looking at a bunch of rooms. Okay, here’s a room with a bed and a so and a and a dresser or whatever, some art on the wall, but without the story of who lived there, maybe there’s history to this furniture. I don’t know. There isn’t a whole lot going on if you don’t have added information. And because all the information was put into those audio files, there was almost nothing posted. So, if you can’t access the audio files, you’re just looking at a room. There are no signs. It’s not like a museum with a sign on the wall that you can read. It’s like, oh, this desk belonged to this person and this is what they did here and this is where they bought the desk and how this worked. You know, there’s no information at all. You’re just looking at an old desk. So anyway, it didn’t bother me that much at the time because I wasn’t there to learn about the, you know, Baba and Nyonya culture. That wasn’t my main interest. I wanted to see how they bought three different properties, three separate houses, and then and then knocked down the walls in between them to create one big house. And I wanted to see the well on the inside. I wanted to see the outdoor courtyards with the open skylight, the air wells, how all that works. The servants quarters. I wanted to see how the house was built and engineered. So, in my video, that’s what I was talking about. I wasn’t talking about what the museum is actually about. I was just using it as an example of that type of engineering and architecture. So yeah, by the time I finished, I was probably babbling a little bit all over the place because I was sort of talking about the air well and the wall and the archways and how they wired it for electricity in the modern era and how did they handle plumbing and you know it doesn’t have a back entrance but only one front entrance all this kind of stuff. And yet everything around me was more about the family and the lifestyle and that part of history, how people lived. And so I had that kind of distracting me at the same time. So the video probably ended up being a bit of a jumble. And then when I posted it, I thought everybody I thought nobody would like it because it’s about this Nyonya and Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum. That’s the title of the video. But then there’s 30 minutes of me babbling about history and people wouldn’t like it. But people seem to respond to it. Okay. So it was a yeah relative success.
And after that video, what yeah, I went on to another one. Oh yeah, this one this is a video that definitely did not need to be made, but I had this idea in the back of my head. I had like a day, half a day free available. So I thought, well, let’s take advantage of this time and shoot a video. And because I know so much about the museums of Melaka now, I thought it would be kind of handy to make a short quick walkabout tour just to show people where the museums are. Like in the historic core of Melaka, it’s a very compact area like 500 meters in any direction and there’s at least 18 museums right in that area. So, what I wanted to do was like take my knowledge. I know where all of them are. I know all of the names of them. And I thought I could just grab my GoPro, go for a walk, start at one part of Melaka, like in front of the Samudera Museum, and then just say, “All right, welcome to a walking tour of the museums of Melaka.” Right here is the Samudera Museum, the Royal Malaysian Navy Museum, the Maritime, the Ocean Museum, and here is the Customs Museum. This one costs 20 ringgit. That one’s free. Bunch of museums right here. Let’s go down to Dutch Square. Here, Dutch Square. There’s the history and ethnography museum. There’s the youth museum. There’s the Kota Melaka Warisan Gallery Museum. Here’s the architecture. You know, boom, boom, boom. All right. Now, we’re at the back of St. Paul’s Hill. Here’s the Sultanate Palace Museum, the Independence Proclamation Memorial. Here is A Famosa. Good. Now we’re on Jonker Street. Here’s the Cheng Ho Museum. Here’s the Baba Nyonya Heritage Museum. Great. All done. You know, in and out really fast. Of course, by the time the dust settled, I had been talking for over an hour about all the different museums. I just couldn’t help myself. Like when I started at the Flor de la Mar, you know the Portuguese ship that there’s a there’s a recreation of this Portuguese ship and it’s a museum now. The interior of the ship is actually a museum and you can climb onto the deck and then go down into the hold and they have all these museum exhibits. But the thing I noticed when I went to that museum the first time is that I didn’t even know before I went there that it was a treasure ship and had this incredible history that when the Portuguese defeated the Melaka Sultanate, they looted the city, put all the treasure, all the gold, everything of value onto this ship to take it back to Europe. And then the ship sank in the Melaka Strait. And that treasure has been lost. Nobody’s found it. It has not been recovered. So, that’s the most important thing about that ship. And yet, when you go through the museum, it doesn’t tell you that. It like it doesn’t highlight that part of its history. So I kind of used that as an example to say that when you visit the museums of Melaka, it’s a good idea to do your homework before you go because the museums have a habit of skipping the main story. They assume you already know the story and then the museum is like an illustration of the stories, but you already have to know the stories before you go there. Like when you go to the Melaka Sultanate Palace Museum, there’s a really cool display that tells the life story of Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, that whole drama, which is an amazing story, but as a typical tourist, you probably walk through that gallery and you read some of the signs, but it’s probably not going to be clear to you and you look at it and go, “Oh, that’s some sort of historical story of Melaka.” But if you know the story of Hang Jebat and Hang Tuah already, then that exhibit has a whole lot more meaning for you. So you kind of have to know the stories before you go to the museum, which is kind of odd. So anyway, I wanted to say that. So I added that little aside in my walkabout tour. And then every time I went to a new museum, I had another little aside I wanted to give expanding a little bit. A little bit here, a little bit there. And before I knew it, I had a typical hour-long hour plus Planet Doug video. And the crazy thing is how tired I became. I really didn’t walk very far. Like I said, Melaka, the downtown core is very compact. All I did was walk from my hotel to Dutch Square past Samudera. And then I went around St. Paul’s Hill to go to the Melaka Sultanate Palace and the Proclamation of Independence Memorial. Then I walked back to Dutch Square over to Jonker Street. And then I went up to the top of St. Paul’s Hill because I wanted a bird’s eye view. So from up there I can point out where all the museums are clustered. Here’s one cluster of museums here. And there’s another cluster over here, one here, and one here. I group the museums in clusters. Five different clusters. But by the time I walked to the top of St. Paul’s Hill, I was so laded, I couldn’t even speak anymore. Something went wrong with my voice. I couldn’t talk. And no matter how long I sat on a bench to get my heart rate down, to get my breathing down so that I could talk on camera again. As soon as I started talking, I ran out of breath. I became breathless and I became very very laded. It was very weird. I’ve had that experience a few times lately. And I guess it could be just heat exhaustion because I’m out in the hot sun all of this time, but it might also be dehydration. I just don’t drink enough. I think that might be the problem. I’m just suffering from extreme dehydration. So yeah, by the end of that video, if you watch that video when I post it, I might be posting it today after I finish recording this. You’ll hear my voice at the end when I’m on the top of St. Paul’s Hill. And I tried to cover up how much I was suffering. I didn’t want to show that I was like one second away from the world going black and I was just going to pass out and fall over. I was that out of it just from I don’t know what it was. I mean like I said it’s not like I had just run a marathon. I walk I routinely walk much farther than that in a single day. So why was I so out of breath? And I think that’s part of it is that it’s one thing to be walking like you walk 5 kilometers in the hot sun. Okay, you’re a little bit tired, but now walk 5 kilometers in the hot sun and talk at this volume like I’m speaking into a microphone the entire time. It’s the talking that really gets you. That’s why you get laded and that you feel like you’re going to pass out sometimes. And I’ve noticed that in the past if I’ve gone hiking and I’m trying to record a video while hiking, it sounds like I’m about to die. Like, man, you’re out of shape. You know, listen to your breathing. Like you’re climbing up this hill, but you’re like, you know, you’re breathing so hard. It sounds like you’re really out of shape. But as soon as I stop talking and I’m no longer talking into the GoPro, then I’m fine. I just power up the hill. But as soon as I turn on the GoPro and I try to go uphill and talk loudly at the same time, then I start getting laded again. I’m losing my breath. The world starts to go black and I feel like I’m going to pass out. And that happened during my museum walkabout video. So yeah, that should be my last museum-based video from Melaka. So, yeah, but again, my original idea was to make like a 20-minute quick guided tour just to show the physical locations. Here’s some museums. Here’s some. Here’s some. Here’s some. Done. Pack up your GoPro. Go home. And I ended up talking a lot more than that. And it, you know, ended up being an over an hour-long video, as all my videos are.
And then I had this idea again. Nobody was screaming for this video. Nobody was saying, “Oh, you’re in Melaka, Doug. You’ve got to shoot this video.” Even I wasn’t totally committed to it. But while I’ve been in Melaka, I keep seeing a bus, a city bus. I remember the number because I see it so many times. It’s a pink typical city bus, the same style of bus that I used to see in Port Dickson. And it was bus number M100. And bus M100 goes through Dutch Square. And I kept wondering, okay, here I am walking everywhere, riding my bicycle everywhere. And I even walked all the way to Melaka Sentral. And a lot and a few people left comments on that video saying, “Dude, Melaka Sentral is a bus station. Why did you walk all the way there and walk all the way back?” I ended up walking 14 kilometers that day round trip to go to Melaka Sentral and back again. And like dude, like how dumb are you? It is a bus station. Why didn’t you take the bus back at least come back from Melaka Sentral to Dutch Square? And I guess my reason for that is I like to walk. It’s better. You go slowly. You see things from a bus, you know, you wait an hour for the bus to show up and then you sit in the bus, you don’t see anything. So anyway, I like walking. Also I didn’t know even when I went out there, I didn’t know I was going to a bus station. It never occurred to me. So, I didn’t do any research into the buses and I wouldn’t have known what bus to take. But when you’re in the heritage zone for a while, you see bus M100 all the time. It’s just a constantly going by. And every time I saw it go by, you know, one day I should just hop on that bus for fun. Like, I don’t have a destination in mind. Let’s just ride around on the bus, see where it goes. That’ll be fun. I’ve done that lots of times in different cities around the world. And it’s always interesting. It’s sort of like a tour bus, but it only costs local city bus prices. Then just hop on the bus and ride till the end of the line and see where it goes. Maybe you’ll make an interesting discovery. So anyway, since I had some time here in Melaka, I thought, well, today let’s do that. And I did a little bit of research in advance and I don’t know whether it’s actually true or not but one of my AI buddies told me download this app called Lugo and when you have Lugo it will tell you everything about the buses where the bus stops are and you get a map with GPS trackers. Every bus has a GPS tracker on it and then you can use the Lugo app to see exactly where the buses are and how long it will be until they get to you and you can see the whole route. So I did I downloaded the Lugo app. I talked about it in the video and in the video on the app on my phone I had the route of bus M100 on display. It was like a dedicated thing that I had clicked on, show me bus route M100 in Melaka. And then it opened up a map, like Google Maps sort of thing. And it showed me with a yellow line exactly where the bus route went. And it showed me every single bus on the route with a GPS tracker so I could see exactly where all the buses were. So, in the video I talked a bit about how, yeah, Lugo works really well. You can pop up this app and then open a map of bus route M100. But since I shot that video, I cannot find that map again. I’ve been on Lugo long amounts of time searching and searching and searching and I cannot figure out how to find that map again. The UI of Lugo right now is just baffling to me. Now, when I open up Lugo, I have no idea what to do. I don’t know what it’s for. I don’t know how it works. I’m like I’m clicking on things. And I was talking with my AI buddies again, going back to them and saying, “Hey, listen. I’m on Lugo. Where can I find the bus route for M100?” And they give me all these things. Oh, do this. Click on that menu. But everything they tell me to do, it doesn’t show up on my app that the menus don’t match what they’re telling me. Anyway, in the video I talk about how good the app is and you should use it in Melaka, but now based on experience after I shot the video, I’m telling you it’s useless. I mean, I cannot figure out how to use it. Ever since I shot that video, I’ve never been able to find anything that I found that first day. I don’t even know what I did. I don’t know how I found that bus route map. I cannot recreate the steps. So anyway, so yeah, I went off and the main point of the video in the end is that bus M100 exists. It goes in a loop from like well it starts at Melaka Sentral. That’s the starting point and the ending point of bus M100. So it leaves from Melaka Sentral and then goes in pretty much a straight line right down to Dutch Square, goes through Dutch Square, and then it does a loop out to the Portuguese settlement, turns around, comes back, goes all the way over the Melaka River to the other side, then completes a wide loop all the way back to Melaka Sentral. So, it does this loop around. And when I was doing my research, I was told they accept Touch ‘n Go. So, you can use your Touch ‘n Go card to get on and off the bus, which I thought was amazing. But they don’t accept cash. It’s completely cashless. But then when I finally found the bus and the bus pulled up and I got on, the reality was the opposite. I went on there with my Touch ‘n Go card and then the driver says, “No, no, no. You can’t. That doesn’t work. You can’t use Touch ‘n Go for this bus, but you can pay with cash.” So, it was the exact opposite from what I thought. I thought, “You can use Touch ‘n Go, but you can’t pay in cash.” So, that’s what I was telling people in the video. Then, I get on the bus and the guy says, “No, no, no, that’s not right. You can’t use Touch ‘n Go and you can pay in cash.” But of course, to pay in cash, you have to know where you’re going. Then you have to tell the bus driver where you’re trying to go and then he tells you what the fare is. It’s not a very efficient system. And the other really inefficient thing is the bus stops are a lot of them don’t exist. Like the bus just stops at the side of the road and there’s no bus stop. The local people just know that’s where the bus comes, but there’s no sign, there’s no benches, there’s no shelter, there’s nothing to indicate that this is a bus stop other than the local people just got used to it. But if you’re a foreigner, you would have no idea. And I did eventually find an actual bench with a roof, a shelter that was near the Ibis Hotel. I went into the Ibis hotel to ask them like, “Is it true that the bus goes by here? And if so, like where is the bus stop?” And the guy, the receptionist at the Ibis Hotel, he says, “Yeah, the bus goes by here. And if you just go outside the hotel, turn left, there’s a bus stop right there.” So, I went in search of it and it was further away than he had told me, but I kept walking and walking and walking and then I suddenly saw this big metal bench with a roof and I thought, “Okay, that has to be the bus stop.” And in fact, on the road there was a big painted square that said Bas on it. B A S. And in the video, I was confused about that. I forgot that B A S is how they spell and pronounce bus in Malay. You know, it’s like bus or whatever. But B A S means bus. But of course, this bench and this roof has no sign on it of any kind. So, you have no idea what bus stops there. There’s no schedule. There’s no route information. It’s just a bench and you just have to assume it’s a bus stop. And so I hung out there for a while and I was tracking the buses using the Lugo app. It worked really well once I opened up the route map for bus M100. Worked fine. I just can’t find it again. I have no idea where it is in the app. I can’t track it down again. But at that time I had it. And I could see the bus, a little toy bus, a blue rectangle coming along the road. And it says, “Okay, it’s 7 minutes away, 4 minutes, 2 minutes.” And then, yeah, a bunch of people got on the bus with me. The guy told me, “No Touch ‘n Go.” And it was 2.2 ringgit to go to Melaka Sentral. My original idea was just to sit on the bus and never get off it. I was just going to go around in a loop, come back to the beginning, and get off. You know, I’ve done that in Kuala Lumpur when they made when they originally came out with those tourist buses, the go buses, the color-coded go buses, and they were free for everybody, free for tourists. And then I experimented with those bus lines where you can just hop on one of them and you don’t have to worry about where it’s going because it does a loop and you end up right back where you started from. You don’t have to worry about how much it costs or bus stations. You just hop on and go in a circle and you know eventually you’re going to go right back to where you started. So that was my original idea for M100, but it turns out the bus goes to Melaka Sentral and that’s the end of the line. You have to get off the bus at that point because that bus might go out of service or something. So by the time I got to Melaka Sentral, everybody got off. I couldn’t stay on, so I got off the bus, too. And then I had to figure out, well, how do I get back on bus M100, you know, for the return journey. So, yeah, it was interesting for me. Maybe for someone else it would be even more interesting like if they spent all their time in the heritage zone, the UNESCO heritage site, and they that’s all they saw. It would be kind of cool to hop on M100 and it takes you outside the heritage site into the rest of Melaka like over a million people who live there in this big Malaysian city. So you get a nice tour. You can see all the giant hotels, apartment buildings, department stores like Eon. Yeah, you see a lot of big landmarks. You go over the bridge and see all kinds of interesting neighborhoods. So, I mean it for someone who enjoys that kind of small adventure, yeah, why not? Costs you three ringgit in total. Three and a half ringgit to do the full loop and then you can go for a ride. It actually takes you past the Portuguese settlement. I was hoping the bus would go like right up to the shoreline in the heart of the Portuguese settlement, but it doesn’t. It goes by the prison museum and then St. John’s Hill and then it kind of skirts Portuguese settlement. So you could get off the bus there and just walk a couple of blocks into the Portuguese settlement, but it doesn’t actually go through it. It just goes along the edges of it on the main road. But yeah, someone could have an interesting experience. I like most everything that I saw I’d seen before. So when I rode around on M100, every road I went down, every building I saw, I had already seen. I’d either walked by it, walked down that street, or ridden my bicycle down. So I was going through familiar territory. And then I was trying to answer the question, is the bus M100 useful to foreigners? You’re a foreign tourist in Melaka. Can you use this bus? Can it help you explore the city? And my conclusion in the end was nah, not really because all the nearly all the attractions are right in the heart of the historic center. There’s not very much outside of that. You could like there’s the prison museum, St. John’s Hill Portuguese settlement. And this bus does go there, but because the bus does a circle, it’s really hard to use. Like normal buses go in a linear path, like it has a route going down all these streets from A to B, and then it just turns around and goes back down the same street. Right? So you could take the bus from here to here, get off, look at the prison museum, then just cross the street and hop on the same bus going back in the opposite direction. Right? That’s how buses work. In my experience, they go down this street and go back on the same street. So you know exactly where you are. But this bus, for whatever reason, it does a loop. And if you think about it, that causes a lot of problems because if you want to go from A to B, now you want to go back from B to A, you can’t just reverse. You can’t just go here and here. You go from A to B. Now you want to get back to A. You have to do the entire loop because the bus only goes in one direction. So you go from Dutch Square to the prison museum. Now you want to get back to Dutch Square. Well, you’ve got to go all the way around the entire loop all the way back up to Melaka Sentral, get off the bus, get on a new bus, and then complete the loop all the way back to Dutch Square. If you see what I mean, if you think about it logically, a loop is a very difficult way to go from A to B because to get back to A, you have to complete the entire loop. There’s no way to go there and back on the same bus. So anyway, it’s not a very useful bus for foreigners, for tourists. So unless you just want to do it for fun, these these things I enjoy doing. I like learning how things work. And the local people, they were getting on the bus with a card. So there is some sort of a official Melaka transit card. And almost everyone on the bus seemed to be a senior citizen, someone overweight or having some kind of medical problem or people who looked very very poor. And I think with their when you become a senior citizen in Malaysia, I’m sure you get a discount on your card and they were beeping in and out of the buses with that card. But they seemed to be low-income people for the most part. I didn’t like the buses weren’t packed with people commuting to work and going to school, things like that. The only people I saw were clearly they were taking this bus because financially they had no other choice. They don’t have a car and they can’t pay for a Grab. But if you’re a foreign visitor and you want to go to the prison museum, take a Grab. Don’t mess around with this bus. It will just be way way too much of a hassle. So anyway, that was also supposed to be a very quick and easy short video. Hey, how do I take a bus in Melaka? You know, a 20-minute guide. How do you take a bus in Melaka? But then I went off on all these Planet Doug tangents. And that video also ended up being an hour and 9 minutes long. But yeah, that’s normal for a Planet Doug. And yeah, then I shot one more video, but that video, the story of that video is more about hotels, and that will be the next story. Here we’ve had my technology story, Planet Doug videos story, and now my endless struggle with hotels, and that is going to be the next story.
I said there was a video about this story and that’s because I did fire up my GoPro when I moved hotels twice and I’m not quite done with the hotel moving yet. So, the hotel story starts with the fact that I ended up staying in Melaka longer and I found myself staring down the barrel of the Independence Day weekend and I guess I waited too long to make the decision because I was staying at the Mahkota Vibe Inn which is a place that I’ve stayed in Melaka most of the time and when I went to book my room like to extend my stay no room available. It was sold out. So when I went to Agoda and I went to Booking and Traveloka, they all said, “Yeah, there’s there are no rooms available. They are sold out.” But I knew from experience in the past that this wasn’t entirely true. All that actually means is Agoda had a certain number of rooms that they could sell, but that doesn’t mean they had all the rooms. So the hotel makes a decision about how many to post to online sites and then they hold some rooms back so that they have rooms to offer people who just come in through the front door, right? Walk-in guests. So they kind of try to strike a balance. So in the past when I found out a weekend was coming up and I really I wanted to rebook and they had no rooms on Agoda. At one point I went to the front desk and I says, “Hey, by the way, I was just trying to extend my stay and there’s no nothing available on Agoda, but do you guys have a room still? Like have you tucked a few away? And can I just book the room and pay you with Touch ‘n Go right here at the front desk?” And to my delight, yeah. And to my delight, the price that I paid like using Touch ‘n Go at the desk was lower than the price on Agoda, particularly when you factor in the tourism tax and the heritage tax and the service charges and the fees. That really bumps up the price on Agoda. And somehow when I talked to them at the front desk, they kind of skirted a lot of that stuff and just threw out a number and says, “Yeah, give us this much.” And for as many nights as you want. So I knew I could do that. At least I did it in the past. And this time because of Independence Day weekend, nothing was available online. I went to the front desk again, but this time I could see right away. They kind of looked up and saw me coming and I could feel the negative energy almost right away. And then instead of the woman that I normally deal with just saying, “Oh yeah, fine, fine, fine. How many nights?” Oh yeah, do go ahead. Touch and go scan. She kind of looked at me and waited for my pitch and then she I have to call my boss. So I thought, yeah, well that’s it. Whenever they have to call the boss, that just means they’re going to say no and they’re trying to find a nice way to say no. So she called her boss and they had this long conversation. And then she turned to me and says, “Nothing we can do. We’re fully booked for the weekend. We have no rooms available.” So then I was kind of stuck because if they don’t have any rooms available, well, most hotels will have no rooms available and those that do are going to be very expensive. Very expensive rooms that basically I can’t afford. So now I’m scrambling to try and figure out where I’m going to lay my head. I had one more night, but then the next morning, yeah, I’m going to have to I get I’m getting kicked out. Basically. And then I was actually on Agoda looking around and out of nowhere I stumbled across a double room for 25 ringgit per night. And I knew the place. I’d seen it before. After I thought about it for a while, I remembered coming across this listing before. Or it was for the Discovery Youth Hostel. And I’d seen it in the past, but they always listed double rooms, like a basic standard queen-size bed, double room at a price higher, significantly higher than the Mahkota Vibe Inn, for example. And the room was clearly way worse. It was like a It’s like a youth hostel, an old broken down kind of place where nothing works. The walls are paper thin. You know, you’re and has a lot of dorm rooms, things like that. So, in the past, whenever I saw the Discovery Youth Hostel, they had these double rooms that were really awful for a much higher price and they had dorm rooms and those were the only options. So, I never really thought about going there because the Mahkota Vibe Inn was a much much better deal. You got so much more value for the money that you spent there. The rooms are just so much nicer. But this time, for some reason, I put in the dates and it came up with a double room for 25 ringgit rather than, you know, the 75 ringgit that you would see normally. I thought 25 that’s I’ve never seen anything that cheap. That must be a dorm bed. But I went through the check-in process where you select your room and I assumed it would now say, you know, you can choose between men only dorm, mixed dorm, this dorm, that dorm, 8 bed dorm, 20 bed dorm, whatever it is they have. But it turned out to be a private room for 25 ringgit. And as soon as I saw that, I just snagged it like fast as I could because I know from experience, I’ve done this in the past where I’ve been trying to look for a room somewhere, whether Indonesia or Malaysia, wherever, and then I see a good room at a good price and then I want to double-check something else like, well, before I book it, let’s check this other place. By the time I check the other place and come back, that listing is gone. Someone has snagged it. So I thought, okay, 25 ringgit is being offered to me right now. Let’s grab it. And I grabbed it for two nights to take me through the weekend. Okay, take me, you know, I’ve got I’ve got it for two nights now. And I booked it right away. So now that I had booked it, what I like to do most times in my life is do a little bit of reconnaissance. So like if I’m taking a bus tomorrow from here to Johor Bahru or something, I’m taking the bus tomorrow. I go to the bus station today. I like I go to the bus station the day before just so I know how to get there, where it is. Is it the right bus station? Is my bus leaving from here? Does my bus actually exist? You know, I like to do reconnaissance so there aren’t any nasty surprises the day of. So, in this case, this was actually on the day I shot the video taking the bus, bus M100 because the bus stop to get on bus M100 happened to be right beside the Discovery Youth Hostel. So, I thought, “Oh, I can go out, shoot this video riding the bus, and then I can kill two birds with one stone on my way to the bus stop. I can just pop over to the youth hostel, check the place out, confirm that I have a reservation because at 25 ringgit per night, I still didn’t believe it. I thought, ah, there’s no way this can be real. That’s too cheap for a private room in Malaysia.” So, I wanted to confirm I had a room. So anyway, when I was there, you know, I saw the building there, big sign, Discovery, Discovery Cafe and Guest House and an old building, like an old heritage building over a hundred years old right on the river. It looked kind of ideal from what I was seeing. And they had this interesting courtyard full of junk, just piles of old furniture and garbage everywhere. But I kind of like that because it’s a place where I can park my bicycle, right? It’s like, “Oh, wow. Look at all the Cuz I did meet a young guy there, Rizal. He worked there and he cleans the rooms and kind of manages the place in the daytime.” He was sitting there in a chair with his dog beside him. So, I went to talk to him and then I asked him about bicycle. It’s oh yeah, just park it anywhere in here. It’ll be fine. And then I asked him, I told him, “Okay, I’ve booked a room here for two nights on Agoda.” But actually by then I’d booked a third night. So I actually had three nights, two separate reservations. And I told him, I say, “Can I just want to confirm that I do have a room here because everything in Melaka is so booked. If I don’t have a room here, I’m really going to be stuck.” And I wanted to come here and confirm. And he wouldn’t I thought at first he just didn’t want to bother checking but he basically said to me oh no don’t worry about it if you you made a reservation on Agoda and you paid already says yeah okay no problem you you’ve got a reservation don’t worry about it we have a room for you so I just had to take him at his word. I thought he just didn’t want to check the computer or anything but I found out the next day when I went back there they don’t have a computer like this. They actually have a little room there just like the biggest pile of junk you’ve ever seen. It’s a crazy little place. But there’s a desk in there buried under all the garbage and some hooks on the wall for the room keys. And that’s where they handle people checking in and checking out. And in that room there’s no computer. So when I did check in the next morning, he asked to see my passport. So, he had my name and then he made a phone call and he had to call his boss and say, “Yeah, boss, I have” and he gave him my name and he says he has a reservation and then his boss looked it up, I guess, on a computer somewhere else and then he got the information. He turned to me and said, “Okay, yes.” And then he checked me in. But yeah, they he could not have checked my reservation. He’d have to call the boss to check. So, anyway, but he told me, “No, fine. You got a room. Don’t worry about it.” So, I knew where I was going the next morning. So, I woke up the next morning. I done a lot of pre-organizing and prepacking the day before. So, I was pretty much ready to go. And I was able to spend the morning at the Mahkota Vibe Inn because checkout wasn’t until noon. And what I will do is stay until 11:59. And at 11:59, I drop the key off at the desk and check out because I want to I paid for the room until noon. I want to maximize my time sitting in air conditioned comfort working on videos on my laptop. I check out at the last possible minute. And I was a little bit worried about the Discovery Youth Hostel because on the Agoda listing it said check-in was at 4:00 p.m. And I thought, h I hate that. Like even 3:00 p.m. I feel like a hotel is really pushing it. It’s like 2:00 p.m. is already too late for me. Like again, you you’ve paid for the room and then you have to wait until 4:00 p.m. before you even get possession and then they kick you out at noon the next day. So like, you know, you feel like you’re paying for a day, but you’re really only getting from 4:00 p.m. till noon. But anyway, when I was there the previous day, I mentioned that to the guy. I says, “I’m actually staying in a hotel right now in Melaka, so I’m going to be checking out at noon, and if I have to wait until 4:00 before I can check in here, you know, is there anything any wiggle room there? Can we do something else?” And he had no idea what I was talking about. He said, “No, we we don’t have 4:00 p.m. checkout.” Well, on Agoda, you do. It always amazes me. I tell hotels, restaurants, cafes all the time that their listing on Google Maps in Agoda is completely wrong and has all the wrong information, nobody ever cares. I always find that so odd. Again, if I’m running a business and my customer tells me, “Oh, the hours on Google Maps are incorrect.” That night, I’m fixing it, but no, no one else ever seems to worry about it. So, I told him, “Yeah, on Agoda it says 4:00 p.m. check-in time.” And I thought he’d, you know, get on the phone. Hey, boss, I think our Agoda listing, there’s something wrong with it. It says, you know, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, whatever. I don’t care.” You know, nobody cares. Anyway, he was not going to go fix that error. But it turns out, as he told me, “Ah, don’t worry about it. When you check out over there, come over here by one. I’ll check you in. Don’t worry about it.” So, that was good to hear. So, I was all set to go. The next morning, I’m packing up the final packing to get ready to move out of the Mahkota Vibe Inn. And just for fun, I do this all the time. It’s like a hobby, just checking rooms on Agoda. And I went to the Mahkota Vibe Inn to see, well, do they have any rooms on Agoda listed? And it turned out my room, the one they are kicking me out of, the room they told me was full, was now on Agoda. They had rooms available. My room in particular, the standard queen class of room. It was listed on Agoda. So they told me there were no rooms available, but in fact, they were not telling me the truth. And my room was actually available and I could take it. I could book it right there on Agoda if I didn’t want to move out. But the kicker was because of the busy weekend holiday, they raised the price to 300 ringgit per night. They actually had two listings, one listing for 200 and then for the exact same room they had a listing for 300 ringgit. So I think what they what the boss did when you know they they think they might have had a discussion beforehand. Yeah. You know that foreigner who pays for the weekends through Touch ‘n Go. If he comes to do it again, tell him no. Because we’re losing money. You know, we have to gouge people for the weekend and we got the weekend holiday coming up. We can get 200 300 ringgit a night for that room. So, let’s kick that foreigner out and then we’ll we’ll list it at 300 ringgit a night and see if somebody takes it. So, yeah, holiday holiday prices go up. They they skyrocket. So, anyway, I guess if I were a millionaire at that point, I would have just oh, I’ll just book it and I I don’t have to move, right? I’m if I can stay in the same room, that’s what I’m going to do. But I’m not going to pay 300 ringgit for a hotel room. And if I were going to pay 300 ringgit for a room, it would not be at the Mahkota Vibe Inn. Now you’re talking five-star luxury. So four-star anyway. But if you’re going to pay that much, well, you’re you’re not staying at the Mahkota Vibe Inn then I might as well see what luxury hotel is available. But I had my reservation for 25 ringgit a night. So, I was good to go. Put my trailer on the back of my bike and I rode my bicycle across town. I went to the Discovery guest house, the Discovery Youth Hostel. And when I first got there, there was nobody there. The guy Rizal, I guess he was off cleaning rooms or something, getting rooms ready. So, I just sat down. I just sat down and waited for a while. And then he he finally came back. His dog. Very happy to see him running around, bounding around. And then I went in to check in. And then we had that normal tax confusion. It’s always part of my hotel check-in process. There’s always some some weird thing that at hotel reception they don’t understand or they don’t know or there’s something confusing. So in this case, I was thinking about two things. The tourism tax and the heritage tax. And in the past, recently, every time I book a hotel, the 10 ringgit per night tourism tax is included on the Agoda price. So when you pay on Agoda, they add the 10 ringgit on top of the room rate on top of the all the other taxes and you’ve paid it in advance. And then I run into trouble because you show up at the hotel and some hotels are accustomed to collecting it in cash. And then you have to get into this big discussion with them, breaking out screenshots and receipts and trying to prove to them that you’ve already paid the tourism tax. So there’s that whole problem. But here in Melaka, they also have a heritage tax. And the heritage tax is a weird one, too. It’s for me anyway, it was three ringgit per night. And when I was booking the Vibe Inn, as far as I could tell, I mean, it’s they don’t break it down very clearly. I don’t think the heritage tax was included. And when I checked into the Mahkota Vibe Inn and then I showed them, okay, Agoda booking, I already paid the tourism tax, that’s taken care of. They accepted that. And then they said, oh, but you have to pay the heritage tax, three ringgit per night. So if I booked for a week, seven nights, then I have to give them 21 ringgit in cash. And what I did, I scan their QR code and I would pay them 21 ringgit from Touch ‘n Go to cover the heritage tax. But now that I booked this Discovery Youth Hostel in my Agoda listing, no tourism tax, but it listed the heritage tax and it said three ringgit per night heritage tax is included in your Agoda price. But of course, when I get there, the guy he they wanted a 50 ringgit deposit, which is kind of ironic. Maybe I’ll say something about that in a minute. But I had to give the guy a 50 ringgit deposit. And then he said, “But for two nights now you have to pay six ringgit for the heritage tax. So please give me 56 ringgit.” So now I’m mentally heaving aside. It’s like, “Oh boy, here we go again.” So I’m going to try and demonstrate to this guy that I’ve already paid the heritage tax. It was included in the price. And I felt a little bit weird about doing that. I kind of thought, ah, should I even bother? We’re talking, you know, I’m a low-budget dude. I don’t have a lot of money. But even so, but still, three ringgit is not a huge amount of money. Do you really want to fight over three ringgit or just let it go? But I thought, ah, I’m tired of all this confusion. And the one reason I was coming to here was this amazing price of 25 ringgit per night. So, but now you start adding more taxes on top of that. If I if if he’s going to add a tourism tax, of course, now it is going to be 35 ringgit and then heritage tax, now it’s 38. And there could be a cleaning fee and a service charge. It could be up to 50 ringgit all of a sudden, right? They get you with that 25 ringgit, but by the time you’re done paying everything, it could have doubled to 50 ringgit. And I’m kind of tired of that. So, I thought I would dig in my heels. And I said to the guy, “No, no, I I’ve already paid the heritage tax. It is already paid on Agoda.” And this guy, nice guy, friendly guy, helpful guy, but he’s not in the business of listening. He’s not there to listen to you. So I said to him, you know, I’ve already paid the heritage tax. All he heard was heritage tax. And he says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heritage tax. Pay me six ringgit heritage tax.” He says, “No, no, I’ve already paid on Agoda paid heritage tax.” And he says, “Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Heritage tax six ringgit. You know, you have to pay. You have to pay six ringgit.” I was like, “Okay, here we go.” So then this gets really confusing. Typical Planet Doug tangent here. Now I want to show him I already paid. But on Agoda when you pay the bill, you get a receipt by email. The receipt does not break down the price. It shows you how much you paid and that’s about it. So, the heritage tax is included line is not in your official receipt. And even if you go into a call up your booking, it shows you what you paid, but it doesn’t itemize it. So, even if I show him my receipt by email or on Agoda, neither one says heritage tax included. So, how do I demonstrate it to him? Because I remember seeing it. So, what I had to do was get out my phone, go to Agoda track down the Discovery Youth Hostel, make another reservation. So, I had to enter some dates where a room was available, and then select my room, select the budget twin room. It was a budget twin that I booked originally. And then you confirm, okay, that’s the room I want before you pay for it. Then it breaks down the price. That screen shows you the taxes and the service fees, but that’s the only screen that shows you. So, basically, I had to make a fake reservation before it would finally show heritage tax included. He accepted the proof that I showed him and I did not have to pay the heritage tax. But then came another surprise, something they never tell you online because I saw the Discovery Youth Hostel building and it looked really cool from the side. Old building, like a century old building on the river with this crazy spiral staircase, balconies on the outside. I was like, “Wow, what a funky place. This is really cool. And I can’t wait to see my room.” And then the guy, Rizal, he assigned me a room. He’s got the key and he says, “Oh, come with me. I’ll show you the room.” And of course, no surprise, he takes me across the street to another building. I wasn’t even in the good building. So, we crossed the street and then we just went into this ugly old square thing with no character, no windows, no balcony, no vibe, no riverside view, no river position. It was just like a basic commercial building. And he said, “Oh, no, your room’s over here.” Like h I mean I don’t really care but I was looking forward to being in the classic heritage building because I thought that was the Discovery Youth Hostel but they have different buildings and so when you book online you don’t know what building you’re going to be in. And I think that’s always a bit of a nasty surprise for some foreign visitors. Even the Mahkota Vibe Inn is like that. You go you go to the Mahkota Vibe Inn. You go into the lobby. You go up to the front desk. You’re feeling good. You’re checking in. You’re paying the taxes. You got your key. And you’re thinking, “Well, ah, nice place. Yeah, where’s my room?” And then they, “Oh, it’s it’s not here.” You’re like, “What? No, no, come with me.” And they take you outside down the street to some random door and, “Oh, no, your room’s up here.” It’s like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” You know, you like to know these things in advance because it’s always disappointing when it happens. And yeah, in this case, why the room cost 25 ringgit started to become more and more apparent because the youth hostel bones were starting to emerge. You know, they had this weird heavy metal door with like a skeleton key. So, it’s not like one of these doors that you beep in, you know, beep in, beep out. You’ve got a skeleton key and you have to unlock the door to go in, but then you have to close the door and lock it behind you. It’s a small thing, but over the course of a day when you go in and out like 10 times, it’s really annoying. It’s like even to get out of the building, you have to unlock the door to get out and then you got to close the door behind you and then put the key back in and lock it from the outside. And the lock is like decades old. So I’m in there with a skeleton key going pulling on the door, pushing, lifting, wiggling, and takes forever to get that lock to click over. It’s just a bit of a hassle. Then you’re in the building and of course it’s pitch black in there. There’s like no light at all. They’ve got all the low wattage bulbs, the lowest wattage they can find, no windows, narrow hallway, and like wooden wooden floors beside all the rooms. So, when you’re inside your room and people are going back and forth to the bathroom, it’s like a herd of elephants going by, you know, thump thump thump thump thump thump. This loud echoing thunder because it’s a wooden balcony wooden hallway that people are walking up and down. And it turned out that my room I I did say to him, you know, I’ve got a bicycle, bicycling equipment. So, if possible, can you give me a room on the ground floor or as low as possible? Like, if there’s a choice, can you give me a room on the lowest floor possible? And of course, when we get there, my room is on the top floor. It’s like, of course, it is. And then he takes me in these weird old buildings, right? They have these stairwells that are just weird. They’re like on weird angles. Like you go up this way and then you got to turn a tight corner and then you got to go up this way and then you got another corner. So you go up floor after floor through these really tight stairways. And of course I have my bicycle trailer. It’s not ideal in those situations. I have to pull the trailer up those stairways, you know, all the way up to the top floor. And then he takes me down the hallway. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. And he shows me the room. And I mean, the room is what you would expect. I mean, it’s a small room. It had I booked a room with two twin beds because that was the only room listed, but this one had a queen bed. So, which I don’t care. Twin, queen. I can I can make do with either one. But this room had a queen bed. And the room is so narrow that the queen filled the entire room from wall to wall and another wall on the other side. And that’s always a bit of a problem for me because you only have one side of the bed that you have access to. And I lay out all my gear on the other side of the bed, but then I can never reach it because I have to climb onto the bed to get all the way over to my bags where I have all my camera gear and laptop and everything. If the bed is in the middle of the room and you can come at it from either side or from the foot of the bed ah you can like organ you can get much much more organized but if the bed barely even fits in the room it becomes much more difficult to move around and it was pitch black in there you know the guy left and said okay here’s your room here’s your key and I closed the door and I thought oh I better turn on the light I can’t see anything in here it was so gloomy I’m like squinting and looking around and yeah, where’s the light? Turns out the light was on. It was like one little little bulb in the top of the ceiling in this indented little thing. And it must have been like a 10 watt bulb, five watt. Like, how small can light bulbs get? The smallest bulb they could get is the one they put in there. And I’m looking around the room. It’s like, I can’t I can’t see my hand in front of my face, man. And of course, there’s no no windows to the outside world. A lot of these weird hostels have like my room did have a window, but the window opens up onto the hallway. I don’t know why they ever build a room like that. Like why do you want a window that opens on the hallway? I don’t get it. There’s no light out there. It’s just the same dim bulbs and there’s no air out there. It’s not like you’re opening the window on the outside world, but a lot of rooms have that. So, and then the rest of the room, it did have air conditioning and a fan, which is a bonus. And then it got a little bit worse. Like all of this sort of stuff I’m accustomed to. I’m telling this story, but it’s not really a big deal for me. The thundering elephant sound of people walking up and down the hallway, no lights, lack of window, small room, you know, all that is normal. Low-budget life that that’s what it is. You stay in cheap hotels. That’s what cheap hotels are like. But there are some deal breakers. And in this case, the Rizal who showed me that, he showed me where the bathrooms are. Oh, that’s the other key thing. The reason it’s 25 ringgit, there was no private bathroom. It’s a shared bathroom. So, there’s no attached bath to the room. You have to go out down the hall to where there are shared bathrooms, which again is not a deal breaker. I’ve lived like that lots of times in the past. Anyway, he shows me the bathrooms, toilet, shower combination, you know, very, very small room. You kind of got to go go in there and hunch your shoulders and spin around and it’s really hard. And he said to me, “Oh yeah, here sometimes if there’s a lot of people, the water flow is not very good. So, just be aware of that.” And I said to him, “Oh, yeah, that’s no problem. No problem. I don’t need all.” Turns out he was minimizing the problem. So after I moved all of my stuff, I had I made like three trips because I had to bring my two bags into the room, then all my water bottles was like one trip to bring all my water bottles up, then my trailer. By the time I got everything up the flights of stairs, I was drenched in sweat, just overwhelmed with heat. And then it was time to take a cold shower. So, I said shared bathrooms are fine with me, but it does take some effort because now you can’t just strip down and stroll into the bathroom to take a shower. You’re going out into public, walking down the hallway, past other people, past rooms to get to the bathroom. So, you basically have to dress up to be proper and to go to the bathroom. So, now you’ve got to gather up all of your stuff. You got to get put clothes on to go to the bathroom. And then you’ve got to bring your toiletries. And you got to make sure you’ve got your room key. Make sure your valuables are tucked away and locked away because of course the lock to that room. Anybody could sneeze and it would pop open. So it’s not a very secure room. So you’re worried about your valuables in your room. So I do all that. I go all the way down there. You’re you getting into that bathroom and you close the door behind you. You try to figure out how the latch works and then you’re taking off your clothes and there’s nowhere to hang anything. Like come on. Hooks. Hooks, man. Ah, why do people never put hooks in bathrooms? Because you got your towel, you got your shirt, you got your shorts, taking them all off and then you’re like, how do I keep them out of the flood of water? There’s nowhere. You got to figure that out. Finally, you’re ready for your shower, which I was. I turn on the tap. Nothing comes out. Not a drop of water. No water at all coming out of the shower head. Nothing. There was no water. So, that that is kind of a deal breaker. So, I ended up moving from that bathroom because there was no water coming out of the shower head and then it had the tap near the the ground where they have like a hose, a bum gun basically for toilet cleaning. And sometimes if there’s no water up high, there can be water down below. But it turns out there wasn’t. I went over to the other bathroom. You got to get dressed again. And you got to unpack everything, move to the other bathroom, and then in there also no water, but out of the bum gun tap, there was a trickle. You know, you turn it on full and just like drip drip, just a little bit of water coming out. So I thought, well, that that’s all I can do. So then I’m down on my knees hunched over in this bathroom and I got my hands underneath that tap and I’m like drip drip drip and I wait until my I’ve got a a a handful of water and I’m just like splash. I get another handful splash and try to wipe it on my skin. Splash. And I’m trying to do it down my back, you know, just to just to wipe down a little bit with a bit of water. So, while I’m in there doing that, I suddenly hear these loud shouting. Sounded like Mandarin. It sounded like Chinese to me. And I hear loud voices right outside the bathroom door shouting and shouting and shouting and just all kinds of commotion out there. Goes on for a long time while I’m in the bathroom and I’m finally done with the, you know, I figure, okay, that’s enough. I’m, you know. So then I I open the door and as soon as I step out, there’s a group of three like middle-aged senior citizen Chinese men, kind of large, overweight men in their underwear, butt cracks on display. There’s this group of three men in their underwear crowding around the toilet on the other in the other bathroom because they’re like really close together and they’ve all got their toothbrushes in their mouth and in their underwear and they’re shouting at each other because they discovered there’s no water, right? And they’re trying to figure this out amongst themselves. And so anyway, they see me and they swing around and I got these three men staring at me in their underwear and they’re like, “Water? Is there water over there?” There. And I says, “No, there’s no there’s no water there either.” You know, and they just went back to shouting at each other. And these three men in their underwear were there all the time smoking, you know. It was like, “Well, welcome to hostel life.” So, those bathrooms were a kind of a deal breaker. I mean, if if I couldn’t find a solution to that water problem, I would never book a room there again. I can live with the crazy characters, the crazy men in their underwear smoking in the hallway. I can deal with all that stuff. That’s just life. But when there’s no water, nah, that’s that’s a deal breaker. Of course, there are a variety of ways of dealing with a no water situation or a drip drip drip water situation. I travel with a water bag which comes in handy quite often. It’s a 10 L bag and I normally use it for drinking water. I’ll bring it to like one of those water filtration machines, fill it up. It’s a 10 L bag, but it ends up holding like 8 1/2 L or something like that, drinking water. But in an emergency, it also has a shower attachment and I’ve used it in the past. You just fill it up with any old water and then you attach the shower attachment. And it has a rope on it with a hook and you can hang it from something and then it gravity feeds water. You know, it’s actually designed, I think, for camping because the water is the the bag is black and you hang it in the sun, the the sun will heat up the water inside the black bag and you can have like a warm water shower. But yeah, I’ve done that in the past where if the water is dripping very very slowly, you gather it up in something and then pour it into this bag and they can use it for a shower. So, I had that method in my back pocket. The other thing you can do in this building anyway is just go on a hunt because it has three floors and there are bathrooms on every floor. And I didn’t know how it would work. Like maybe the water tank was on the roof and my floor got the water first and that means the tank is empty. Or it could be pumped up from below and that means the water is you might have water pressure on the ground floor a little bit on the second floor and none at all by the time it gets to the third floor where I was. So then if you are going to take a shower, you go through that whole thing where you put on your go to the bathroom clothing or in the case of these Chinese gentlemen, just go parading around in your skimpy underwear. I guess if they were wearing boxers, it wouldn’t jump out at me as much. But yeah, they were wearing like teeny tiny bikinis, you know? It’s like I didn’t need to see that. I did not need to see that. Three of them all together crowding around the same toilet. Anyway, so you Yeah, you put on your your go to the bathroom clothes, get your toiletries ready, and then you’re just prepared to go from floor to floor to floor looking for any bathroom that has water. And I did that later on that day. And the first time, the first floor that I, you know, below me, they were all full because everybody’s doing the same thing. Everybody in the hostel is trying to find a bathroom that has enough water. So my floor, everybody on my floor had to go down to the lower floor. So it like doubles the amount of people needing to use them. So they’re all full all the time. And but I eventually found an open bathroom down on the the bottom floor. And yeah, did a little bit of showering there. Wasn’t a great deal of water pressure, but more than up on top. But yeah, the and then later on, I mean, the other technique you can use is just put a bucket in the room like in the bathroom where if there is a tap where there’s just dripping out, if you find a bucket or go buy a bucket, I’ve done that in the past, too. They might have a laundry area and you can grab one of their laundry buckets, put it underneath the tap, open it up, and just let it sit there for hour after hour. Hopefully, the bucket fills up. Nobody else wants to take a shower in that time. And then when you go in, well, at least you have a bucket there. And you can take a a water bottle, 1 and 1/2 liter, and just cut it in half. So the bottom is like a scoop. So now you got a bucket of water, and then you’re you know, you take your shower that way. So yeah, you you when you stay in one of these low-budget hostels, you become a hunter gatherer, you’re just trying to survive on a day-to-day basis, and you just you just adapt. You adapt to your environment. So eventually in the bathroom on my floor, a bucket emerged, and underneath the tap and then one of these scoops made out of out of a water bottle. So then I could take a bucket bath. And we just left the tap on all the time. And most of the time the tap was dry, but then every once in a while there’d be a burst of water. So when there was a burst, it would fill up the bucket. So that’s that’s what we did on the third floor. Yeah. I was thinking about all of this, how you stay in a place like that to save money, right? That’s the idea. By the time they did add some taxes, so my 25 ringgit per night was in fact 30 ringgit per night. So that’s what I paid for this room. And that saves money because it’s cheaper than other hotels. But sometimes you end up losing money because of the hardships in one of these places. For example, the security is extremely poor. So maybe you spend an entire year traveling and you think, “Well, I saved so much money because I stayed in low-budget rooms, but then at some point in your trip, somebody breaks into your room and steals your camera and your laptop and your smartphone, and you just lost $4 or $5,000 all in one go. But had you been staying in a nicer hotel with locks that work, maybe you would not have been robbed. You see what I mean? So, by staying in a low-budget hotel, it ended up costing you more money than if you paid for a nicer place from the beginning.
And in this case, I had my own similar experience where a friend of mine came down from KL, came down to Melaka for the weekend, my friend Matthew. And Matthew was one of the reasons I decided to extend my stay over the holiday weekend because he suggested, “Yeah, and if we’re in Melaka at the same time, we can you know, grab a meal together.” So that’s one of the reasons I stayed longer to meet up with Matthew. So that that day that I moved into the hostel, he arrived and he moved into the Estadia Hotel and then we arranged to meet for dinner. So, I was going to walk from the hostel to the Estadia, meet up with Matthew, and we’re going to have dinner. So, I’m I’m rushing around at the hostel getting ready. And then, as I’m I’m fully dressed, got my knapsack, I’ve got my smartphone in my pocket as I always do. I’m just going outside into the world. But as I’m going down floor by floor, I stop off at every bathroom just to double check like, do they have water? I’m like thinking ahead to the future, you know? I go in and turn on the tap. Oh, no water here. There’s a sink. Maybe the sink has water. Oh, no water here. Oh, there’s a dribble coming out of this one. So, remember this one might have a dribble. I got all the way down to the ground floor and there was a bathroom there. I wanted to check. And it’s again a very, very small room. You pretty much have to hunch your shoulders and suck in your stomach and okay, get in, close the door. And there’s no way to stand outside of the spray of water kind of thing. It’s not like you can stand 10 ft away and then see if there’s water. But I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was standing in front of the shower head. There’s the pipes going up the wall. Here’s the tap and there’s the shower head. And I aimed the shower head off to the corner away from me. Like just in case there’s water comes pouring out, it’s going to spray away from me and I’m not going to get soaked. So, I’m standing there and I turn on the tap full and I don’t know why this is the case, but in the pipe assembly, there was some sort of a cap missing. I guess there was supposed to be a valve there. And all there was was an open hole coming directly out of the pipe. And we happened to have really, really strong water pressure down there. So, I’m standing there, I turn on the tap, and I get blasted like with a fire hose. Hits me in the chest and just drenches me and I’m like fumbling. Ah, turn off off. It’s like, oh, so stupid. Now my shirt and my pants are soaking wet. And then I just go out into the world and I start walking to meet Matthew for dinner. I have dinner with him. And then I check my phone and my phone has a big red warning sign that it has short-circuited water has been detected in the USB-C port. You know, because all that water that hit me in the chest, I didn’t even think about it. I had my smartphone in my pocket upside down so that the, you know, the USB charging port at the bottom was facing up and all this water poured into the charging port and shorted out the charging area at the bottom. It’s like, ah, okay, I saved some money by staying in this cheap hotel, but it cost me my smartphone, right? You always have, you know, you’re staying in cheap places, you end up breaking a lot of your gear. Yeah, it’s the same thing. If you decide you’re never going to pay for air conditioning to save money, so you stay in all these cheap rooms, fan only, but the heat and humidity just destroys all your electronics, and you end up losing money in the long run. Anyway, after dinner, I got back to my hotel, my my hostel, back into my little room there, and then I started working on my phone. It was still on, but it had this big notification that water had damaged the charging port. So, now I’m online. I’m going to the forums, I’m talking to my AI buddies, I’m going to the Samsung site trying to like, what do I do? I explain what happened and can is my phone broken now? Can I fix it? What can I do? So now I’m spending the entire night working on my phone, you know, and they talk about how you got to, you know, shake the phone to get as much water out as possible. Shine a light in there, try to see if there’s water in there, any corrosion, get, you know, a flashlight and then get a toothpick with a little bit of a cloth or something and try to dry it out. And then when you set it up overnight, try to have a fan, you know, blowing on it all night long and then wait for hours and hours and hours until that sign, the warning goes away. And then when the warning sign goes away, then you can plug in. But they absolutely said do not plug in a charger with that warning because you could short-circuit and and destroy the phone. So, I was dealing with all of that. Hours and hours and hours go by and the warning about moisture being detected was not going away.
And I thought, well, yeah, I’ve ruined my phone thanks to this crazy bathroom situation. And yeah, wasn’t a good feeling. But then I did more research and one of my AI buddies guided me through turning on some sort of an advanced setting that revealed system apps. And one of the system apps is USB settings. And under storage, you can clear the cache. So my AI like I told my AI buddies like, “Yeah, it’s been hours and hours and hours. I don’t think there’s any moisture in there, but I’ve still got my phone is essentially still frozen because I’ve got this warning message and I cannot charge my phone. It will not charge. And then my AI buddy says, “Well, it could be just a persistent warning.” And told me well what you can do you know system app USB settings clear the cache that warning will disappear and then leave it and then if it detects moisture again it will give you a new warning. So you you basically clear the warning message and then it resets turn your phone on and off well off and on and then if there’s still moisture in there the the warning will come back. But if the warning doesn’t come back, you know, you might want to let it sit overnight. But, you know, maybe you can give it a try and put in a charger and see what happens. And luckily, ah, what a relief. It charged up again. So, whatever moisture got in there, I managed to clear it out. So, that that was that was the adventure of moving into the Discovery Youth Hostel. On the positive side, amazing Wi-Fi. They had like 5G. I had routers right outside my room and I had a good strong Wi-Fi signal in that room. But the bed sheet was like pure nylon, really horrible against your skin. The pillowcases were like 100% nylon. You try and put your face on that and it’s just like ah just it feels like rubbing a balloon against your skin. That squeaking sound. It just ah it just makes my skin crawl. I hate those nylon sheets. And luckily I talked about in the video I was shooting a video throughout much of this and I talked about how that’s why I travel with my own cotton bed sheet cotton. I have my own pillowcase that I carry in my bags made out of 100% cotton because if they have a nylon pillowcase, I just slip it inside my cotton one and I sleep much much better with the cotton. So, I I carry all of these things. And because I have a bicycle, I have oil like lubrication. So, all the door hinges that squeak and squeal, I go up and down all the hallways and I oil all the hinges so they they stop making noise and put buckets in the bathroom to gather up as much water as you can. I mean, yeah, it’s it’s a whole thing living in a an old broken down youth hostel like that.
And then came the next part of the story.
So, the next story involves where I am right now because based on all of the descriptions I just gave you of my room at the hostel, this behind me, this lamp over here, this beautiful cotton pillowcases, this feather pillow, this doesn’t look like that hostel that I was describing. And if I grab my GoPro, maybe I can give you a little look around where I am. Check that out. Look at the size of that window. Coffee station. Beautiful cotton fitted sheet, cotton duvet, feather, pillows, benches, furniture, nice TV, and a huge nice bathroom over there with hot water. All the hot water you could want. So, taking all of that in, I’m clearly not at the youth hostel. I’m actually in a room at the Estadia Hotel where Matthew was staying. And how I ended up here is kind of interesting because Matthew came down here for a conference and the conference attendees are staying at a different hotel, but he decided to come down a day early and then just book a room somewhere else. So he would spend one night in the Estadia and then the next day move from the Estadia to the conference center to join the rest of the conference members. So he booked this place and then he found out that check-in time at the conference hotel wasn’t until 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon and he had his wife and family driving down. So he thought, “Huh, what I can do is just book this room for another night, a second night, like his room at the Estadia, and then he can relax all day with this room and his family has a place to to relax and then they can wait until 4:00. Someone could even stay in the room maybe, but then at 4:00 they can leave this room and then go to the conference.” So he decided to book one more night. So this is a story Matthew was telling me and then he did. So he booked this room, paid for another night, and then he went down to the desk to tell them about it. And then, you know, make sure that his card still works. You, oh, I extended my stay by one night. Can you change the settings on my card so you know the electricity doesn’t turn off? He hand you he talks to the people at the front desk and they look at it and they turn to Matthew and say, “Um, sir, you booked the wrong day. He didn’t book that that day. He booked the next day by accident. He calculated the days wrong.” And when Matthew was telling me that story, the first thing I said was, “You know what? That’s a that’s exactly what would happen on Planet Doug.” And then Matthew laughed and he says, “Yeah, that’s what I said to the guy at the hotel. He told me I’d booked the wrong day.” And then Matthew laughed and says, “Ah, I pulled the Planet Doug.” So I guess making a dumb simple mistake like that is now synonymous with Planet Doug. So if you make some sort of a really dumb mistake, it’s like, “Ah, I pulled a Planet Doug.” So now that he had booked that room and he got a good price on it, it was like a discounted fair discounted rate. He couldn’t cancel it. He asked is now this is you know you can’t cancel it, can’t change the dates, can’t get a refund. So you are stuck with it. So now he ended up basically with two nights in this room that he wasn’t going to use and the room was just going to be sitting empty. Huh? Huh? Huh? And then Matthew said to me, “Hey, you know, the room is just sitting here. It’s going to be empty for two nights. You want it? You know, if you want to you know, move in here for two nights, it’s yours.” And we we made that arrangement. He gave me the room key and then I moved in. I just I went back to the hostel. And when I moved from the host, I spent one night at the hostel. So, I only had the one night there. It was exhausting because the bed was really uncomfortable. The roar of the air conditioner, the noise of the It was It was not a good night. But I did spend one night there. Because yeah, Matthew spent the night here. And then I just packed up my laptop, my GoPro, an extra t-shirt, and came over here. And I spent last night, and then today, and then I’m going to stay here in this room tonight as well, and then noon tomorrow, check out, and then I’ll be going back to the the hostel. So yeah, Matthew, he pulled a Planet Doug and then it worked out in my favor where he offered me Yeah. It’s like I can’t get a refund and the room’s just going to be sitting empty, so somebody might as well make use of it. Next thing I know, I’m sitting here in the the lap of luxury. It’s so much fun to go from one to the other, like to go from a hostel like that to here. It really makes me think about the nature of these sorts of places because there are some surprising things. I noticed when I was at the youth hostel, I wrenched my back. I hurt my back while I was there. And you do that all the time in low-budget hotels because the spaces are so narrow, the bathrooms are so small, and everything is awkward. There’s awkward angles. You’re trying to get past the door and then I’m trying to take a bucket bath and you’re trying to bend over and then put pour water down your back and you end up like a contortionist and I wrenched my back when I was in the bathroom. I was trying to get water onto my back and somehow I turned a little bit too far. I was like, “Oh man, you know, hurt something in my back.” And it’s really tiring. Like I said, my room I can’t access the bed except from one side. And you’re everywhere you’re going, you’re you’re sort of holding your body tight and then you’re reaching over things and then you know you’re a you’re sort of off balance because you’re leaning way over and trying to pick up something heavy and you can never just leave things out in the open because what I do in a low-budget hostel whenever I leave the room I want to go out I take my laptop, cameras, tablet, all the expensive of items, put them all in a special bag with a lock on it. And I put that bag inside my bicycle trailer and you close the zipper on that bag and you lock the trailer. And that protects a lot of your gear because most people are opportunistic thieves. If they can if they can break into your room, they run in, they see a laptop sitting on the bed tablet, they grab it and they’re gone. Even if they see like a knapsack, they’ll grab the knapsack and run with that. But the trailer, it’s too big. Nobody’s picking up that trailer and getting out of that hostel. It would be a lot of work. So, I mean, it’s not like Fort Knox or anything, but putting my laptop in the trailer bag and locking that zipper, it that’s that’s as good as I can do it. But again, every time you go out, you basically have to pack up and put everything away and keep it safe. And then you come back in and you got to unlock, unzip, take it out, plug every You just can never really relax. And then going to the shared bathroom to take a shower. That whole routine I mentioned, you got to put on your clothes, get your toiletries, make sure you have your room key locked, you know, and you need flip-flops, of course, because it’s a public bathroom. Could be, you know, the floor could be filled with all kinds of terrible fungi and things. So, you want to have your flip flops now. Go to the bathroom in your flip-flops and getting in and out of those flip. It’s it’s a whole thing. It’s exhausting being in a low-budget environment. It’s tiring. And a room like this, you step into it and you can just feel your whole body relax. Is like even my back because I always sit on a bed like this when I’m editing a video or doing anything and I prop up a bunch of pillows so I can lean against it and in these low-budget places the bed and the mattress, everything kind of moves around and there’s gaps and things and the pillows don’t have any any heft to them and you end up with like all kind of hunched over and twisted and you’re constantly adjusting things and you just can’t get comfortable. The mattress is rock hard. So, your butt loses all blood flow. Everything falls asleep. Your legs fall asleep. But here on this bed, beautiful mattress, feather pillows, and everything just everything just works. And you don’t have to bring as much stuff, right? Because when I came over here, I knew the room had a kettle. I don’t have to bring my kettle anymore. They even supply coffee. They have coffee mugs. I’m still using my Tim Hortons coffee mug because I like it so much. I prefer it better than those porcelain mugs. But I didn’t have to bring my own coffee mug. I didn’t have to bring my bed sheet or pillow cases because I know all the pillow the pillows here are nice. The sheets are made of cotton. The duvet is made of nice cotton. You don’t have to bring your own towels because you know they’re going to supply. You don’t even have to bring shampoo or soap, toothbrushes because it’s all supplied in the bathroom, right? So, you can travel light when you stay in nicer hotels. Staying in a cheap hotel, you have to travel heavier. Even Okay, I didn’t finish that story where it was so dark in that room, I couldn’t see, but I could fix that problem because I also travel with my own light bulb. Normally, I would unscrew if I can reach it, the low wattage bulb, and put a 100 watt bulb into that light socket, but I couldn’t reach it. It was too high, the ceiling. But then I have a special adapter that plugs into the wall. So, I take my 100 W bulb, stick it into an outlet, turn on the light, and suddenly say, “Oh, I can see, you know.” So, yeah, I travel with my own light bulb, my own everything, water bag in case I need it for showering. You know, you just end up carrying around a lot more stuff. Even extension cords. I have like 10 lbs of chargers and extension cords and power cables because in a low budget room, there will be one outlet way by the door and it doesn’t reach your bed, right? So, I have to have an my own extension cord. But in a room like this, it’s right there, right beside the bed. Power outlet there. There’s one over there, one over there, one over there. You know, life is so much easier when you’re Yeah. Living when you’re staying in a place like the Estadia. Very, very cool. Yeah. And there are other advantages, too. I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t even realize it until today. I was fiddling around over by the coffee station. There’s a desk there, and I pulled on this front drawer, and it turned out it opens up, and there’s a safe in there. So, you can even lock up your valuables in the room safe. This room also has a fridge which can save you money because you buy cold drinks in bulk. You know, I love my milk and I can buy some milk and put it in the fridge. This fridge appears to be broken. So, it’s not always perfect, but it does have a fridge and most of the time it would be working. I haven’t even checked, to be honest. Matthew told me the fridge is broken. It probably is. I haven’t actually checked or I haven’t checked to see whether I can fix it or turn it on or something, but it does have a fridge and things like that. So, yeah, there’s a lot of advantages to staying in a room like this. But having said that, if it’s not in your budget, if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. So, like in my case, as as nice as this room is, I’m only staying here because yeah, Matthew, friend, and Planet Doug supporter thought, “Ah, you know, might as well not let that room go to waste. We’ll let Doug relax for a couple of nights and feel better.” And then once the two nights are over tomorrow, I’m going back to the real world. And then I have three, no, four. I have a few nights booked at the hostel. I booked these nights kind of before I knew how awful it really was. And so now that I know how awful it is, you know, I might look at moving back to the Mahkota. I might be staying here for this weekend as well, just the way the dates work out and things that I need to do. But the problem is at the Mahkota if it’s a weekend again the price goes up to 60 ringgit per night you know base rate and then they add all the taxes on top of that so it could be like 80 ringgit a night 75 80 ringgit and now that that’s that’s too much for that room it’s not it’s not worth that much money so I’ll probably end up staying at the hostel where yeah could be anywhere from 25 to 30 ringgit per night to stay there. And now that I’ve moved in, now that I figured out the bathroom situation and yeah, I I’ll survive. I I can make a happy life over there. I hope.
And I think that is it for my ongoing stories here on Planet Doug in Melaka. Yeah, like I said at the beginning, I didn’t think I had anything to talk about, but of course in the way I live my life, yeah, the smallest things end up being small adventures. And it’s been a lot. It’s been interesting to be here over the weekend. I didn’t go out. I didn’t seek out any specific Independence Day celebrations like they have that big parade in KL. What’s it actually in Putrajaya now? And I noticed on YouTube, of course, all the smart YouTubers, they came to KL for that. And then they went to the Independence Day parade and they posted their videos like as fast as possible. And you know, they get tens of thousands, hundred thousand views in Malaysia because every everybody loves those. Foreigner goes to the Independence Day parade videos. I didn’t go I didn’t seek anything out here, but the whole city was just vibrant over this weekend. The one really great thing about that Discovery Guest House is the location, like 25 ringgit at night and you’re right in the heart of the heritage zone, which is very rare to be right in the middle of everything. It’s right on the river right on one of the bridges. You’re just steps away from Jonker Street. So, it’s like the the location couldn’t possibly be better. So, that that is an advantage to that place. You just have to put up with the lack of water and people wandering around in their underwear. Oh, and don’t forget about the cockroaches. When I was moving in there, I was exploring the place, of course, and on my floor, they had this tight, weird spiral staircase going to the roof. Sort of an enclosed roof where they hang laundry to dry the bed sheets. So, I went up there, explored, and then down around the bathrooms, I noticed there were three, maybe four, at least three sinks. No mirrors on the wall or anything like that above two of the sinks, but I thought, “Oh, okay. They actually have sinks here. That could be handy.” I hate being in a bathroom like shaving or something thinking that there’s somebody outside waiting for me to finish because they just need they need to use the toilet, right? So, if I can get out of the bathroom and then brush my teeth and shave, things like that at a sink, then then I I’m not so worried about making people wait, right? So, I wanted to see is there any water in these sinks? Are they usable sinks? So, I went to look at the sinks and for whatever reason they were filled with rags, like garbage and rags have been piled into one of the sinks. And I thought, “Oh, that’s kind of weird.” Anyway, so I picked up the rags and pulled it out of the sink because I was going to turn on the tap and underneath it, you know, huge dead cockroach, you know, the the cockroach corpse down there in the middle of the sink. Oh, okay. I I don’t think there’s any water here. This has been dead for a long time. That that giant cockroach. And I hit the tap and yeah, no water comes out, right? That sort of thing. So, yeah, you got the bugs to consider. Yeah, cockroaches are not in short supply over there at the the hostel, I’m sure. Yeah, I could go on and on with all my little stories about that place. And I’m not done yet. I’ll be back there for several nights now in the future. That should be interesting. So, that is it. That’s what’s going on here on Planet Doug in Melaka. Thanks for hanging out with me. I hope you enjoyed some of those stories. And I’m shutting down for now. See you next time.