SUMMARY:

• After months of getting absorbed in Melaka’s history, the plan is finally to get back on the bicycle and head up Malaysia’s east coast—with the visa clock and approaching rainy season providing a fairly hard deadline.
• A question about how long I’ve been traveling turned into a much bigger realization: I’ve spent most of my adult life not so much traveling as simply living in different countries without ever establishing much of a conventional home base.
• Looking at my YouTube analytics for the first time in a while revealed something surprising: the videos that take the least effort often have the highest RPM, while some of the videos that attract the most clicks aren’t necessarily the ones people actually watch for very long.
• The final question led from modern shipping and the Melaka Strait to an older way of crossing the Malay Peninsula—and some fascinating possibilities for how Malaysia might bypass the Strait in the future.

Getting Unstuck from Melaka

I came to Melaka intending to continue cycling around Malaysia. Instead, I got completely sidetracked by the history.

That’s one of the recurring problems—or perhaps advantages—of traveling without a rigid itinerary. You find something interesting and suddenly the original plan doesn’t seem quite so important anymore.

Melaka turned out to be particularly dangerous in that respect. The more I learned, the more I discovered that I hadn’t learned nearly enough. Every historical answer seemed to reveal another question underneath it. What started as ordinary travel videos gradually became a months-long investigation into the city.

But visas don’t care how interesting a place is.

With only a limited amount of time remaining in Malaysia, the plan was finally to leave Melaka and start cycling east, aiming eventually for places such as Kuantan, Terengganu and Kota Bharu before reaching the Thai border.

Whether I actually follow that plan, of course, remains another question.

That’s one of the amusing things about my travel style: I usually have a general direction rather than a detailed itinerary. I know roughly where I want to go, but I don’t necessarily know what I’ll be doing a month from now.

I’ve Been “Traveling” for Much Longer Than I Realized

One of the questions asked how long I’ve been traveling and whether I ever get tired of it.

Answering that turned out to require defining what I mean by traveling.

My first major overseas experience was an organized cultural exchange to India when I was around university age. Until then, the world had been a surprisingly small place for me. I knew almost nothing about passports, visas, living overseas or even the basic mechanics of how people managed to travel independently.

That first trip changed everything.

From there, I gradually developed a life in which I would study for a while, disappear to another country, return for a while, leave again, find temporary work and eventually head overseas once more. South Korea, Taiwan, Central America, Africa, South America, the Philippines and many other places became parts of a life that never really developed the conventional pattern of settling down, establishing a permanent home and building toward some predetermined future.

Even when I technically had a “normal” life, I often found a way around the normal parts.

At one point in Taiwan, for example, I lived in a hostel for roughly ten years rather than moving into a conventional apartment. When I arrived, the hostel was simply a cheap place to stay until I found work and got established. Except I never really moved on from it.

That probably says quite a lot about me.

The important distinction is that I don’t really experience my life as one endless vacation. I’m not constantly flying somewhere, staying three nights and moving on to the next destination. Quite often, I simply live somewhere for months or years.

The location changes. The basic lifestyle doesn’t necessarily change very much.

And that’s probably why I don’t get tired of traveling. For me, this isn’t really an extended vacation. It’s just life.

The Strange Relationship Between Home and Family

Another question asked whether I still keep in touch with my family in Canada.

The answer is yes—but in a rather limited way.

I still talk to my brother, usually every month or two, and those conversations can easily last several hours. I have an almost endless supply of stories to tell about wherever I happen to be living.

The communication itself is funny, though, because the technology gap between my life overseas and the people I know back in Canada is enormous. I’m accustomed to communicating with people through WhatsApp constantly—messages, photographs, links and quick questions throughout the day.

My brother doesn’t even have a smartphone or computer.

So there isn’t much casual communication. We can’t simply exchange little messages throughout the day. Instead, I make a phone call, and suddenly we’re having a three-hour conversation.

My relationship with my nieces and nephews is even more distant. They’re technically family, but I haven’t lived in Canada for decades and haven’t been part of their ordinary lives.

It’s an odd consequence of living this way: people can know that you’re doing something interesting without necessarily knowing anything about what you’re actually doing.

My YouTube channel is essentially a public diary of my life, yet people I’ve known for years will occasionally ask me, “Where are you? What are you doing?”

The answer is right there on YouTube.

Why Planet Doug Tries to Tell the Whole Story

One of the questions included a compliment that my videos give the “full story.”

That phrase actually gets to the heart of what I’ve been trying to do with Planet Doug.

I’m not particularly interested in showing only the spectacular part of travel.

If somebody goes to an amazing beach, I want to know how they got there. Where did they wake up? What did they eat? How much did the hotel cost? Was the journey miserable? Was the road dangerous? Did they have to spend three hours on a bus to reach that beautiful beach?

Those things are part of the experience too.

A beautiful destination doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s connected to all the ordinary, inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant things that happen before you get there.

That’s why the Planet Doug approach has always been more of a travel journal than a polished travel advertisement. The boring bits aren’t necessarily something to hide. Sometimes they’re exactly what makes the story useful and interesting.

Three Places That Changed My Life

Another question asked for my three favorite countries.

That’s almost impossible to answer without defining “favorite.”

If we’re talking about the places that gave me the most pleasurable travel experiences, I’d probably come up with one list.

But if we’re talking about the places that changed me and had the biggest impact on my life, the answer is very different.

India would have to be on that list because that first experience fundamentally changed the direction of my life.

Ethiopia would be another. My bicycle journey there in the late 1990s was extraordinarily difficult, but it was also one of the most significant experiences I’ve ever had. Looking back, I sometimes think about how different that trip would be today, when I could walk into a historic city like Gondar with instant access to information about its history, architecture, culture and religion.

And then there’s Guinea in West Africa, another extremely difficult bicycle journey that exposed me to an entirely different part of the world.

None of those three would necessarily be the places I’d recommend to somebody looking for an easy, relaxing holiday.

But that’s not really what the question was asking.

Some places become important because they are comfortable. Others become important because they fundamentally alter your understanding of the world.

Those are two very different things.

The Melaka Problem: History Takes Time

The deep dive into Melaka has also exposed a dilemma for Planet Doug.

I’d love to do the same thing in other Malaysian cities.

Ipoh. Kuantan. Kota Bharu. Terengganu. There are places where I could easily imagine spending a month investigating the history, walking around, visiting museums and following one story after another.

But history has a nasty habit of expanding.

You think you’ve understood something, then discover another layer underneath it. Then another. Then another.

It’s like peeling an onion that never runs out of layers.

That’s wonderful intellectually, but it’s difficult when you’re trying to make a living from YouTube.

A deep historical investigation might take several days of research, filming and editing, yet attract a relatively small audience. A straightforward adventure-travel video can potentially reach a much larger audience.

So there is a tension between making the videos I find most interesting and making the kind of videos that can financially sustain the lifestyle that allows me to keep making them.

I haven’t solved that problem.

What the YouTube Numbers Actually Taught Me

One of the most revealing parts of the AMA came from a question about YouTube income.

I normally don’t pay much attention to YouTube analytics, but answering this question forced me to actually look.

And I learned something I probably should have known a long time ago.

Views aren’t the whole story.

One of my videos had around 52,000 views but an RPM of only about $1.20. Another had considerably fewer views but a much higher RPM. My history-heavy videos can attract clicks without necessarily keeping viewers watching.

Meanwhile, the videos that require comparatively little preparation—my behind-the-scenes and AMA videos—have some of the highest RPMs on the entire channel.

That was a surprise.

It also illustrates why YouTube analytics can be both useful and dangerous. You can spend an enormous amount of time studying exactly where viewers stop watching, which thumbnails attract clicks, which words produce higher click-through rates and which topics generate more revenue.

Eventually you can end up optimizing the entire creative process around the numbers.

And that’s where I start to get uncomfortable.

There’s probably a sweet spot somewhere between making completely artificial clickbait and making videos that nobody ever discovers.

I’m still looking for it.

Could Planet Doug Become a Malaysian State-by-State Project?

Another interesting suggestion was to visit all 13 Malaysian states and the three federal territories.

It’s an intriguing idea because most foreign visitors don’t really think about Malaysia in terms of its states.

They think about Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Melaka, Langkawi, Johor Bahru and other individual destinations. The names of the states themselves often don’t enter the conversation.

A journey specifically designed around visiting all of them could therefore become a different kind of travel project—part adventure, part geography lesson and part introduction to the less familiar parts of Malaysia.

It would also fit naturally with the way I travel.

The problem is that doing something like this properly takes time, and time is always the thing I have the least of.

Could I Actually Become a Tour Guide in Melaka?

Someone suggested that if I eventually became a permanent resident of Melaka, I could take a tour-guide course and become licensed to lead tours.

It’s an interesting idea.

After spending months investigating Melaka, I probably have enough accumulated knowledge to give a reasonably good introduction to the city’s history. But actually being a guide would require much more than memorizing a script.

A guide has to be able to answer questions that aren’t in the script.

That means knowing the subject deeply enough that if somebody suddenly asks about an obscure historical figure, a building, a food tradition or some little-known event, you can actually have a conversation about it.

There’s another problem.

Apparently a lot of modern tour guiding involves enthusiastic group participation, photographs and plenty of “Everybody stand over here and smile!”

I’m not sure that’s quite the Planet Doug experience.

A Planet Doug tour would probably involve somebody standing around looking at an old wall while I explain why I think the wall is historically interesting.

The selfie portion of the tour would be entirely self-service.

Getting the Old Bicycle Ready Again

After months of sitting around Melaka, the bicycle is about to become important again.

I’ve kept it going with the basics—checking the gears, oiling the chain and making sure nothing has seized up—but a proper checkup at a bike shop would certainly make sense before setting off.

The camping equipment is another matter.

My tent is old enough that I have serious doubts about whether the waterproofing still exists. If the Malaysian tropical rain decides to test it, I may discover that my tent has become more of a decorative fabric structure than actual shelter.

The traditional solution would be to buy a new tent.

My solution is more likely to be: hope for the best and buy a tarp if everything goes wrong.

That pretty much sums up my camping philosophy.

The Melaka Strait and the Long Way Around

The final question took the discussion in a completely different direction: could Malaysia eventually develop ways of bypassing the Melaka Strait?

The modern proposal involves Kuantan, a deep-water port and the East Coast Rail Link. In broad terms, the idea is that cargo could arrive at Kuantan, be transferred onto trains and transported across the peninsula rather than making the long journey around the southern end through the Strait.

What makes this particularly fascinating is that the basic idea isn’t entirely new.

Historically, people already crossed the Malay Peninsula using rivers. Boats could travel up one river, be transported across a relatively short overland section and then continue down another river toward the opposite side.

In other words, modern rail infrastructure would be solving a very old geographic problem with modern technology.

And then there’s the much more ambitious idea that periodically reappears: a canal across the narrowest part of the Malay Peninsula, effectively creating a Southeast Asian equivalent of the Panama or Suez Canal.

The engineering might be possible.

The economic, environmental, political and social questions are considerably more complicated.

For now, the Strait remains one of the world’s major shipping routes. But it’s fascinating to look at the geography and realize that people have been trying to solve the same basic problem—how to move goods across this narrow peninsula efficiently—for a very long time.

A Life Without a Final Destination

Perhaps the biggest theme running through all of these questions is that I don’t really have a grand plan.

I’ve never had a conventional retirement plan, investment portfolio or carefully calculated destination for the final chapter of my life.

I’m 63, and I’ve somehow made it this far by continuing to move, work things out as I go and deal with whatever happens next.

That probably isn’t a particularly useful life-planning strategy for most people.

But it is the life I’ve ended up with.

And after decades of doing this, I still don’t have any great desire to stop.

Maybe that’s the closest thing I have to a plan.

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A Couple of Thoughts That Stuck With Me

“I don’t really experience my life as one endless vacation. I’m not constantly flying somewhere… I just happen to be doing it in different countries.”

That distinction probably explains my relationship with travel better than anything else. I’m not trying to be permanently on holiday. I’ve simply never been particularly interested in building the conventional kind of life that requires staying in one place.

And perhaps the most revealing line of the whole AMA was this:

“I don’t have a plan. So far, I’ve been lucky.”

That’s not necessarily a philosophy I’d recommend to anyone else. But it does seem to describe the strange, improvised path that has somehow carried me from a small Canadian city to India, Ethiopia, Guinea, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and a few dozen other places along the way.

FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the August September Ask Me Anything video for Planet Doug. I’m recording this in my hotel room in Melaka at the… Where am I now? I’m at the M Candy Hotel. I keep forgetting that name. It’s such an unusual name. I don’t know where M Candy came from. So I keep forgetting that name. But yeah, I’m in a very comfortable setting here. Nicely air-conditioned, very comfortable bed, lots of space around me. And I have my morning cup of coffee on the go. Instant coffee. Not the best coffee in the world, but it is instant and I can make it here in my room with my own kettle. So I love that. So I have the questions all loaded up on my tablet. I have a screenshot of every question that I can cycle through. I think there’s 11 questions and I have some notes that I pre-prepared on my phone. So you’ll see me referring to here to read the questions sometime to my phone to remind me of little notes I made about them. A couple of really interesting questions I look forward to talking about. With only 11 questions it should be a relatively short sort of ask me anything video here on Planet Doug. My behind-the-scenes podcast videos tend to get quite long and these ask me anything videos as well can get me talking and become quite long. But this one should be relatively short. We will see. We’ll see how that turns out. Some of these questions might get me ruminating and telling stories and the video may get longer and longer. Let’s see how it goes.

Question number one from regular guy. Hi Doug. What is your Strava account? Can I follow it? Yeah, quite an easy question to answer. I mean I looked at my Strava account on my laptop just to see what the name of it is and I don’t think it’s anything special. I call everything Planet Doug. So I think you find my Strava on Strava by just typing in Planet Doug. If you search for that, my account should pop up. The only wrinkle with my Strava account is that I don’t really use it. What I do is if I’m traveling and there’s a reason to record where I go and I do it on my phone using Strava, but the only reason I use Strava is so that I can download the GPX file and then I copy and paste that GPX into another website called Map Director and then Map Director uses the data from Strava to create an actual map because on Strava you can get a map but then you have to pay for the premium account and I don’t make enough money here on Planet Doug to spring for yet another online account. So I just use the free Strava account and then I can’t make a map on Strava. I have to take the data and make a map somewhere else. And Map Director is free to do that. So it takes longer of course, but that’s what I do. And Strava is a little bit odd for me because it is so focused on physical activity. It’s not travel-based. So it’s not designed to record someone’s day when they’re traveling. Because when you’re traveling, you might be walking, cycling on a motorcycle, then on a bus, then on a train, then on a ferry, then on a… you know, you use a mix of transportation all on the same day. And Strava doesn’t know how to handle that. You have to pick one form of transportation and then it judges you based on your physical fitness and your heart rate and your this and your that. And it’s designed for athletes to track their performance. So you only get to choose one mode of transportation whether you’re running, hiking, cycling, whatever it is that you’re doing. And then I noticed in the past that when I recorded a normal day, Strava would flag my activity because it looks like I’m cheating because I might have picked hiking or walking because I’d be walking around Kuala Lumpur and I’m tracing where I’m walking. But then at some point I hop on the MRT. So Strava say, “Oh, you say you’re walking, but now you’re going 50 km an hour, and that doesn’t make sense. So you are cheating.” And then flags my activity and says, “You cannot post this activity publicly. You can’t use it in all of our competitions, all of our all these things that they have on Strava.” So what I had to do in order to avoid all these flags is all of my activities on Strava, it’s only available to people who actually follow me. So you can’t just go to my Strava account and then see everything. You actually have to follow Planet Doug. This is how I understand the system. And then you can actually see my activities there and the photos and things like that. Because if I just make the activity open to the public, Strava flags it, you know, cuz I’ll do things like take the ferry across to Sumatra. So Strava is trying to follow me what I’m doing and I ride my bike to the dock. Then I’m on a ferry going across the Melaka Strait and then I’m riding my bicycle on the other side and then I’m walking around my new neighborhood in Sumatra. And Strava just doesn’t know how to handle that. It’s like, what the heck are you doing? The speeds and the distances covered in the amount of time just doesn’t make any sense. And it doesn’t know how to slot it into the proper competitions or whatever it is they do. So it flags it and says, “No, okay, you’re cheating here. This is an irregular activity. Something is wrong with this.” Anyway, so yeah, the Planet Doug Strava account is a little bit weird. I only use it to track what I do and then extract the GPX data, but I think you can just look for it as Planet Doug. That should pop up on Strava.

Question two from Rai R AI. Hi Doug, what are your plans for the rest of the year? Yeah, good question. Of course, I’m supposed to be cycling around Malaysia. I’ve been sort of on this kick for a long time now, but I came to Melaka and I kind of got stuck here because I became so interested in the history of Melaka and more and more I’ve realized how special Melaka is as a city. I can’t really think of anywhere that I’ve ever been where there is so much history jammed into one place in a very small area. You know, you might think, okay, Kuala Lumpur, a huge city, massive place, big population, must have a really amazing history. You might think you can base yourself in KL and just cover the history of that city. But you really can’t do it because the area of the city is so vast and it really doesn’t have the in-depth fascinating history that Melaka does. You could probably make one video about the history of KL, its origins as a tin mining village basically and then it grows from there. And you can run through some stuff, I guess, but there really isn’t any history there that you can cover like you can here in Melaka. So Melaka really is a special unusual place. So I became a little bit obsessed with it and I got stuck here and I’ve been here for months just making videos about Melaka. But of course, my visa clock is always ticking. And my current visa, I probably have 6 or 7 weeks left on it, a little bit over a month and a half. So if I’m going to be doing cycling, I have to leave now. My current plan is to leave Melaka on Monday. It’s Friday, October 2nd right now. And I have plans to leave Melaka on my bicycle on Monday. So I guess that would be October 4th or 5th, something like that. And then my plan is to ride my bicycle around. Like I don’t think I’m going to go to Johor Bahru the city because if I go into that city, that’s a major effort on a bicycle and then cycling into that urban sprawl and then out of it again would be quite not a lot of fun. I don’t think I’m in the mood for that kind of challenge right now. And if I go into Johor, I feel like that’s another city that has a lot of history. There’s museums there and I can feel in the back of my mind, you know, it would be really cool because again, as far as I understand the history, when the Portuguese defeated the Melaka Sultanate here in Melaka, the Melaka Sultanate retreated with its forces and they eventually established the Johor Sultanate. And that is another huge part of history. So Johor has a history that’s tied directly in with Melaka and then of course Singapore. There’s a lot of history over there and I could feel I would get bogged down become interested in that and the only way not to end up spending 2 months in Johor Bahru is just don’t go there at all. I mean if everything was open to me and I had no concerns about visas and finances anything like that well yeah that’s what I would do. I would just cycle down the coast south from Melaka eventually swing over to Johor Bahru spend as much time there as I want and then when my visa expires pop over to Singapore back into Malaysia again. But I’m always worried about immigration because I’ve come into Malaysia so many times and I’ve heard from many many people that the border crossing from Singapore is more official. They’re really looking hard at people. So I’m worried that they’re very formal there and I’m worried that they just won’t let me back into Malaysia. So I’m very leery about that border crossing. If you’re only doing it once, yeah, no problem. You’ve been in Malaysia for 3 months and then you get to Singapore, pop over to Singapore for 2 or 3 days back into Malaysia, I think you’ll be okay. As long as you can prove to them that you are really a tourist and you’re not working in Malaysia, yeah, they’ll let you back in. But I’ve done it a number of times and I’m worried about it. So yeah, if I could, I’d probably do the Johor Bahru for a while and then pop over to Singapore back again, start fresh with another 90 days cycling up the east coast. But I don’t think I’m going to do that. I’m probably going to bypass Johor Bahru and over the next month and a half ride up the east coast passing through yeah Kuantan, Terengganu, Kota Bharu and somehow or other get to the border with Thailand as I’ve always been talking about and then when my visa expires pop over to Thailand for a little while and then back into Malaysia again from there or I mean if I’m moving really really fast I mean it’s conceivable that I go through these places faster than I normally go through. Like instead of spending weeks in each city, I just spend two or three nights and then move on. I could end up all the way in Penang or even all the way back in KL. If you’re cycling every day or every couple of days, it’s not that hard. I could in a month and a half. Yeah, you could cycle all the way around Malaysia, all the way back to KL or to Penang. And then from there, there are airports. I could store my bicycle for a couple of days, fly back over to Sumatra as I often do, come back and then continue from there. So anyway, as far as my plans go for the rest of the year, that’s as far as I’ve thought it through. Basically riding my bicycle up the east coast. I hope the weather is okay because I have a habit of doing this. I shot myself in the foot because all this time that I’ve been in Melaka, the weather has been perfect. Gorgeous weather. Perfect for cycling. Probably on the east coast it was perfect as well. That would have been the time to keep cycling, but I ended up staying here. And now that I’m leaving the beginning of October, as far as I understand it, now we’re in the shoulder season from the dry to the rainy everywhere. I don’t I can’t keep track of the rainy seasons in Malaysia, the monsoons on the east coast, the west coast. It’s too much for my brain to figure out and I try not to worry about it too much. But it looks like it’s starting to rain right now. So again, I shot myself in the foot that I delayed cycling so long that now that I’m just about to start cycling, I’m just heading into the rains. Depending on what the weather is like this year, I think October is like the shoulder month. We’re still leaving the dry season, but not entering the rainy season until November, maybe December. So I might get a month of relatively good weather cycling up the east coast, but I think the rain is going to start building and building and building. And that’s never fun on a bicycle. Yeah, I’m not a big fan of cycling in the rain. When it rains, I just don’t cycle. If I wake up in the morning in my hotel room or in my tent, if that starts happening and I look outside and it’s raining, I just stay. I’m not going to pack up and leave while it’s raining. I’ll just stay until the next day and hopefully the rain stops by then. So yeah, for the rest of the year, that’s basically I’m dealing with, you know, my bike ride around Malaysia, visas expiring, and that’s as far as I’ve thought it through. I don’t know what will happen after that.

Question three, interesting. It’s a two-parter from two different people. The first part, do you still keep in touch with your brothers back home? If yes, how frequently did you communicate or you only contact them if you need help with the mail, etc., just because you are not in Canada? I’m asking out of curiosity because you did mention in past videos you’ve lost all contacts in Canada and you had no references back home. So I’ll answer this one first and then I’ll put the addendum from Bing Lim in a separate section. So, do I still keep in touch? Yeah, I do. I have one brother back in Canada and I try to call him as often as I can, but I don’t want to bother him. It’s a funny thing like people in Canada seem to be busy. You can’t just like for the phone to ring. I have this feeling anyway that anybody back in Canada, the phone rings, their reaction is, you know, it’s like a landline, you know, ring ring ring like in a classic old-fashioned cuz no one I know in Canada is up to speed with technology. That’s the main problem. My friends, none of them are set up. So everybody I meet in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, everywhere, we’re hooked up on WhatsApp. We’re like communicating every day, constantly sending messages, photos, links back and forth all the time. Everybody in Canada, they’re offline. Like my brother, he doesn’t have a smartphone. He doesn’t even have a computer. So we can’t stay in touch by sending messages. We can only do it by phone call. And then if I call him, I do have this feeling like whatever time I pick, the phone rings and it’s like, ah, okay, I have to talk to Doug now. Like if I call other people, they’re busy. They’re always doing something. You’re always interrupting something and you don’t have the easy workaround of sending a message like, “Oh, are you free right now? Hey, do you want to chat on the phone?” I can’t send messages to anybody. So anyway, I do have this. Yeah, I could call all the time because I have a Fongo phone number, a Fongo account, which is a Canadian-based phone number, and I can call Canada for free, anytime I want, talk as long as I want. So you’d think that would be pretty amazing. So I could do it all the time, but I’m also don’t want to bother people. So yeah, I call my brother once a month. A month might go by where I’ve forgotten. So it might be once every two months. He’s always eager to talk to me. Like I say it feels like I’m bothering him. But that’s only my feeling. And again I get that feeling because when I communicate with people back in Canada, I seem to have a thousand stories to tell. Like if I talk to anyone in Canada, whether by email or phone call, you know, put a quarter in me, I’ll talk for the next four hours, tell you about everything I’ve done in Malaysia, in Sumatra, wherever I am. I’ve got endless stories. You know, the new mouse that I bought. Sit down, buckle in. I’m going to talk about my new mouse for an hour. You know, some technology problem to do with this or that, my microphones, my GoPros, my bicycle, all the experiences I’m having in Melaka, you know, I will talk as long as you’re willing to stay on the phone. But then when it comes to their turn to talk, I’m thinking, okay, what’s going on over there? What’s happening in Canada? Nothing. You know, it’s like there’s nothing coming back my way from people that I know in Canada, friends or family members. There never seems to be stories to tell, things going on. So then again, I do have that odd feeling where I, yeah, I talk to somebody like my brother in Canada and I’ll talk for two hours, two and a half hours. You know, I talked to my brother for a long time telling all of my stories, but then yeah, there isn’t a whole lot coming back in the other direction like stories from there because it’s just normal life. It’s family life. You know, he’ll tell me about his various children, who got married, who’s doing this, who has a new job, who moved from here to here, who’s having a baby, you know, things like that. And then once you tell those stories, you know, it’s just day-to-day life. You know, the days go by comfortably naturally, and there aren’t the highs and the lows that make up my life overseas. So that’s kind of interesting. But anyway, the question, do you keep in touch? Yeah, every month, every two months, I have like a three-hour conversation with my brother. Tell him all of my adventures and then he tells gives me all the updates on family and everything going on there. Friends, really almost no contact at all. Yeah, just lost contact with everybody in Canada, everybody else.

And Bing Lim added an addendum. So call that question 3B. May I add to this question? I recalled you said you have nephews and nieces. Do you know if they have ever watched your videos or do they know you are on YouTube? Again, it’s an interesting question because I don’t know. Honestly, I have no contact at all with my nieces and nephews. Just from my brother, he had five children. So technically, yeah, I’m an uncle. I don’t feel like an uncle because I haven’t been living in Canada. I’m not like the uncle who visits during the holidays. I haven’t been in Canada for a very long time. So I’m not an active presence in the lives of these nieces and nephews. I’m sure they know I exist. I met them when they were young, you know, when they were children. I’d been back in Canada from time to time and I met them. I know who they are. They know who I am. But beyond that, yeah, I just don’t know anything about them. And do they know that? I don’t even know if they know I have a YouTube channel. My guess is because of my brother, they’re aware of it. My brother has this routine where one I think one night per week, he sits down in front of a computer and watches one of my videos so that he has this habit. He watches my videos. He keeps up to date with where I am and what I’m doing. I don’t think he can watch all of my videos cuz I might post three or four videos in a week and he really only has the time. He has to pick which one. He can watch one video per week basically. And then he’s sitting in front of the computer. He might have my voice coming out over the speakers and then I’m sure it’s like it’s like a family gathering, a family dinner and there would be nieces and nephews there with their significant others, husbands, wives, whoever. And then they would be, “Oh, okay. Dad’s, you know, their dad, you know, dad’s watching Doug’s videos again, you know, Uncle Doug’s videos.” So I’m sure they’re aware I have a YouTube channel, but I don’t think anything I do, anything I talk about is of any interest to them and their lives in Canada. I do have a niece who is a real world traveler in the past. I don’t think she does it anymore, but she yeah, she’s been on big adventures herself. She cycled all the way across Canada, coast to coast. She lived in Africa for a while. Yeah, she was she’s a real adventurer and a traveler. So she could probably relate to some of the things I’m doing. All of my nephews, I don’t think they have that interest in international travel. Other countries, it’s not part of their world. They live in Canada in that smallish city where I was born and grew up. So they’re still based in the area, you know, where they were born, where they grew up. And you know what Uncle Doug is doing somewhere. I don’t think it means anything to them. I’m pretty sure none of them watch my videos. I remember my whole life been more or less like that where I would go off on these weird things that I would do like up to and including flying to South Korea when I originally permanently moved basically from Canada to this part of the world. That was back in 1991 when I flew to South Korea from Toronto. And from that point on, I think my mother and father’s my father, he probably didn’t even know I left the country. He like if someone says to him, “Yeah, you know, oh, Doug is teaching English at this school.” He’s like, “What?” He’s like, “Yeah, he’s in South Korea.” Like it would come as news to my father that I had gone to South Korea. He would have to be reminded because even when I was living in Canada like living in I wasn’t living in Sarnia like my home city. I was living in other cities around Canada. I wasn’t based there. So to tell my father that you know he probably thinks I he probably thought I was still in Toronto and it would come as news to him that I was in South Korea. It’s like oh really okay I didn’t know that. You know, my mother would keep track. Of course, the mother is always the anchor of every family. She’s the one that keeps in touch with the children. Back in those days, of course, there’s no email there. We were just writing letters back and forth and Christmas cards, little care packages my mother would send me. So my mother knew where I was, but even she wasn’t really invested in any of it cuz to her it was just just Doug’s latest weird idea. Like I would go on a cycling trip in Ethiopia or now I’m going to go to Guinea, now I’m going to go to Ecuador for 6 months. Now I’m going to Guatemala for 6 months. She doesn’t know why I’m going to these places. She’s not really… She didn’t really care that much. Her whole thing was, Doug, please marry this beautiful girl next door, have a family, and just settle down here in Canada. That was what she wanted. And everything anything I did overseas was just she didn’t really invest in it, you know. She just wanted me to get married and settle down in Canada and that would have made her happy. So even my mother who was following my small adventures, I’d be in a place like Taiwan and she wouldn’t know where that was. She would do the classic thing. She would tell people I was in Thailand because to people in Canada, Taiwan, Thailand, they’re all the same place to them. They would confuse those two countries because they sound the same. So I think she probably thought I was in Thailand and told all of my aunts and uncles I was living in Thailand, even though I was in Taiwan. And then what exactly I was doing in Taiwan, she probably had kind of a vague idea. So that’s kind of the situation. And when it comes to Bing Lim’s question, my nephews and nieces, I yeah, I think they know I have a YouTube channel. They know I go to other countries, but I’m pretty sure they don’t watch my videos. Even my friends in Canada, I don’t know if anybody knows I have a YouTube channel. Even friends that I made in Taiwan that I’m still in touch with, like people I got to know quite well in places like Taiwan where I lived for many years. I don’t think they even know where I am right now. They don’t know I have a YouTube channel. It is kind of odd when I get a question like I’ll get a message from someone that I know quite well, a friend of mine, and the question on WhatsApp or something will be, “So, where are you? What are you doing? What have you been doing?” And I’m thinking, “It’s not that hard to find out.” You know, these days I don’t really have the time to update Facebook and Instagram, things like that. I lose I abandon those sites, but YouTube is pretty much up to date. So for someone to send a message and say, “Where are you?” tells me they don’t even know I have a YouTube channel because it’s pretty easy to figure out where I am and what I’m doing. You don’t have to ask. Just check my YouTube channel. Oh, he’s in Malaysia still. Oh, he’s in Melaka right now. They could see it pretty easily. So when I get all these messages from friends from Canada, friends from Taiwan, friends from South Korea saying, “Oh, where are you and what are you doing?” That tells me they don’t even know I have a YouTube channel. I certainly don’t get any input from anybody. Like people that I’ve known my entire lifetime, it’s not like they’re showing up on my YouTube videos and leaving comments. I’ve never gotten a single comment from anyone from Canada, from my past life, you know, no friend of mine, no relative, nobody has ever left even one comment on any of my videos or my website or Instagram or Facebook at any time. So yeah, they’re just not those kind of people. They’re not into social media. They’re not into smartphones and tablets and stuff like that. So yeah, it’s a whole different world. So nephews and nieces, they know I have a YouTube channel, but I don’t think they watch my videos. They don’t have any relevance to their, you know, day-to-day life in Canada.

Question four from Ernie. I know it’s Ernie because he says, “Cheers Ernie.” in the question because the YouTuber name that they put in these, you know, when you leave a comment on YouTube, yeah, they’re indecipherable most of the time. So Ernie writes, “How long have you been traveling? Do you ever get sick of it? Have you thought about where you end up? Do you have a plan? Great videos. You sure give the full story from each place. Cheers, Ernie.” Yeah, thank you for the compliment. Saying that they’re great videos. I do my best and I do try to give the full story. I think that’s the whole Planet Doug ethos. Even now like when I started the YouTube channel all the way till today a constant drum beat a theme of mine is frustration with travel vloggers who don’t give the full story of like their own personal life their travels and then the places that they’re visiting. So yeah, I do tend to focus on that quite a bit where I want to tell whatever story I’m telling. I want to give the full story, the full context rather than sort of a glamorous short highlight version of my experiences. My whole thing is I like to give the actual story of what it’s like on the ground, not just, wow, it’s so amazing and the people are so friendly and the food is incredible and look at this amazing beach. You know, if I’m at the beach meeting friendly people and having delicious food and seeing a gorgeous sunset, sure, that’s all well and good, but how did I get to the beach? Was there like a 3-hour grueling bus ride to get there? Right? I like to include how you got to the beach because that is part of the experience of being overseas. Whether you got there by scooter and it’s blistering hot and the traffic is deadly, you know, the whole package. I want the whole story, not just, wow, look at this amazing beach and how incredible my life is. I want to know how you got to the beach. Where did you wake up in the morning? How much are you paying in that place where you woke up? What did you have for breakfast? And how much did it cost to rent the scooter? And did you need a license? And on and on and on. I want all the details. I want the whole story. So that’s kind of how my mind brain works about this. How long have you been traveling? Of course. Yeah. To answer that question, you’d have to say you have to define traveling. My first travel experience goes way back to my first year of university. So I guess I was 19, 20 years old. I can’t remember. But I finished high school. I did one year of university. And then while I was at this university, I saw a poster for a Canadian like an NGO sponsoring a youth exchange program. And then you sign up or you apply to this program. And at that time, I’d always been interested in going overseas. I just I was such a dummy and my world was so limited. I knew nothing. I was such a limited person when I was a teenager growing up. The thought of going to another country was in the back of my mind, but I didn’t have the slightest clue of what that meant, how you did it, what it involved. In my small city where I grew up. I didn’t know anybody that went anywhere. It just wasn’t anything that anybody did. So I remember going to university my first year. I’ve told parts of this story before. And I would meet people there and we have conversations like people in my classes, same age as me, everything. And then I’m just chatting with them. And the whole time I’m trying to play it cool, but I’m just astonished at the things I’m hearing because it’s like, whoa, I didn’t know you could do that because all I knew was when you go to university, well, you fill out the forms and then you tick the box that says, I want to live in the dorm because as far as I was concerned, well, that was the only option, like live in a residence. And then I would meet somebody at the university that I was attending and we’re just chatting, you know, after class. And so, yeah, oh, I’m staying here at a Sydenham residence. And then this person would say, oh yeah, I got an apartment downtown. And I’m like, whoa, you have your own apartment? Like that alone was like mind-blowing to me. He’s like, you can do that? How do you do that? Like I was so inexperienced. I’d never met anybody who knew how to do these things. Like you pay rent every month, you have electricity bills, and wow, you’re and you’re my age, and then we’re chatting, and then it comes up that oh yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, last summer, yeah, I went down to South America, went to Bolivia, and I’m like, you know, my eyes are like, you went, you know, these were like gods to me. How do you do that? You know, I didn’t know about passports, visas, changing money, backpacking around the world. I had zero experience in anything. And then I saw that poster and it was an organized trip. Like all you had to do was fill out the application, do like very difficult, very complicated interviews. I got accepted and then when you sign on the dotted line from that point on, everything was organized for you. That was something I could handle. So I did this like 7-month exchange program with India. Half of the trip was in Canada. So a bunch of young people from India came to Canada and we lived and worked together as a group, as a team. And then the second three and a half months we flew back to India and then we all lived in these small villages out in the countryside, farming villages as a team and lived and worked in India. So it was like a cultural exchange program. And that was kind of interesting for me, too, because as you can imagine, most of the people who were drawn to this program to begin with were sort of travelers already, like way ahead of me. Like my entire life, I feel like I’ve always been 10 years behind everybody else. So like even like when it comes to life experiences, I’m 10 years late learning about music. I’m never aware of new music. I don’t discover music until 10 years after everybody else. I learned about movies 10 years afterwards. You know, when I was young, I didn’t go to the theater. It just wasn’t part of my life. We didn’t have money when I was growing up. The whole idea of, oh, Jaws is in the theater. We got to go watch Jaws. I mean, I was there for the all these big blockbuster movies of the 70s and the 80s hitting the theaters. I never went to any of them because going to the movie theater was just not part of my world. You know, it never occurred to me that, oh, that’s something that people do every weekend. Every Friday night they go to the movies and watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars and Jaws. All these ET, all these huge movies that define the 70s and the 80s. I never watched them until, you know, until I was in my 30s, 20s, and 30s. I guess I didn’t watch them when they were in the theater. I never really knew about them. I wasn’t aware of them at all. Anyway, that just to show you how inexperienced I was. And then all these people that joined the exchange program, all the other members, they were all far more experienced than I was. And then I kind of kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to betray just how dumb I was. And then I’m just listening to all them talking about all the traveling they’d done around the world, the places they’ve been, the experiences they’ve had, and that’s why they wanted to join this exchange program. It’s like oh I get to go to India for free you know I don’t have to pay for it and for me it was like a just an absolute mind-blowing experience. Everything that happened from beginning to end was like yeah mind-altering. I’d never done anything like it before, seen any, you know, you never been anywhere, never done anything in your life. You’re from this tiny city in Canada and suddenly you’re in New Delhi and then you’re in Udaipur and you’re in Rajasthan and then you’re in this little Indian village in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you can imagine, you know, just my brain exploded. So that was kind of when traveling, you could call that traveling, right? My whole life was kind of traveling at that time, but I wasn’t doing the traveling thing like perhaps you’re thinking about where you’re riding your motorcycle around the world for 4 years like that kind of ongoing journey. It wasn’t like that. But right from that date, I think my life has been traveling. But it isn’t really… it’s not really a positive trait. It’s it came out of an inability to formalize my life and I didn’t really see it that clearly for a long time. So for example after the exchange program ended after India we all flew back to Canada and then yeah we did like this long debriefing the program processing everything we’d experienced and learned and then we were all set free I think yeah I rode the train back across Canada to my hometown cuz yeah I was still a kid back then and I had to go back to my hometown, you know, move back into my parents’ house basically living there and then I needed to make money to go to university and I ended up with a job in British Columbia. So that’s where the exchange program had taken place. It was in British Columbia in the Rocky Mountains. I lived with a local family there that had a construction company. They built houses and they offered me a job for the summer building houses. So I did that for the summer. Meanwhile, my girlfriend at the time, she and I were going to go to the same university. We were changing universities. And then while I was in British Columbia, she rented an apartment in the new city, Guelph, where we’re changing to a new university. So she was renting an apartment, doing all of the official stuff, right? So even then, I ended up living in an apartment with her like a regular kind of person, but I never did any of the formalities. And in fact, in my entire lifetime, I’ve never done it. So, for example, my girlfriend to rent that apartment, she had to get references and she had references because she’d rented other apartments and her landlords, you know, gave her a letter of reference. She had to give deposits and assurances and guarantees and her parents helped her out with that. You know, they would sign the forms to say, you know, we are responsible for the finances of this place and if there’s any damage, you know, basically the real world of official documentation, paying rent, signing up for a phone line, paying the phone bill, electricity bill, water bill, all of that was done by my girlfriend while I was just out in the middle of the Rockies, you know, hammering and living in this little cabin, no running water, having to shower in the river because, yeah, there was no bathroom of any kind, just an outhouse. So I was out there doing that while she was arranging my life at the university and I could just move into a ready-made apartment. Oh, here it is. So she did all the formal official stuff. I didn’t have to do it. I didn’t know how to do it. I could not have done it. So that’s kind of what I mean that even though I was living in this apartment at the time going to university, I still was sort of unconnected like sort of traveling. I didn’t have a home base. I had no official residence anywhere. And then as I completed my university degree, I kept taking off. So I would do one semester and then I went to Guatemala for half a year and then I went back to university to get some more credits and then I left again to do something else and went somewhere else for a long time came back. So even while I was going to university, I wasn’t based here, living here, paying rent and official. I was just sort of wandering around casually and getting short-term places to stay, staying in cheap hotels and things like that. And then came the key date. So in answer to your question, how long have you been traveling? Maybe you could date it from 1991. Everything I’ve described all happened before 1991 and I was living in Toronto at the time working there. But even then I had one foot out the door the entire time like I never settled down. I was living partially with another a different girlfriend at that time and she provided all the formality again. She had a real job with real references, a real income. A kind of job where when you get the job, it’s very difficult to get long interview processes and rein another interview. When you get the job, they pay for you to move to that new city and set you up and, you know, real-world stuff. And I never did any of that. I mean, I think at that time I had like a part-time job at the university newspaper. So I was the production manager at the university newspaper and it was my job on the weekend to… Yeah. I wasn’t writing for the paper or anything like that. I was doing the production, the layout and the printing stuff like that. And then that was all the money I was making. And I barely made I mean I was living on like $20 at a time. My whole life has been like that where I might have $20 and that’s all the money I had. And I never really told people how poor I was or how difficult things were cuz at that time my girlfriend was based in Toronto at this amazing job living a real life. And I had a car at the time, the only car I’ve ever had in my life which I bought for $500. And barely ran. But then I would drive to Toronto to stay with her and I’ve got that $20 to get me through the week, right? And it just barely covered the gas for the car. And then I was just living tiny paycheck to tiny paycheck, barely making it to the next time. And you know, I would I had all these weird tricks I had to play using like like a bank card and things like that to put like withdrawing $20 at a time and my account was down to like 35, you know, and you just that bank account is barely staying alive and I have to wait until I get my next paycheck. So that was kind of the life I was living. And then I eventually I got a job in Toronto as a temp, like a temp worker. And again, it was all temporary, all just casual work. And then I always had one foot out the door. And then came 1991. I learned about teaching English in Asia. Seemed to suit me. I didn’t really have anything to lose because I had no money. I had no job. I had no place to live. So it really wasn’t as adventurous as you might think. So all I did was I bought a flight to South Korea in 1991 and I landed there heavily in debt with a huge credit card debt that I had built up because I had to pay for the flight using a credit card. And then I just went looking for a job teaching English. And then from 1991 until today I’ve basically been in and out of Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, back to Canada. Various trips, various jobs, based in South Korea for a while, then based in Taiwan for a while, and while I was in Taiwan, that was probably the longest stretch of time where I had a normal life. But even then, the whole time just about… Well, yeah. The whole time I was living in a hostel like everybody else, they landed in Taiwan, got a job, and you have to stay in like a cheap hotel or a hostel until you get an income, and then you move out, you move, you rent an apartment, you buy a car, you know, you do all these adult things. I arrived, moved into a cheap hostel, horrendous place, but interesting place. Got a job, started making money, and then for the next 10 years, I lived in the hostel. I never moved out. The best I did was this hostel happened to have like a single room up on the roof of the building, like a little studio apartment, basically still part of the hostel, owned by the same family. And at one point, I came back from a trip and the hostel was full. I couldn’t get a bed. So then they said to me, “Oh, we actually have a room on the roof. It’s still, you know, connected and everything, but you want to stay there.” So I moved into that room. And I just lived there for years and years and years. People who saw pictures of that apartment were like, “Dude, why are you living there? Why don’t you?” It’s like, “Ah, so small, you know.” I loved it. I love small places. So it was really like just living in a hostel. And then I left from Taiwan in 2013 maybe. And then from 2013 until now, I’ve just been traveling basically. But when you say traveling again, you’re like saying if you’re thinking of classic traveling, like going to 10 countries in 3 months. I never ever did any of that because what I tend to do is go to a country and stay there as long as they’ll let me until my visa options run out and then they kick me out and I have to go to a new country. So even though I’ve technically been traveling all this time, it’s like I would go to Ecuador and I lived in Quito for 6 months in a cheap hotel. I got a room for like $1 a night in this really horrible but beautiful amazing place and it cost me $30 a month to live in Quito in Ecuador and I just stayed in Quito for 6 months. So I technically I was traveling in Ecuador but I didn’t travel around the country. I just lived in Quito and then I lived in Seoul. I lived in Taipei and then I went to the Philippines. I stayed in the Philippines for 2 or 3 years until my visa options ran out, you know. So I just keep jumping from country to country, maxing out my tourist visa options before I have to move on. So, do you ever get sick of it? I think I told I gave all of that background because I think people who travel like you’re traveling nonstop like every month endless plane rides, train rides, bus rides, constantly going from country to country. Yeah, you will get sick of that. But my travel history has been more like irregular living. I’m just living, but I just happen to be doing it in different countries. Do you see what I mean? So, technically, it’s traveling, but not traveling maybe in the way you’re thinking of it. And if all you’re doing is living overseas, yeah, you’ll never get sick of it. This is how I’ve always lived. Like I said, living in these like cheap hostels, cold water bath, you know, like cheap hotels in Sumatra where all you… there’s a bathroom down the hall, you know, cold water bucket bath. That’s how I’ve always lived and it’s just life to me. So I don’t… it’s not like you don’t get sick of life if that is your regular life if you see what I mean. So no I never get sick of it. It’s I could do this forever. I don’t have any conception of doing anything else. Have you thought about where you end up and do you have a plan? No, I’ve never thought about that. I suppose I should have. I had opportunities to do it, but based on the life that I’ve described, you can imagine that it never occurred to me that, oh, I got to start thinking about my, as Americans do, they’re always talking about their 401k and their pension plan and their retirement and their investments and all that kind of stuff. I never made enough money ever to even contemplate these things. I’m sure Canada has something like the 401k. I don’t even know what it’s called, but you know, when you work in Canada, they take some of your income and they automatically put it into one of these retirement savings plans. They do it for you, just like the 401k, I guess. And then I guess you get a tax break when you do it that way, but I don’t have any of that because I never worked at a real job in Canada. So yeah, I don’t have any of the… I don’t have a pension, no investments, anything like that. So I don’t know where I’ll end up. I can’t end up like I don’t have the money to end up anywhere. I’ll just end up wherever I am. And do I have a plan? No, I don’t. I don’t have a plan. So far, I’ve been lucky. I mean, I’m 63 years old. I’ve made it this far without any big problems. No health problems, no huge hospital bills, no accidents, no, you know, big emergencies. And I don’t have a family. I’d have nobody to take care of. It’s only me. It’s easy to take risks when it’s only you and nobody is depending on you. I have nothing to lose. You know, there’s no house I can lose. There’s nothing out there that I can lose. So yeah, no plan and I don’t know where I will end up.

Question five out of 11. I guess this question has been asked before. From your travels, which is the top three countries or places you like the most and why? Thank you. Yeah, I mean that kind of question you kind of have to define it as well to come up with an answer. My way of answering that question would be what are the three places where I had the biggest experiences that had the most impact on my life and that because of that I would go back to and for that I guess I would have to go well gets tricky very very tricky I would have to go back all the way to India because like I said India had such a profound impact on me going to India set me on a course that dictated the rest of my life basically. So India but of course India is a very tough place to travel. You can see that YouTube videos tend to focus on the hardships of traveling in India. So it may not be the most pleasurable place to visit but man when you think about India the geography is incredible. The variety. I mean you could spend your entire lifetime in India never run out of new areas to visit with different geography all the way from you know the Himalaya mountains in the north down to the yeah all the way down to the south all the coastlines the history the number of languages the number of cultures the food I mean there’s just no end to the place so so India has to be among my top three and then I went on a I how long was it 10 month I sometimes say it was a year but probably wasn’t quite a year where I went on a trip to Ethiopia it was a cycling trip but I spent all of my time there either cycling or living in little places I based myself in the capital Addis for a while just hanging out in that city and exploring I lived in a small village for a while I just came across this tiny village that I really liked. I got to know the local teachers and I found a cheap hotel, lived in this cheap hotel and just sort of lived in the village for a while and then I went hiking through the mountains. I had a backpack and I would hike down these there was no roads or anything. I just hiked in the interior of the Ethiopian highlands following the regular trails, centuries old, millennia old trails, going from village to village and just sleeping at night in the villages, things like that. And then cycling around the whole country and that had a profound impact on me. Ethiopia is one of the toughest places in the world to cycle for sure. Probably this was back in 1998 1999 and Ethiopia was a very rough place back then much rougher than it is today. It’s developed a lot since then still a tough place but back in ’98 ’99 yeah it was really tough and it had a huge impact on me and it is one of the most amazing countries in the world. So again, given unlimited budget and time, I would definitely pencil in a return to Ethiopia because I would appreciate it much more now. When I was there in ’98 ’99, there was no internet as there is today. So I had nothing. I mean, I had no there’s no smartphone, there’s no Wikipedia, there’s no YouTube. So you can’t get any information. So when you’re in a historic city like Gondar for example in northern Ethiopia, I think Gondar would be like Melaka for me. I could base myself in Gondar for 3 months and shoot a video every single day about the history of Gondar, the architecture of the place, the buildings, the temples. It has a incredible history. And then the markets and the people and the countryside and just yeah you could spend a year just in Gondar and today you would have the advantage of every time you don’t know something yeah you’ve got the internet you can just learn everything about the city you’re going to visit the castle that they have in Gondar when I was there I didn’t even go into the castle I remember that again I didn’t have any money so I couldn’t even pay for like the entrance ticket to go into the castle if I remember right. I walked around it from the outside, but the only thing I knew about the castle was what I read from the information signs there. I had no access to information. So I couldn’t do a deep dive into the language, the culture, the history, the music, the art, anything, the religion today would be a completely different experience. So, Ethiopia, India, Ethiopia, and then one of the other really big experiences of my life was a cycling trip in Guinea in West Africa. So I might put that as my number three. I went there, yeah, by bicycle. And my exposure to it was like one of my first big exposures to a Muslim country because Guinea is Muslim. It’s also French-speaking because it was a French colony and it’s in West Africa. So it’s a completely different from my time in Ethiopia. A window onto a whole other part of the world you know West Africa very very different from East Africa and I had I wouldn’t call it pleasant just like Ethiopia was super super tough for me. Guinea was really, really, really tough as a cyclist in particular and it was a bad time to be there. There was some fighting going on on the border and again I was completely cut off from information. And I remember that I bought a radio at the time because there was a lot of fighting and a lot of danger and people were panicking and people were talking about an army that was marching on the capital city of Conakry and Indian shopkeepers that I got to know were discussing seriously that they’re going to have to flee the country and I’m there like a dumb tourist like I’m just here to ride my bicycle, dude. Like I’m not prepared for all this and I couldn’t get any information about what was happening. So I bought a shortwave radio in the market just so I could tune into BBC Africa and that was my only source of information to try and figure out can I even ride my bike around Guinea like what is happening in the country right now and there was so much corruption, so much military, so many police officers. The local people were paranoid at the time. Everybody was… Yeah, it was a really rough time but it was amazing. I mean an eye-opening experience. So again in terms of its impact on me, Guinea would have to be on that list. So India, Ethiopia and Guinea would be my three. But I wouldn’t recommend any of those three to other people unless they know what they’re getting themselves into. So if you want to talk about the like the best places, the most pleasurable places, the easiest, you know, then I’ve got a whole new list for you. So of I probably start off with Malaysia because Malaysia has been a real revelation for me in terms of how interesting the country is and just how nice it is to be here. I mean, it’s got it’s so different from traveling in a place like Ethiopia or Guinea. I mean that is an adventure, gruelling and tough. And then Malaysia is just wonderful and nice. Everybody is friendly. The food is amazing. The sites, you know, traveling is easy. I mean, everything is just warm and welcoming and wonderful. So put Malaysia on that list. Philippines would be on that list because I’ve had so many amazing adventures in the Philippines. And Philippines could be pure pleasure, an amazing combination of adventure, travel, but just a wonderful place to visit. English helps like being in Malaysia where people speak English, that helps a lot. And the Philippines, a lot of English is spoken. So that also helps your experience there. So those two and then a long time ago, I did a trek in Nepal and my trek through the Himalayan mountains in Nepal. Amazing experience. So in terms of pleasure, wonderful places then I might make a different list and I would say things like Malaysia, Philippines, Nepal, something like that. So I hope that answers your question.

Question six. In line with the Melaka deep dive into its history and culture, may I know if you could be considering similar exploits in other towns and areas in Malaysia? I certainly thought about it. But in a way I thought about it in a logistical problematic way where yeah I would love to do exactly the same thing if I could you know budget and time were not issues man yeah easily I could do it some towns jump out at me like right now I’m thinking about cycling up the east coast so now you’ve got Terengganu I still have trouble with that name Terengganu love to base myself there for a month and do nothing but make videos about that city, its history, the river, the coastline, everything about that city. Kota Bharu, Kuantan, those major cities along the east coast. I could easily do it I could easily do it in Ipoh as well. There’s a lot of history there of course and I’ve been to Ipoh and but I just scratched the surface of what is there. So yeah, I could easily do it in Malaysia, but at the same time, there’s two problems with that. How much time it takes. Especially like here in Melaka, it’s kind of funny where when I first arrived and I kind of shot my normal videos and I was like talking about the history a little bit and I thought I knew what I was talking about because I went to the museums and then I found out that everything I learned in the museum was kind of misleading and then there was so much more to the history and then I dug deeper and I thought okay now I know about the history but then I discovered that no there’s another layer under that and another. So the more you make the more you learn about a place’s the history of a place like peeling an onion that you just you there’s no end to it. There’s a layer after layer after layer and you never get to the end of it. So it creates a real time pressure. Plus for YouTube it’s a very small audience I guess that’s interested in that kind of historical deep dive. They’re a committed audience, but I don’t think that audience is ever going to grow. There’s no chance of going from here to Kota Bharu and then making historical videos there, deep dive videos, and now you’re suddenly going to get, you know, 40,000 views, 100. There’s no opportunity for your channel to grow if you keep making those videos. But at least if you if I just set off and do more of a adventure style travel, I think there’s more of an opportunity for your YouTube channel to grow, which means you make money and that would allow you to keep going. So I think committing to doing nothing but deep dives into local culture and history, you’re you have to be self-funding. You have to have the money to do that and just pay for it on your own because your YouTube channel, it’s not going to grow. But if you do adventure travel like cycling or moto vlogging for some reason seems to be super super popular everywhere in the world, people love motorcycles for some reason. I’m not sure why, but people are fascinated by them and motorcycle journeys. If you commit to that, there’s a chance that your channel will become popular enough you’ll be able to make enough money to keep going. So committing to this kind of deep dive means locking into never making any money. And then yeah, you have to have your own money. And but if you switch modes into more of an adventure travel style, kind of a sprinkling of history, but focus more on the day-to-day travel, going from A to B to C to D to E, at least there’s an opportunity, a chance that you’ll hit the YouTube lottery, you’ll be good enough, fun enough, entertaining enough that your audience will grow. So yeah, I’d love to do the sort of deep dive in other areas, but the chances of being able to do that are yeah, pretty slim.

Question seven of 11. This one is quite interesting because it connects a little bit with what I was just talking about. So question question seven. I think your Melaka videos are getting pretty good viewership. Are you getting some decent income from YouTube alone? Would you say YouTube is paying about $6 US per 1,000 views?

And yeah, interesting question. And I made some notes about this thinking about this question and I learned a lot of things myself which are quite interesting. But yeah, the Melaka videos I wouldn’t say they’re getting good viewership. You know, my normal videos 3,000 views, 4,000 and then occasionally one of them will spike. And it is interesting to see which ones spike. And it seems to be connected to the topic or to just the wording of the title, which is really interesting. And I’m not a fan of YouTube clickbait. I hate all of that over sensationalized drama, the manufactured danger excitement that you see all over YouTube. But you know when you even when you look at my videos you see maybe you have to do it like you don’t have a choice. So, for example, the videos that spiked with more views, one of them is actually a normal Planet Doug video, but I was feeling a little bit, I don’t know, snarky that morning, I guess, when I titled the video. And I called the video Melaka, I have a bone to pick with you. And that’s an English idiom like like I have a problem with you. I’m angry with you. Or yeah, I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Melaka. And because of that title, that video has 52,000 views. Though, it’s important to point out that 52,000 views means 52,000 people clicked on the video. It doesn’t mean, you know, maybe all of them, maybe 50, maybe 48,000 of them stopped watching after 30 seconds. You know, they thought, “Ooh, this tourist, he’s angry with Melaka. He had a really bad experience, scandal, excitement.” And they click on it and then I start talking and they’re like, “What the heck? Who’s this boring dude?” Yeah, you know, delete unsubscribe, right? Because when I said, “I have a bone to pick with you,” it was more about there was so much fascinating history in Melaka that I was unaware of. Even someone who was interested. I went walking around everywhere in Melaka. I saw everything. And yet all of these incredible stories, I didn’t even know about them. So there was something wrong with the presentation of Melaka’s history. And that was why I said, you know, I have a bone to pick with you. You know, like I think in that video there was a white building. I kept seeing this white building and I walked past it like a hundred times and I never knew it was a museum. It’s like I then I discovered as one day looking more carefully at the sign. Oh, that thing’s a museum. And I had no idea. So that was what I meant by I have a bone to pick with you. Like why don’t you slap a big sign here that says museum? I think most people walk by that building and they don’t even know what it is. And then I learned the story about the discovery of the foundations of the Middelburg Bastion. And I it was I learned it from a viewer who put it in the comments saying, you know, did you know that the observation tower, the Menara Taming Sari, they were going to build it right there beside the bridge. But when they started digging, excavating, they hit the rock, the laterite of the fortress. And they uncovered this hidden fortress foundations. So they decided to move the tower and then they uncovered the ruins of the fortress. Amazing story. It’s like how the heck have I been in Melaka for 3 months and I never even heard that story until now. So somehow Melaka as a tourist destination failed me by not telling its own stories properly. That’s what I meant. And a normal Planet Doug video title would have been very boring. But this one, Melaka, I have a bone to pick with you caused a lot of people to click on it. The other one that was very popular was when I went to the French submarine, and I don’t know why that one was popular, to be honest, but it seemed to tap into an international audience. And it got 42,000 views, you know, 10 times more than my regular 4,000 views. And I don’t know why that one just struck a chord and with people and then YouTube started promoting it and I got a lot of views for that one. And another one that got a lot of views, again, it was because of my title. I kind of dove a little bit into the clickbait. I This was another video where I was just talking about all the amazing history of Melaka that I didn’t know about all these incredible stories that I missed for some reason. And I called the video something like the lost history of Melaka, secrets that tourists never discover, right? And I hate those words like lost history. Like the history isn’t lost. It’s right there out in the open. It’s just it’s a little bit, you know, people are just unaware of it. And then the secrets that tourists never uncover. Again, that’s clickbait, but it works. You know, you use that kind of title. I mean, technically, I allowed myself to use that title because it still felt reasonable. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t over drama. I wasn’t being overly dramatic. So, you know, but the title you pick has a lot to do with how many people click on the video. Whether they keep watching the video, that’s another story. And I think that’s where the $6 per 1,000 views comes in. And to be honest, I generally pay no attention to any of that stuff. I just find it overwhelming and I find it distracting. Like YouTube offers, you know, if you have a YouTube channel, they offer an incredible range of analytics. You can get lost in the analytics and never come up for air because they keep track of everything. And I don’t really like that because what it does is it puts all the focus on getting people to click on your video and watch your video. Every trick in the book, every little nuance, every image, every word. So you can go into your analytics and you can see exactly where people stop watching your video like you know here’s the views and then they drop off. Ah what did you do at this point in your video? How can you keep their attention? And then, you know, you learn all these tricks, I guess, and when you find the exact spot where people stop watching your video, you figure out if there’s a pattern. And then you have to figure out a way to change it up, you know, like right when this happens. Now, jump out of the bushes with a clown suit on and go, “Hey, hey.” And then get people excited and keep watching, you know, grab a puppy and, oh, here, look at a cute puppy now. Keep watching my video. Like you know all these I’m being facetious there but not really because when you talk about all the all the advice they give you how to get an effective thumbnail how to keep people interested engaged in your video. A lot of it, if you follow all of those rules, you’ll end up with a clickbait video that is completely fake and artificial and has nothing to do with reality because yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of the videos that are super popular, the ones that keep people’s attention, you know, a lot of them are absolute junk. And I mean if you are willing to make junk just to make money, well you know go for it. You know that is your choice. But I guess there is a sweet spot where you can make high quality personal real natural stories about traveling and also make them entertaining enough and package it in a way that keeps people watching the video and then wanting to come back and watch your next video. Yeah, there’s got to be a sweet spot in there. I’ve never found that sweet spot obviously, but it is there. So yeah, the analytics can help, but I do find them annoying and distracting, and I don’t know anything about them. So, even with this guy’s question about $6 per 1,000 views, I knew that has a name. There’s a name for that, and I had to look it up because I don’t know what it is. And I have the answer here. So apparently if you’re talking about how much money you make per 1,000 views, that is called RPM, the revenue per mille. Mille being I think French for 1,000. So that figure is how much you make, not how much the video makes. Because then, you know, YouTube takes their 60% or whatever it is they take, all the taxes, all everything is out. How much money are you getting per 1,000 views? That is your RPM. And he’s asking me, is YouTube paying me an RPM of $6? Am I getting $6 per 1,000 views? And to be honest, I didn’t I don’t know. I didn’t know until I did the research on this question. So, one interesting thing about YouTube, they added this not that long ago, is now when I go to my video list, my content list, it actually shows me exactly how much money that video made. And to be honest, I don’t like seeing that number because it’s very depressing, especially if you spent a lot of time like researching a history video, you know, like 2 days goes into researching the topic and then a day of shooting and then a day of editing, a day and a half of editing. So, it’s like three or 4 days of your life goes into this video and you see that figure. Here. It’s like, “Oh, this video made $4.” You’re like, “Okay, I’m making a dollar a day here.” It’s like, you don’t want to see that. It really Yeah, it’s kind of kind of sad. It’s kind of depressing. So, I don’t really like it that I can see those numbers, but because of this question, I can do some quick math. So, I went through my videos and I took how much money the video made, divided it by the number of thousands per view. So, if it’s like if that video made $20, I can see it there. $20. And then there were 4,000 views, right? 20 divided by four, $5, right? That is a RPM of $5. So, $5 per 1,000 views. So I can do the math by looking at how much the video made divided by the thousands of views and I can come up with it. So anyway, I am not making $6 as my RPM. Not even close. Most of the videos were in a range of from like 65 cents to $3 in there. Most of the videos seem to go up and down. Some like call it like $2 RPM. So if you look at one of my Planet Doug videos, you can do the math yourself and you can just take 4,000 views, multiply it by $2, I probably made $8 from that video. Or if it’s you know 3,000 views I made yeah multiply $6 for that video. So yeah, I wish I had an RPM of $6. Some of them is actually higher than that. So even though the average is somewhere between like 65 up until $3, like in that range, a couple of them did have a $6 RPM or even an $8. So, for example, this lost history of Melaka, the secrets that tourists never learn, that for some reason has an RPM of $8. So, I made $8 per 1,000 views on that video, which I think tells me that people watched more of the video. So what’s interesting is the number of views is one factor but more important is how long did those people watch. So for example my Melaka I have a bone to pick with you video. It’s one of my most successful videos 52,000 views but it only has an RPM of $1.20. So yeah, that tells me that a lot of people clicked on it, but most of those people didn’t watch the video. They just clicked on it and then they just clicked away and went to watch something else because it’s only a $1.20 per 1,000 views. So for that one, again, you can do the math right there. 52,000 views. So 52 * $1.20. That video actually made more money than is normal for me. Of course, my phone is going to stop working right now when I need it. 52,000 times 1.20. So that video earned $62 for me. So, even though it does have a very low RPM of $1.20, because 52,000 people clicked on it, I still earned $60. And if every one of my videos made $60,

Planet Doug is flying high. Planet Doug is traveling the world and shooting videos and having a very good life. Yeah. Like if you made $60 per video, someone like me, let’s say I put out even two videos per week, what would that Let’s do the math there. Four weeks. So like eight videos a month, I guess. Yeah. Nobody’s living large on that. So, even if you posted eight videos a month and each video made $60, that’s yeah, $480. And that’s still not quite enough. But if you posted three videos a week, 12 videos a month, each one made 60, you know, that’s $720 a month with my lifestyle. Yeah, I could live on that. But yeah, so that was one interesting one. The other one is the French submarine video. Again, this is all new information to me. I never look into this because of this question. It made me do a deep dive and it is actually pretty interesting. I never even thought about this stuff before. But the French submarine video, 42,000 views, it made $2 per 1,000. So it has an RPM of $2. So 2 * 42, that video actually made $84. Though, I mean, to me, as a YouTuber on Planet Doug, that seems like a fortune. Like none of my videos ever make that much money. So, for to have a video of mine make $80 to me, that’s amazing. It’s like that’s a huge achievement. But, of course, that video, it probably took me three full days to shoot, edit, and post. So, you’re talking about $80 of income for three days of work. And you’re going to make way more money than that doing any job. Like if you’re a clerk at 7-Eleven putting in three eight-hour shifts, you’re making way more money than $80. So, you know, it’s kind of a real whiplash making YouTube videos cuz even making $80, wow, you feel like you’re making money, but you’re still the poorest person on the planet. You’re making less money than anybody else around you, like anyone in your world. So, I recently posted a video about the tombstones at St. Paul’s Church, and that one was relatively popular as well, 17,000 views, but for some reason, it has an RPM of 65 cents.

And that one I don’t understand because it seems like an interesting video, but maybe it is so slow and so dominated by history that even though 17,000 people clicked on the video for whatever reason, nobody watched it. Like everybody just stopped watching after 30 seconds or something. So it has an RPM of 65 cents. So, even though when you look when you scan my YouTube channel, it looks like one of my most popular videos, recent ones, it’s actually the least popular because nobody watched it. They clicked on it, but they didn’t watch it. So, 65 cents RPM. And something else that really jumped out at me, which was a very big surprise, is that the videos with the highest RPM, you know, revenue per 1,000 views, are these videos. It’s the BTS videos, like my behind-the-scenes podcast videos. They have an RPM of $8 per thousand views. And these AMA videos, ask me anything videos, they have a $6 RPM. So they range from $6 to $8. All of my behind-the-scenes videos where I’m talking for 5 hours, 3 hours like this. They’re actually more popular than the videos that I spend days working on. But of course, I still don’t make a lot of money for those because not many people click on them. They might like have 1,000 views or 2,000 views, something like that. But interestingly enough, the RPM are the highest. They’re the highest performers on my channel in terms of RPM. $8, $7, $6 in that range. My normal videos range from 65 cents to $1, $2, maybe $3. So yeah, it’s a lot of interesting information there. You can really see which of your videos make money, which ones don’t make money, which ones are popular, which ones are unpopular, and it could help you as a YouTuber, you know, guide what you do. So yeah, very interesting question. Led me down a rabbit hole stuff that I never usually think about because, yeah, it’s a little bit too too depressing.

Question eight out of 11. Again, a very interesting question. Hi Doug, Malaysia has 13 states and three federal territories. Have you ever considered to loop them all in order to finish off your Malaysian tours? And I say that’s an interesting question because I noticed that what’s the guy’s name again? I knew I was going to talk about this guy, but now I can’t think of his name. Patty. Patty Doyle. Right. Let me let me double check that. Yes, Patty Doyle. So, he’s a YouTuber from Thailand. Very professional, very successful YouTuber based in Thailand. He’s British of some variety. And I remember when he switched from being an English teacher to being a full-time YouTuber. He was making YouTube videos before. There was a group of oh again I can’t remember the name of these guys. There’s like a group of three YouTubers that tried to travel on a really really cheap budget and they made videos together as a group. He was a member of that team I think. But then he started making his own videos in Thailand. And his very first series, if I remember right, was getting a scooter. And he had a project where he was going to ride his scooter to every province or state, I don’t know what they’re called in Thailand, but go to every province in Thailand. And there’s I don’t a lot of them, 30, 40, 50 of them. There are a lot of them. So he was going to visit every single state and make a video about that state and it was like part of this big project, a big journey that was going to take one or two years to complete. And if I remember right, those videos were very popular. Like right out of the gate posted his first video, massive viewership, making lots of money, and then every one of his videos where it had a structure, I guess, it had a journey, it had an outline, state by state by state. And then for some reason that drew an audience. And of course, he’s very different from me. He’s very hyper and energetic and, you know, he sings in his videos. You know, he’ll burst into song and does he dances all the time. You know, he does all these things that I could never do in a million years because it’s just not part of my personality. So, he’s just very engaging. Lots of people enjoy watching his videos. You can say the videos are not very good or they’re just kind of junk food, but they are popular. And he makes enough money from YouTube that his last seems like his last four videos is all about taking all of his YouTube money and buying a new condo. It’s like leaving living in Bangkok. Why were leaving our dream condo. 223,000 views. I bought a 40-year-old condo in Bangkok. 250,000 views. I renovated a 40-year-old condo in Bangkok. 160,000 views. Our Bangkok condo renovation is finished. Full tour and cost. 120,000 views. And then the very last video he just posted, seven mistakes I made traveling Thailand. Watch before you go. And then there’s like a thumbnail saying Idiot pointing at him my biggest Thailand mistakes. Anyway, this is what I should be doing. Anyway, he made enough money from YouTube that his entire life now is based on spending that money buying his dream condo in Bangkok. And yeah, of course, I’m busy making a dollar a day diving into the history of Melaka. So, yeah, we’re living very different lives here on YouTube. But again, that’s the kind of video it seems like you should be making on YouTube where you know, seven mistakes I made. Anything with a numbered list like the five best restaurants in Melaka, the six most amazing sites in Melaka, the four mistakes I made in Melaka, watch before you go. I mean, that would get a lot more views than the videos that I’m actually posting. So, and his thumbnails are always very very good. They’ve always got a really strong hook, the topic, and his videos are like 20 minutes long, 15 minutes long, 20 minutes long, you know. So, he’s very disciplined about doing everything right. Though, I must say this idea of you must post short videos, I don’t know if I entirely believe that because I also watch a guy, his name is Dale Phillips. Very popular YouTuber and his videos are all 90 minutes long just like mine. They’re an hour to an hour and a half long and they’re not exciting. He doesn’t do any of this fancy Patty Doyle stuff. He just walks around and chats. The video doesn’t isn’t really framed that nicely. The audio isn’t that great. There’s no real information in the videos. But yeah, he gets tons and tons and tons of views. So there seems to be a real range in YouTube. What kind of videos are popular? It doesn’t have to be your video has to be clickbait thumbnail, clickbait topic, and 20 minutes long because then you see somebody like Dale Phillips, all he does is the lowest effort possible from what I can see. He doesn’t even put in, you know, information or text boxes. He doesn’t do research really. He just sort of walks around. He interacts with people, tries local food, and then, yeah, 70,000 views, 100,000 views consistently. So, seems like there’s a lot. Anyway, long tangent, I guess, to get around to Patty Doyle did this in Thailand, so you could do it in Malaysia as well. Like if you set off on a motorcycle or a scooter and you said you are going to visit all 13 states and three territories in Malaysia and make a video about each one about your journey. Yeah, I think that video project would be it wouldn’t be as popular as Thailand. People just love Thailand for some reason. Like a western audience. They’re just fascinated with Thailand. I don’t really get it. I’ve never been a big fan of Thailand as a travel destination myself. I prefer Malaysia myself, but anyway, I think this video would be very popular. And the thing is, I think most foreign visitors to Malaysia never think about the different states. Never comes up. We go, we think about cities, right? We’re going to, oh, I went to KL. I went to Langkawi, the island. I went to Penang. I went to Melaka. I went to Johor Bahru. But if you told them the names of the states, Pahang for example, they’re like, “No idea what you’re talking about.” Like, nobody knows the names of the Malaysian states. They just don’t come up. People don’t know what they are. People don’t think about them. And if you made a video that actually was based on the states of Malaysia, that would actually be interesting information. It’d be helpful information to visitors like, “Oh, I didn’t even know that they had states and territories.” Like, what are these? I think I think that project would probably be quite popular, but you couldn’t really do it on a bicycle. I think you’d have to have a motorcycle to do something like that. But yeah, it’s a good suggestion.

Number nine out of 11. More of a suggestion than a question. If you became a permanent resident of Melaka, Malaysia, you could possibly do a tourist guide course. Get a license and conduct tours. You have fallen in love with Melaka. Yeah, I mean, I could see the possibility. There are a lot of guided tours here, but I think they come with a tour that you sign up for, like a bus tour kind of thing. I see groups all the time, a guy or a woman walking ahead of them with a flag, and I think they’re part of a bus tour from China or from Germany or for wherever. They start in Kuala Lumpur, sign up for a one-day tour of Melaka, and they all pile on the bus, and they come down here, and the guide takes them around, and they get back on the bus and go to the next location like that. So, there are very there are a lot of tours here. And I see Malaysian tour guides as well. I don’t know how they’re organized. I have no idea. Like I’ve never seen a business like a little shop that said guided tours of Melaka. Come in, sign up. We have a tour leaving at 10:00 a.m. every morning. Just show up and we go. You know, I’ve never seen anything like that. So there might be a market for something like that. But of course, as a foreigner on a tourist visa, that’s completely illegal. You can’t be paid to offer guided tours. You would have to get the proper permits, a work visa and then as he says you know you can get a license in being a tour guide. I don’t know if you know you think about this from the point of view of knowledge even now I probably have enough knowledge in my brain that I could give a pretty good surface level tour of Melaka from a historical point of view. I would have to do my I’d have to do some studying, memorizing to make sure I’ve got all of my facts straight because I often get dates wrong or there’s a lot of confusion about exact dates and names and place names, things like that. So, you got to make sure you got all that figured out in advance so you’re not stumbling. And then if one of your members of your tour group asks you a question outside of what you know, you have to be prepared to answer that. You can’t just know the basics. And then they say, “Oh, what about, you know,” and they ask you some question about some person you’ve never heard of, you know, you got to know a lot more than is contained in your guided tour. So, here’s my tour. Here’s my script. But that can’t be the limit of your knowledge. You have to be able to field questions that go deeper than your tour, you know. And I guess you would have to know I would have to know a lot more about food, things like that, which I know nothing about. I know nothing about the traditional foods of Malaysia, of Melaka, you know, things like that. But yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting idea. It would certainly be fun except again I don’t think I have the right personality because I’m way too serious. I’m way too yeah just too serious for that. I see the way the tour guides are behaving and there’s a lot of selfies involved, right? As part of your tour, if you don’t offer your members of your group chances to get together as a group and go woohoo and pose for a selfie in front of each place you’re visiting, you’re kind of failing your tour group because they’re really interested in their selfies. And on Planet Doug’s guided tour, you’re on your own. You want to take selfies, go for it. But I’m not making a big banner and I’m not going to encourage you to pose in front of this, you know, fortress ruin and then go woohoo. And no, you’re not getting that on the Planet Doug tour. And I think a lot of people, they want to have fun, you know, they’re interested, sure, they might be interested in history, but they also want to have a good time. And I’m not the guy to turn to if you want to have a good time, I don’t think. Interesting time maybe, but not not a fun time. That’s not happening on Planet Doug, I don’t think.

Two questions left. Number 10 is from Alfred Flatcap. For when you start your cycle tour. Are you satisfied that your bicycle and accessories are presently in the best order or are you considering a checkup at the bike shop first? Similarly, thoughts on your camping equipment, too. Yeah, good question. I was just thinking about that myself because I have plans to leave on my bicycle tour on Sunday. I think earlier I said it was Monday, but so right now I don’t have a hotel room booked for Sunday night. So my actual plan is to leave Melaka on my bicycle on Sunday. So I’ve got today to record this video, tomorrow to edit this video, get my bike ready, and then Sunday leaving. So that’s the plan. And I have been neglecting my bicycle. I’ve had it parked outside all this time here in Melaka and recently I haven’t even been riding the bike. I check up on it, you know, I check that the gears are still working. I oil the chain cuz it can get rusty pretty quickly in this climate, but that’s all I’ve been doing. I’m going to have to pump up the tires tomorrow, ride it around, make sure the brakes and the gears are still working. It would be a good idea to bring it to a bike shop at this point and just say, you know, just give it a once over. Just clean it top to bottom, reoil everything, the chain, make sure the gears are changing, just get everything dialed in, and double check the most important parts of the bike, like the bearings that are in the what is it called? I can’t even think of it at where the pedals turn. What’s that bearing assembly called? The… It’s got a really weird name. I can’t think of it right now. Bottom bracket. You know, check on the bottom bracket. Does it seem like it’s okay? Things like that. I should do that. I mean, it would make sense to have somebody, a professional, just give it a once over, but I don’t think I need to, to be honest. I think everything’s okay. And if it does break down, it does. I’ll have to get it fixed in Johor Bahru or Kuantan or something like that. So, yeah, I think it’s okay. When it comes to my camping equipment, yeah, that’s a whole other story. The tent in particular, I doubt very much that it’s waterproof in any way. The waterproof coating, the seam tape that is water supposed to keep the water out of the seams, all of that is gone. So, I don’t think the tent is waterproof in any way. So, if I am sleeping in this tent and there’s like one of these Malaysian tropical downpours at night, yeah, I think I’d be in pretty big trouble. That technically if what I’ve come to conclude in my lifetime is that every time you start a new trip of any kind, begin with a brand new tent. Do not try to keep your old tent going beyond its lifetime. Just get a new tent and start fresh. Use that tent for that trip and then at the end of that trip, you know, donate it to charity. Your next trip, get a new tent. Always get a new tent. I think that would be the smart thing to do. But then again, of course, for a modern tent, that would be very expensive. I mean, they’re worth hundreds of dollars if you go that route. And you can get cheaper tents of course, but they’re heavier and not as good. But yeah, my current tent, yeah, I have no idea how it would survive in a rainstorm. And then if I do end up camping out a lot on this trip, I should just to save money. And it turns out that it’s leaking, I would probably just buy a big tarp, you know, just go old school and pick up a tarp and just drape the tarp over the tent and then just Yeah. Use it that way. Yeah, not much else you can do. And my other camping equipment, I’m not really well designed. I’m not well set up for camping. I follow people who camp every single night just about like let’s go cycling and he’s pretty hardcore about that. And he has such a minimalist life in a way. He does seem to carry a heavy load, but he’s still he camps out every night. He seems to have like frying pans with him. And I don’t know how he does it. Like if I sleep in a tent at night, it’s all I can do just to suffer through sleeping in a tent. I have to get my food from a local restaurant and then I go back to my tent to sleep. I mean, when I was cycling across Canada, camping out every night, which I had to do because I can’t afford hotels in Canada, then I would cook every single night at my tent. And I had the proper cook stove. And I would just make spaghetti every single night. That’s all I ever cooked. Just a big pot, boiling water, spaghetti, and then a package of tomato sauce, like spaghetti sauce. I just cut it open and pour it in, stir it, eat it. That was my meal. I’m not chopping vegetables. I’m not chopping onions. I’m not frying things. I’m not building a campfire and using a frying pan on a campfire on the beach. There’s no way I could do that. Just Yeah, it’s it takes too much time, way too much prep work, way too much cleaning. Can you imagine all the soot on all your pots from a regular campfire? It’s just nightmarish to deal with. So, I don’t know how these people do it to be honest. The only way I can do it is with a clean alcohol fuel stove because it, you know, it has no gasoline smell. There’s no soot of any kind. Burns perfectly easily. You know, there’s no trouble with it. But even so, so the only way I can camp is to just sleep in the tent, wake up in the tent, maybe make coffee at my tent, and then continue on. But the whole idea of camping out, cooking food on a campfire, and then editing a video in your tent, no, there’s just YouTube, like making a YouTube video and camping. I have no idea how you do that to be honest because I’ve never really done it. I’m not sure that it’s even possible. I’ve always got camping gear with me, but I always end up using the camping gear inside hotel rooms, things like that. Yeah, like a sleeping bag and mosquito net, stuff like that. I use it in hotel rooms, not actually camping outside. But we’ll see how it goes. But yeah, I think my tent, there’s no way it’s going to work. It won’t be waterproof. So, I should even for a month trip, I should get a new tent. But I just Yeah, I don’t want to spend the money. I don’t have the money to spend on a new tent. So, I’m just going to use my old one. Hope for the best. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just pick up a tarp, put the tarp over it. Should be should be good to go.

Last question. 11 of 11. It seems that there’s a few projects to bypass the Melaka Strait. What do you think about that, Doug? And then there’s a link to a YouTube video, and I watched the video at that link. Really interesting. This is a very interesting topic because right now the Melaka Strait is an extremely busy extremely important shipping lane in the world. I’ve read that like 25% of all the goods in the world go through the Melaka Strait. So can you imagine if there was ever a problem there and that was cut off. I mean, the world economy would just implode basically, and it takes a long time. Like, ships from China have to go all the way down to the tip of the Malay Peninsula, like go around Singapore. It’s a very narrow space they have to fit through. It’s a big long detour. And then there have been ideas about how to avoid that. And then this video is all about a development at Kuantan where a huge Chinese conglomerate has made a deal to develop and put investments into a deep water harbor and port at Kuantan. And the idea is to link that port with the new ECRL train line so that you can ships from China can come to that port at Kuantan, unload, put all of their goods onto a train and then the train goes across the middle, the central mountain range of Malaysia to the Klang Valley and then the goods can be sold there or put on a ship on the other side and then taken for the rest of the journey. So that’s what this video was all about and it’s fascinating. I found that really interesting from a historical point of view because I came across this fascinating bit of history where people used to cross Malaysia by river from oh boy I forgot the name of the city. The royal city on the coast there. Give me a minute to look it up. I have a vague idea of what it’s called. Pekan. P E K A N. And then on Google Maps, yes, I think they call it the is a town in Pekan district, Pahang, Malaysia. The royal capital of the state. And it is right on the Pahang River. I got to figure that out. Is it Pahang? Pahang? I don’t know right now, but I’ll call it Pahang for now. But a long time ago, there was a route where people would go by boat from I’ve already forgotten. Pekan, I thought it was Perak or something like that, but it’s Pekan because Pekan is right on the Pahang River and they would go up the Pahang River all the way to like 2/3 of the way maybe across Malaysia and then it reaches a point where the Pahang River is like 500 m away from the headwaters of the Muar River. So then they would take their boat all the way up the Pahang River, drag their boat like a portage over to the Muar River and then complete the journey down the Muar River to Muar. So they would essentially cross the entire Malay Peninsula in the middle by river instead of going all the way around to Singapore and back up. And that’s a pretty amazing story that I that I read about. So this idea to build a port and then carry the goods across by train is very similar to what was done historically just south of Kuantan crossing by river from Pekan. You know just avoiding the long journey down around Singapore. And of course, historically, there has always been discussions of building a canal in the narrowest part of the isthmus, the long narrow piece of land connecting Thailand to Malaysia. It gets very very narrow at points and it’s not impossible to imagine someday digging a canal all the way across that narrow part of Thailand. And that would be even more efficient. All this shipping could just go straight from China straight across that part of Thailand, you know, Thailand’s version of the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal, you know, it would be absolutely amazing. And I know they’ve done a lot of research into it, a lot of studies trying to figure out is it economically feasible? What what would it mean in terms how much would it cost? How would it affect local wildlife and the environment and the local people? And I guess they always decided that nah, at this point it’s too expensive. It would be too disruptive to the environment, the people, the animals, everything. It’s a getting permission, buying up all the land, all the permits is just too much. So, they’ve never done it, but it is always a possibility. So there are lots of ideas for avoiding as he asks to bypass the Melaka Strait, the Kuantan Harbor with the new train route, the old way of going by river all the way across or digging a new canal. So that’s a that’s a fascinating story, something something to think about.

And that’s it. Again, I talked a lot more than I was anticipating. I was going to try and keep it really short and quick, especially considering there were just 11 questions to answer, but I guess my brain was thinking, “Huh, only 11 questions, therefore, I can talk longer if I want to.” So, I did go off on a few tangents there, but I hope that was enjoyable. I could keep you company with my babbling while you’re driving your car, washing your dishes, doing the laundry, going to sleep at night, letting my voice just drift you off to sleep, however you’re using these behind the scenes Planet Doug podcasts. I hope you enjoyed that. And as I’d said in that other video, oddly enough, these videos, the AMA and BTS videos, they have the highest RPM of all my videos, which is really strange when you think about it. They earn more money per thousand views than any of my other videos. I never knew that, you know. So that question did me a favor make me look into all these analytics learning a few things about my own YouTube channel. So that’s it shutting down. See you in the next video.