TL;DR / KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• The Planet Doug podcast is now a real audio podcast. After three days of wrestling with technology, account problems, and distribution platforms, I finally have a way to bring my travel stories to listeners who would rather listen than watch.
• Malaysia is hard on both people and equipment. Between a malfunctioning laptop fan, a disintegrating GoPro accessory, and gear slowly succumbing to heat, humidity, and rust, my travel setup is showing its age.
• The history of Johor has given me an entirely new obsession. Hundreds of seemingly ordinary rivers and streams along the coast reveal a remarkable story of land reclamation, agricultural development, and migration that most travelers would never notice.
• Travel videos can tell very different stories about the same place. My time in Parit Jawa, my growing fascination with Melaka’s history, and my reactions to other travel vloggers have reminded me that what we choose to investigate matters just as much as where we go.

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A New Way to Listen to Planet Doug

I’ve finally launched the Planet Doug podcast, and I’m treating it as an experiment.

The idea is simple: take the audio from my existing YouTube videos and make it available through podcast platforms. My behind-the-scenes videos are particularly well suited to this because they’re essentially long conversations with a camera pointed at me. You don’t necessarily need to watch me sitting on a hotel bed with a cup of instant coffee to enjoy the stories.

I also tried recording an entirely audio-only episode while walking around Muar, Malaysia. I carried my little Rode microphone on a stick, wandered the streets, talked about whatever caught my attention, and described my breakfast without bothering to film it.

I loved the experience. Without a GoPro, batteries, memory cards, graphics, and hours of video editing, the whole process becomes remarkably straightforward. I could simply talk, record, and upload.

There is a catch, though. The podcast currently has very few listeners, so I found myself recording hours of stories into what felt like an empty room. Then, when I sat down to record the video version, I couldn’t remember which stories I’d already told.

Still, getting the podcast running was an accomplishment in itself. I spent approximately three days figuring out the technology, working through account requirements, RSS feeds, distribution platforms, and payment-system problems. AI helped me navigate the process, although it certainly wasn’t a case of asking one question and magically having everything work.

For now, the experiment continues. You can watch the behind-the-scenes episodes on YouTube or listen to the audio version wherever you get your podcasts.

My Travel Equipment Is Falling Apart

The podcast might be working, but practically everything else seems determined to give me trouble.

The rubber power-button mechanism on my GoPro Media Mod has deteriorated to the point where the button actually ripped out. My current solution involves stuffing the remaining rubber into the hole and hoping I can still reach the camera’s power button.

Then there’s my laptop.

Shortly after arriving in Parit Jawa, I turned it on and the fans suddenly went berserk. The noise was extraordinary, and eventually I had to force the laptop to shut down. Since then, one of the fans has been making a strange scratching noise.

Naturally, this has sent me down another research rabbit hole. I carry the laptop on my bicycle, and I’d previously decided that the safest place for it was inside a heavily cushioned bag in my trailer. Now I’m reconsidering that arrangement and wondering whether carrying it upright in a pannier might be better.

I haven’t reached a confident conclusion. Nor am I particularly keen to dismantle an expensive laptop in a hotel room without the proper tools.

Meanwhile, my bicycle saddle cover has split open, leaving me sitting on the exposed gel, which has even stained my shorts. The locking mechanism on my GoPro neck mount has also been rusting from the constant exposure to sweat.

The heat and humidity here aren’t just uncomfortable; they’re relentless on equipment. Every little mechanical problem creates another task, another research project, and another interruption to the business of traveling and making videos.

It’s one of the less glamorous aspects of long-term travel that doesn’t necessarily make it into the finished vlog.

Leaving Melaka Didn’t Mean Leaving Its History Behind

When I finally cycled out of Melaka, I thought I was ready for a change of pace.

I’d spent so much time investigating the city’s history that I imagined my next videos would return to more conventional travel adventures. That intention lasted approximately five minutes.

I became fascinated by the retreat of Sultan Mahmud Shah following the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511. The Sultan, his followers, his family, and his entourage withdrew south, eventually reaching the Muar area.

I decided to retrace part of that journey by bicycle.

What I expected to be a manageable ride from Melaka to Muar became a two-day investigation involving historical sites, rivers, waterways, and the story of Tun Teja, whose tomb I found in a beautiful setting among the rice fields.

I also spent a night sleeping on an old sofa at a working fishing jetty.

The sofa wasn’t exactly inviting. It was dirty, the surroundings were noisy, and fishermen came and went throughout the night. But there was a roof overhead, I had my sleeping sheet, and I managed to get some rest without the mosquito bites everyone had warned me about.

It was a perfectly reasonable solution to an ordinary travel problem, even if the resulting footage looked rather startling to viewers accustomed to hotel rooms and conventional campsites.

The experience also reminded me how different a situation can look from the outside. What seemed perfectly natural to me—finding somewhere sheltered to sleep—was apparently a rather shocking sight to some viewers.

And the historical story wasn’t finished. I still had to reach Muar, investigate the location associated with the Sultan’s defenses, and try to understand what might have happened during his retreat.

I didn’t have all the answers. In fact, much of the fun came from asking questions: How did they move elephants across the rivers? How did such a large group navigate the coastal mudflats? How many people were traveling together?

Sometimes the questions themselves are what make a place interesting.

The Canals of Johor: An Entire History Hiding in Plain Sight

My next historical obsession emerged from a deceptively simple observation.

As I traveled along the coast south of Muar, I kept seeing place names beginning with Parit. I also noticed a recurring pattern on satellite maps: long, straight waterways cutting inland from the coast, spaced at remarkably regular intervals.

Parit means canal.

Those canals turned out to be the remnants of a major agricultural transformation. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, policies associated with Temenggong Ibrahim and his son Sultan Abu Bakar encouraged the development of agricultural land. Canals were dug to drain coastal peatlands and mangrove areas, making them suitable for cultivation.

Workers came from Java, and the canal system became an enormous undertaking. These weren’t just short drainage ditches. Some extended for miles inland, and specialized water gates helped drain the land while limiting the intrusion of seawater.

The landscape I was cycling through was therefore not simply a natural coastal environment. It was also the product of generations of human labor, engineering, migration, and economic ambition.

What fascinates me is how easily the evidence can escape notice.

A traveler crossing a bridge might see nothing more than another waterway. But look at the pattern, notice the names, and start asking questions, and suddenly an entire history opens up.

I spent time in Muar researching the canals, then rode out to investigate them firsthand. My first video about the subject was, in my own estimation, something of a jumble. I had absorbed so much information that I struggled to organize it into a coherent story while riding and talking.

Editing the video forced me to research the subject further and clarify the sequence of events. By the time I left Muar for Parit Jawa, I understood the story much better and found myself explaining it again, this time more clearly.

It made me wonder whether my first attempt was effectively a rehearsal for the second.

Perhaps I need to make a video, edit it, discover what I should have said, and then go back and make the video properly!

A Chinese Temple, a Terrible Coffee, and an Unexpected Mangrove Park

The ride from Muar to Parit Jawa turned out to be one of those days when several unrelated discoveries combined to make the journey memorable.

I’d planned to stop at a series of canals and fishing communities along the way. At one of the first, I discovered an elaborate Chinese temple complex with a small café tucked into the grounds.

The setting was wonderful. The coffee was not.

I appreciated the effort that had gone into creating the place, though, and it was a delightful surprise to find such an elaborate complex in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

I continued investigating the canals, paying particular attention to their names and what those names might reveal about the area’s history.

Then I reached Parit Kasim and discovered something I hadn’t known existed: a preserved mangrove nature park with boardwalks and information displays explaining the area’s plants, wildlife, and ecology.

I was thoroughly impressed. The park was beautifully presented and offered a completely different perspective on the coastal environment I’d been studying.

It was also a reminder that the best discoveries aren’t necessarily the ones you set out to find. Sometimes a day begins with a particular research question and ends with an entirely unexpected experience that becomes the highlight.

Four Nights in a Fishing Village

Parit Jawa was supposed to be a simple overnight stop. Instead, I’ve spent several nights here, partly because editing videos takes so much time.

My original plan was to investigate the fishing harbor and perhaps find somewhere to camp. After my previous night on a fishing jetty, I was even hoping to discover another conveniently placed sofa.

But when I arrived, I was exhausted, overheated, and dealing with all those equipment problems. Then, almost unexpectedly, I spotted Marina Lodging.

I assumed it would be too expensive or fully booked. Eventually, I decided to ask anyway. A room was available for 60 ringgit, and I accepted almost immediately.

It wasn’t luxurious, but it was exactly what I needed: somewhere to recover, work on my videos, and escape the heat for a while.

My experience of Parit Jawa has been more complicated than I anticipated. It’s a working fishing village with a great deal of character, but it also has rough edges, piles of discarded equipment and rubbish around the harbor, and limited food options for someone who isn’t particularly fond of seafood.

That last point has been a daily challenge. I’m accustomed to finding inexpensive kopitiam with several food stalls offering rice, vegetables, eggs, and simple dishes. Here, the food scene revolves much more heavily around seafood, especially the local asam pedas fish soup.

Yet the town has also surprised me.

Its reconstructed old street, designed to evoke an earlier era, initially seemed like a modest tourist attraction. But I began examining the vintage-looking posters and signs, researching the actual films and popular culture they referenced.

One poster led me to Hong Kong comics and the characters of Old Master Q. Other signs sent me into the history of Hong Kong cinema.

What might have been a quick walk through a small tourist attraction turned into hours of research.

That’s a very Planet Doug sort of experience: I see something, wonder what it is, and then find myself investigating it long after a more conventional visitor might have moved on.

Why I Sometimes Spend Hours on Something Other Travelers Pass By

While in Parit Jawa, I happened to watch videos by Sarah and Ryan, a professional travel-vlogging couple currently traveling through Asia.

They visited the village briefly on their way to Muar, filming the harbor from above and presenting the town as a picturesque fishing destination.

My experience was quite different.

I spent days here, walking around at ground level, noticing the piles of discarded machinery, looking for places to eat, examining the old street, and trying to understand how the village actually works.

Neither perspective necessarily tells the whole story. A short visit can capture the appeal of a place, while a longer stay reveals its inconveniences and contradictions.

The same difference in perspective came up in my thoughts about other travel vloggers visiting Melaka.

I’ve noticed a tendency among some visitors to approach the city as a collection of cultural and colonial attractions: Dutch buildings here, Chinese streets there, Portuguese ruins somewhere else.

But Melaka’s history doesn’t work quite that way.

The city developed as an interconnected place, and its importance was established long before the European colonial powers arrived. The Melaka Sultanate created the political, legal, linguistic, and commercial frameworks that helped make the city a major trading center.

If we jump straight to the Portuguese, Dutch, and British periods, we risk overlooking the foundations that made Melaka so valuable in the first place.

My point isn’t that every traveler needs to become a historian. People can enjoy a city in whatever way suits them. But I find it frustrating when the search for unusual experiences leads someone to overlook the very things that make a place distinctive.

Avoiding the obvious attractions can be just as limiting as visiting only the obvious attractions.

For me, the challenge is to look beyond the familiar images and discover the stories that connect them.

A Brief Detour into Science Fiction and Storytelling

I also had a couple of things to say about the television shows I’ve been watching.

The second season of Dark Matter has disappointed me so far. I loved the first season’s combination of alternate realities, suspense, imaginative science fiction, and characters caught up in extraordinary situations.

What interests me most is the premise itself. If people can travel between universes, what happens when they encounter unfamiliar worlds? What if they inadvertently introduce a dangerous virus into another reality? Could the technology become a scientific tool or the ultimate weapon?

For me, those possibilities are the heart of the story. The second season has increasingly focused on psychological trauma and individual backstories, sometimes at the expense of the larger science-fiction adventure I wanted to follow.

I had similar reservations about The Fall of the House of Usher. I admired its performances, cinematography, and the way it incorporated themes and references from Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. But I felt the narrative structure weakened its emotional impact.

The central bargain, in which immense wealth and power come at the cost of an entire family line, is a compelling idea. Yet the show reveals the full bargain relatively late, after jumping forward decades. I would have preferred to see the characters make their choices, experience the consequences of their wealth, and gradually become the people they eventually are.

That would have made their downfall feel more tragic.

It’s an interesting parallel with travel storytelling: the ingredients can be fascinating, but the order in which you reveal them makes a difference. Sometimes the missing middle is where the real story lives.

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Two Things I’m Taking Away from All This

“You can use these canals as a starting point to learning about the whole history of Johor.”

That is what keeps happening to me in Malaysia. A name on a map or an ordinary-looking waterway becomes an entry point into a much larger story. The discovery isn’t simply the canal itself; it’s the history that becomes visible once you know what you’re looking at.

And there’s another lesson in my experience with video production. Researching a topic, filming it, and then editing it are not separate activities. Each stage changes how I understand the subject. Sometimes I don’t fully grasp what I’ve discovered until I’m sitting at my laptop, trying to turn hours of footage into a coherent story.

That’s the ongoing experiment behind Planet Doug. I’m traveling through Malaysia, investigating the things that catch my attention, and trying to communicate what I discover along the way.

Sometimes the equipment cooperates. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I make a mess of the story before figuring out how to tell it. And sometimes an ordinary ride along the coast leads to a history I never knew existed.

For now, I’m staying in Parit Jawa a little longer, finishing videos and getting ready to continue south along the coast.

And if all goes well, I’ll be able to do it with a working laptop, a functional GoPro, and a few fewer equipment problems.

No promises, though.

VIDEO FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to a somewhat rare afternoon edition of the Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast. I usually like to record these in the morning as soon as I wake up, but I’ve been very, very busy lately, and my mornings have been packed with stuff I needed to do. So, here I am at 3:30 in the afternoon on Monday, October the 19th. And even though it is the afternoon, I have a cup of instant coffee, my standard drink to go along with this podcast. I’m recording this inside a, it’s actually almost like a lodge. This place where I’m staying is called the Marina Lodging and it’s inside a small kind of fishing town, a fishing village, fishing/tourism village called Parit Jawa, which is just a few kilometers south of Muar. So that’s where I am right now. So I have a few topics to talk about. I have some notes that I’m going to follow. So, I’ve got some Planet Doug video stories, some other travel vlogger stories I want to talk about. If my voice holds out, some pop culture things, whatever pops into my mind, I’m going to talk about today. And as often happens, I’m going to start with technology.

Probably the biggest story in Planet Doug Technology is all about this podcast. And you may already know about this, you may not know about this. It may fizzle out and go nowhere. I have no idea what’s going to happen with it, but I finally got around to setting up an actual Planet Doug podcast. Like this is a video that I post to YouTube and I call it a behind-the-scenes podcast because that’s basically what it is. I’m just sitting here in front of the camera babbling away. It is pretty much an audio podcast. Even though I’m shooting video at the same time, but what I’ve done is I set up an actual podcast. If you listen to podcasts, I don’t know what you use. I use Pocket Casts. People might use Spotify and Apple. I don’t know. There’s a million different ways for people to download, subscribe to podcasts, download episodes, listen to them. And in that mix, you will now be able to find the Planet Doug podcast, which is audio only. And I’m doing it as a bit of an experiment. So, in fact, this video which I’m going to post to YouTube as a video after I’m done exporting the video, now I export only the audio track and then I upload the audio track to the Planet Doug podcast. So, for this one, it makes a lot of sense because this could be a 2-hour long podcast. Maybe you don’t want to sit in front of a computer screen staring at the screen listening to me because why would you? I’m not doing anything. I’m just sitting here on the hotel bed. So, it makes sense that hey, you can just switch over to the podcast. You want to hear all of my stories, you can just listen to it from a podcast on your smartphone and that can be a lot more convenient. So, if you get the idea here, the same thing, but I’m uploading it to YouTube as a video and to Planet Doug podcast only as an audio track. And then once I started doing that, I thought, oh, I can do that with regular Planet Doug videos as well. So, every time I export a new Planet Doug travel video or like history video, whatever it is I’m talking about, I upload the video to YouTube. But as soon as that’s done, I export only the audio track and then I upload the audio to the Planet Doug podcast. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. What I mean is it works because I do a lot of talking. You don’t really need the visuals for me with my Planet Doug videos. It’s not like I’m giving you three minutes of drone photography flying over beautiful landscapes. I don’t have a drone. I would give you that drone footage if I had a drone, but I don’t have one. So, I don’t have long sequences of no talking in my videos. My videos are almost 100% me talking from beginning to end. So, the audio kind of works out. You just hear me talking and I’m describing what I’m seeing. And you don’t always need to see the video to understand what it is I’m talking about. Occasionally something in one of my videos will be confusing because you need the visual to go along with it. So what I’m talking about may not make any sense. But anyway, basically you can export the audio from a Planet Doug video and just listen to the audio and I think it basically makes sense as a podcast. So I do that as well. And then once I had those two types of podcasts on the go, I thought, you know what, maybe what I can do is make an audio only podcast right from the beginning. And that’s when things started to go off the rails. But I did a bit of an experiment one time because I have this microphone, right, the Rode Wireless Go, and it operates as a standalone microphone. I don’t need to connect it to a camera. So what I did is I put it onto a little stick, like a little microphone stick, and then I went walking. This is when I was in Muar, and I just went out to have breakfast. And when I was having breakfast, it was kind of downtime because I’m not recording video about my breakfast. So I thought, well, why don’t I use this time just to record audio? So, I went walking to the restaurant with this little microphone on a stick like Bob Barker and I was just talking into it, telling stories exactly like I’m doing now. So, I basically recorded a Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast but without the GoPro. It was audio only. And then after I finished breakfast, you know, I described my breakfast rather than taking video of it. And then I went walking up and down the streets of my neighborhood in Muar just talking like a madman into my microphone. And personally, I really enjoyed that. It was very freeing because you add a GoPro and, you know, GoPro batteries and memory cards, you know, it complicates matters drastically and video takes a lot longer to edit, a lot longer to export. The video sizes are huge. If all you do is record audio, boom, boom, boom. It’s fast, it’s streamlined, file sizes are small, and I don’t have to sit down and edit the video, right? I don’t have to insert graphics and these sorts of things. And that’s both a good thing and a bad thing because, you know, on the video, I take the time to insert graphics. If I talk about something that’s on YouTube, I can put in a screenshot and you can see on the video, oh, there’s what Doug is talking about. Or if I’m changing to a new topic, I stick in a musical cue. But if I’m doing an audio only podcast, I can just record, upload, done without taking all the time to massage it and put in musical cues and announcements and things like that. So, it’s not quite as organized for a person listening if I don’t take the time to do a full edit of the audio. Anyway, I did that and I uploaded that audio only. I only did one of them to the podcast and I really enjoyed doing it. It was a lot of fun. It was easy to do, easier than video. The only problem is that at this point anybody anyway, hardly anyone listens to the podcast. Like it pretty much has zero listeners. So, I’m uploading a podcast into emptiness. So, now I told, you know, a 2 or 3-hour long story in an audio podcast that nobody on Planet Doug has heard, but in my mind I think they have heard it because I put it out there into Planet Doug. So, now when I come back to shoot the video version of the podcast, I don’t remember what I’ve talked about already and what I haven’t talked about. And even if I remember, oh, I already talked about that. Well, it was on an audio version that nobody listened to. You see what I mean? So then it’s like, okay, now I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. But anyway, setting up the podcast, like figuring out the technology. I told that whole story in that audio only podcast. If you’re really interested in the technology, all the problems that I encountered for me personally, it was incredibly difficult to do. And I had to rely heavily on AI to do it. Like every time I had no idea what to do next like I don’t even know how podcasts work. Like how I don’t even know how to start. Like what is… Yeah, I don’t even know anything. So, I went to an AI and just said, “Hey, I want to start up a podcast. What do I do?” And then working with the AI over about three full days of solid work, I eventually figured out, oh, okay, that’s how you do it. And I ran into dead end after dead end after dead end having to do with all the usual problems that I encounter where for example you create your podcast then you make an RSS feed and then you have to distribute that feed to things like Apple but then to do that you have to open an account on Apple and then to do that you have to have a payment system and an ad anyway and I tried to enter like a payment system and Apple wouldn’t accept my Canadian credit card wouldn’t accept my Canadian address. I mean, I just endless endless problems and nothing but error messages, dead ends, and then I’ve eventually managed to figure it out. So, that was a lot of fun and I eventually got it set up and as far as I can tell, it runs perfectly smoothly. You can find the Planet Doug podcast anywhere that you listen to podcasts. So, it was a fun experiment. I learned a lot about the technology. It may end up being just a giant waste of time and then I will just stop doing it. But for now there is a Planet Doug podcast and this podcast you can watch it on YouTube as a video or you can listen to it on the podcast audio only. Yeah, it’s kind of your choice. So that is the main technology story.

All the other technology stories, I think they’re all problems. All of them, just equipment breaking down. And maybe I can group them all into one little category here. Go through them quickly. With my GoPro, my GoPro Hero 12, I keep it inside a media mod so that I can attach a microphone and plug a microphone into it. So, I have a media mod, but then when you put the GoPro inside a media mod, it has a button on the GoPro, which is like a rubber button with an extension on it that hits the main button on the GoPro. So, you press the button on the media mod, that button presses on the button physically on the GoPro, and then it turns it on or off. But you know, I’ve used this media mod for so long, and you know, the door is already broken on it. I hold it in place with an elastic band. And then the power button, that button hitting a button routine, that rubber started to just degrade and it just will not depress and turn on the GoPro anymore. And now that main button on the media mod has just ripped right off. It just fell off. All the edges, the rubber degraded and it just tore out. And then all you’re left with is a hole in the media mod that my finger can’t fit through. So I can no longer reach the button on the GoPro to turn it on and off like the power button, which drives me crazy. So what I ended up doing was taking the remnants of that button, the rubber of the media mod, and just sort of jamming it into the empty hole. It’s like basically filling it with random bits of rubber and then just stuffing it in there and then I can kind of wiggle my finger around and push on this big bunch of rubber and hopefully depress the button on the GoPro. Anyway, that’s a bit of a challenge. So, I’ve got that problem going on. And then yesterday or no the day before yesterday I arrived in this little village of Parit Jawa and then I turned on my laptop the Asus TUF A16 gaming edition laptop and the fans went crazy. I don’t know what happened. It was like, it sounded like a jet engine. Not a jet engine, like a Formula 1 car. I turned on the laptop and then the fans revved up and it just went… I mean, it was so loud. It sounded like the laptop was going to explode. It was so loud and it wouldn’t stop like keyboarding and whatever, hitting buttons, nothing. Nothing. You know, taking out the power didn’t do anything because it has a battery in it. So, even though pulling out the power cord doesn’t do anything, but eventually, yeah, I held down the power button for whatever it is 10, 15, 20 seconds, and that initiates like an emergency shutdown. And then, yeah, it did not actually explode. But yeah, that was scary. I have no idea what happened. But, of course, I’m carrying this laptop around on my bicycle. And one of the reasons I got this laptop is because it’s supposed to be like military-grade tested indestructible tough chassis. You know, it’s supposed to be up to the task of bouncing around a little bit. Though, I do have to make a decision whether to lay it in my bicycle trailer flat like this. Like I have a cushioned sleeve. So, I put it in the cushion sleeve inside another bag with more cushioning and more cushioning. I mean, it’s more cushioned than anything in the universe. I mean, it’s very very well protected and it’s in the trailer which has a cloth bag, so it doesn’t have a hard surface, so it’s just floating in the middle of cushion. So, I figured that was the safest I could make it in terms of bouncing up and down. And when I remember trying to figure out how to carry the laptop around, this is what all my AI buddies recommended. The choice was between laying it flat like this in the trailer or putting it in a pannier bag attached directly to my bicycle, but then it has to go up and down on edge. So, if I go over a bump in the road, now the laptop is bouncing up and down this way on a hard edge. So, is that better or worse than having it this way and then it’s just bouncing up and down this way? And but the force is spread out over the whole laptop. And this was like long long long time ago. I went through this debate and then everybody said, “Okay, this was the best way to do it. Flat in the trailer. That’s the safest.” But now that I had this fan nearly ripping itself apart problem, I was chatting with, you know, on forums online, getting advice, chatting with AIs, revisiting this idea. Okay, what happened? And is there, you know, is it better to put it this way or this way? And now everybody’s changing their tune. All the advice I get now is no, no, no. Putting it flat, that’s the worst thing you can do. And it says, “Okay, your trailer doesn’t have a hard surface, but that doesn’t matter because now it’s like a trampoline because it has a cloth bottom. Your laptop is like, you know, like a bouncing, bouncing, bouncing up and down, up and down, up and down like that, like it’s on a trampoline. And that’s the worst thing you can do.” So now everybody is telling me, “No, no, no. You got to put it in your pannier bag. Put it on edge like this inside the pannier bag.” So now I don’t know what to think. But anyway, after the fans nearly exploded, now this fan on the left, I’m assuming it’s the fan, it now makes a noise. So when I turn on the laptop, it’s like I can hear the fan hitting something. So I go, when it first started happening, to me, it sounded like there was a giant cockroach inside the laptop, like scratching. It was like a scratching sound and I could feel it on the chassis, a vibration that was never there before. So, there’s something wrong with the fan. And then again, you know, it’s a problem I did not need in my life. And now I’m doing all the research into, oh, what do I do about this? How do I fix it? I’m following all the instructions online. And then at one point you know everyone was telling me well what you should do is remove the bottom of the laptop you know take out all the screws and then disconnect the base so you can physically inspect the fan and there might be a loose wire hitting the fan blade. It might be the screws around the fan loosened a little bit. You need to tighten those down. Could be dust buildup in the fan. And I mean any number of things, but you have to physically inspect it. But of course, even a simple thing like removing the base of the laptop is not so simple when you don’t have the right tools. I mean, I have a screwdriver that fits. I can take all the screws out, but then I guess you need like a special plastic disc, a plastic edge, and you slowly work it, and you have to undo all these clips. You know, you work the plastic in there and undo the clips all the way around. And I don’t have anything that can do that. I can get a screwdriver. But by the time I got to that point, I realized without the proper tools, I’m just going to break something. Like even once I have the base off, I don’t know. It’s just dangerous. And I thought, let’s just give it some time. Maybe this fan problem will disappear over time. So that’s the biggest problem I’m facing right now. And we’ll see. And when I go cycling, I’m leaving here tomorrow. I think tomorrow morning by bicycle. And I think what I’m going to do this time is put it in my pannier bag like this. And it just like does that work out? But the problem there is my laptop bag that I put this in is bigger than the laptop top and bottom. So it doesn’t really fit in the pannier bag. You kind of have to jam it in there and it’s really kind of awkward and doesn’t fit properly. So, I might have to work out another technique. So, problem number one, the media mod button just ripped out. Problem number two, the fan on my laptop seems about to explode. And you need the fan for cooling. Obviously, other bits of gear are breaking down. Of course, I have this cover on my bicycle seat. It’s like a gel cover to make it softer. And the cover on that, the cloth has just torn to pieces. So, I didn’t notice this for a long time, but I noticed on the back of my shorts, I have like one pair of shorts that I wear all the time. And on the back of the shorts, there’s like this big black blob right where you do not want a big black blob to be. I was like, “What? Where did that big stain come from? That looks awful.” And it turned out it was because the gel cover on my bicycle saddle had ripped open and I was sitting right on top of the squishy liquidy gel and that had soaked into my shorts and then kind of stained it and you know so now I don’t know how to fix that. I use this neck mount all the time for my GoPro. And a funny thing, I don’t know if the people who make these things think about this, but when you’re wearing this a lot in hot climates, like, see, I can’t even open it. There we go. Inside here, sweat pours down my neck and then, you know, soaks my shirt and this fills with sweat and everything in here starts to rust. So, this little locking pin that fits in there becomes very very rusty. And then I can’t open and close it anymore. And what I have to do I have special like metal sandpaper and then every once in a while I have to take this rust and then scrape it all off. I have to basically use sandpaper to remove all of the rust. Otherwise, this won’t… I sometimes I try to lock it and I think it locks and then it pops open and then the camera falls off. So, you have to really keep that clean and but there’s no I can’t clean the interior. There’s no way I can get in there to clean it. So, yeah, wear and tear in this climate is no joke. Yeah. See how I tried to put it in there? Oh, there it locked. No, came right out again. And it’s because of all this rust. So, tonight I’m gonna have to clean that up. Yeah, this humidity and this heat in Malaysia is just death on technology. I don’t know how anything survives in this climate. Yeah, I think that’s where I’ll end the technology stories for today.

Planet Doug videos here again because of this whole podcasting experiment. I’m a little bit confused about which videos I’ve talked about and which ones I haven’t. So, I’m going to go way back in time just to make sure I’ve covered them all. I might be repeating myself here, but I don’t think I am. And I’m just going to go through all of them all together kind of very quickly, more like a subject instead of a video by video breakdown because I’ve got six yeah, six videos basically since my last behind-the-scenes video. And so that goes all I think the last one I talked about was all the way back in Melaka. I posted a video about putting up Planet Doug invisible signs everywhere that I talked about in a previous behind-the-scenes video and I think that was the very last one. Maybe changing hotels. I also changed hotels when I was in Melaka. I think I talked about that whole experience. And the very next video, did it happen? No. No, no, no. Now even I’m confused. Because eventually of course I left from Melaka. So that’s where I will pick up the story cycling out of Melaka at long last. I still I don’t know. I don’t know what happened in Melaka to be honest. I think it was something of a profound experience for me. Maybe from the outside it doesn’t seem like it like oh Doug went to Melaka and oh he became interested in the history of the place and I ended up spending a lot of time there thinking about and looking at and researching the history but it somehow it was more than that I uncovered what a special town Melaka is really special in terms of the layers of history and the way the history of Melaka links with the history of the rest of the world. You can treat it like the center of a web that goes out in all directions. Whatever topic you want to think about, you can go you can get to it through Melaka. And then of course you have the way it ties in directly with the long long history of this whole part of the world. Not just Malaysia, not just the Malay Peninsula, but you know events in Thailand, modern day Thailand and Singapore and China and Sumatra, all the various empires and kingdoms and the dynasties on and on and on. It all kind of fits into Melaka as well. And when you’re there as a visitor, the historic core of Melaka is so concentrated. It’s all within three or four blocks. It’s a very compact chunk of the city and I don’t know if there’s any place in the world quite like that that has so much history that extends outward to so many other places and is so contained in such a small area. It’s you can just sit there and grasp it or try to and I don’t know it just opened my eyes to a new way of looking at a lot of different things. So I found that to be a fascinating experience. But I eventually left and then I rode my bicycle out of Melaka and I thought when I did that, okay, now we are going to stop with the deep dive into history. We’re going to change gears and make videos more about day-to-day travel adventures, being on the road like every other travel vlogger on a motorcycle or scooter or bicycle or whatever. But of course that didn’t last very long because I became instantly fascinated with the retreat of the Sultan of Melaka, Sultan Mahmud Shah back in 1511 when the Portuguese took over Melaka and the Sultanate and all of his followers and royal elephants and family, the royal entourage, his army as well, they all retreated south out of Melaka and then they traveled I couldn’t really figure out for exactly how long they traveled call it like three or four weeks this big group of like fleeing from the Portuguese and they traveled down to Muar. So my idea was to cycle in one day from Melaka to Muar and I wanted to tell the story about the retreat of Mahmud Shah. And that of course led to many other topics such as his consort Tun Teja. And that was the highlight of the day for me was finding the tomb of Tun Teja out there in the rice fields. Gorgeous setting. And if you know the history, her story, the story of Sultan Mahmud Shah, it’s a place that’s really worth visiting if it has meaning for you to go see that. It’s such a beautiful spot out in the middle of the rice fields. I was amazed. I was astonished. And then because I talked a lot about that topic from various points of view and I stopped to investigate so many things along the way. I didn’t even make it anywhere near Muar. I only made it halfway. You might have seen that video where I slept on the sofa in on in the fishing jetty. And that’s because yeah, I didn’t make it to Muar. Muar has lots of hotels. No real cheap hotels, but they have hotels and homestays. But in the middle halfway, there really wasn’t anything out there in the countryside other than a homestay. You know, you can rent an entire house if you want to, but yeah, that doesn’t make sense for me. So, yeah, I just settled. I mean, what I was going to do was sleep in my tent, which is pretty normal. Anybody traveling around the world long distances, especially on a bicycle, they sleep in tents all the time. Camp, they camp out. I followed the American hobo as he cycled around Malaysia and he slept in his hammock pretty much every night. Just about, I’d say like 80% of the time, he was sleeping outside in his hammock. It’s a pretty normal thing to do. But then when I went to the jetty and I was looking around for a place to put up my tent, I saw the sofa and I sat down on the sofa to rest and just to hang out until the sun went down. And then all the fishermen came around because that was like a social gathering spot for the fishermen. And we’re just chatting meeting lots of people. And then when the sun finally went down, I just slept on the sofa because yeah, I don’t know why not. I mean, the only reason you would go inside a tent is for, I guess, privacy and protection from the elements in case it rains, but I had a roof over the sofa or mosquitoes. That’s the big one for me. And everybody warned me about mosquitoes. That was the big concern. And there were mosquito coils everywhere around there. New ones, old ones, burnt ones, half burnt ones. So, it looked like mosquitoes were a real problem. But I don’t know. I just lay down on the sofa. I got out my sleeping sheet that I would have used inside my tent anyway, and then just lay there, close my eyes, and lay there the whole night. I didn’t sleep the entire night through because during the night, of course, all the fishermen would come and go. It was a pretty busy place during the night. A lot of noise, a lot of people, a lot of shouting, motors revving. I put in earplugs, eye shade, things like that. I just lay on the sofa and I guess I fell asleep from time to time cuz I woke up in the morning and I felt pretty good. And my face was not, you know, puffed out with a thousand mosquito bites. I didn’t feel a single mosquito bite at all. So, it ended up being a pretty interesting night. I haven’t had time to reply to comments recently, all these videos that I’ve posted. I scanned some from that video and I think a lot of Planet Doug viewers were a little bit like, you know, looking at that sofa, how dirty it looked, like it was almost radioactive. It was so old and so dirty. So, I think there’s people were reacting in a very odd way to that visual of me suddenly sleeping on an old sofa. It’s like, what? What happened. You know, it’s a weird visual, but it was at the time it was perfectly natural. I mean, again, it’s nothing new to me. I’ve slept outside lots of times in my life on long trips, things like that, camping, you know, sleeping in your tent or just if the weather’s fine, you can just sleep on the beach, that kind of thing. So, it’s not entirely new to me, but I mean, if you don’t live a life like that, maybe it looks a little bit shocking. Like why in the world would you do that? And then people maybe who don’t do that routinely are worried about security and animals and all you know whoever whatever goes bump in the night sort of thing. But it was a perfectly fine night. Yeah. And the fishermen were perfectly happy to have me there. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a pretty good night. It was a rough night of course. I mean, it’s it takes a lot of energy to sleep outside like that. You they had a public bathroom there that I could use to take a shower in the morning. But every time you want to go to the bathroom, it’s like a major endeavor because it’s not like you’re in a hotel room and I just get up and go in the bathroom, take a quick shower, come back, sit down. You basically have to secure all of your belongings. And then you got to be dressed properly for being out in public. And then you have to walk whatever 3 400 m across to the other side of the jetty bringing your soap and your towel and your other clothes with you and then go in there and do the shower and then you’re doing it in the heat and humidity. So almost as soon as you turn off the water or the shower, you just start sweating again instantly. The shower hardly even cools you down. So it is a lot of work to sleep outside like that as opposed to being, you know, inside a hotel room. But yeah, you have a lot of experiences. That was pretty cool. And then from there, the next video, which should be going live in 7 minutes, a lot of people left comments on that first video speculating about, oh, what wonder what happened during the night and then what happened in the morning. Well, you will see in 7 minutes because the next video starts with me waking up on the sofa. And I did one of those things. I point them out in other YouTube travel vlogs like the guy from Morocco, Let’s Go Cycling. I haven’t talked about him in a long time. So Avan, I think his name is, but he does this thing. Almost every one of his videos is the same because he camps out a lot. And what he does is he takes his camera, sets it up on a tripod, and then goes back inside his tent, and then recreates waking up. So there’s a camera out there filming, and then he pretends he’s coming out of the tent for the first time, unzips it, gets out, and stretches, and you know, he recreates the moment of waking up. And I did the exact same thing on the sofa. So I got up from the sofa and I put my GoPro. I did I was still half asleep, but I just hit play on the GoPro and then aimed it at the sofa. And then I pulled the sheet up again pretending like I was still sound asleep. And then I filmed myself, you know, waking up and sitting up and putting on a shirt. And the video itself opens with some music. I guess Planet Doug is trying to get all, you know, high production value. So, I play some music and just show me slowly coming to life and waking up and and then there’s like 20 minutes, 30 minutes of me just talking, sitting on the sofa, talking about the night, sleeping on the jetty, all the everything that happened during the night. And then there’s another 20 minutes of me telling the story again of Sultan Mahmud Shah because his journey wasn’t over yet, right? He retreated to the city of Muar and I had made it to Muar yet. So this day two of cycling was going to be from this town, Merlimau. From Merlimau to Muar. And in Muar I knew there was a historic plaque, some kind of a marker showing where Sultan Mahmud Shah built defenses. So his whole group settled there on the far side of the Muar River, built like palisades or stockades for defenses against the Portuguese and kind of established there for a little while until the Portuguese found them again and I think they fought again and then they were driven inland even farther away to a place called Pagoh or something like that. Anyway, so my story of the retreat following the path that the Sultan followed wasn’t over yet. So I was talking about that everything though to be honest I didn’t know a lot about the history because it’s not like I read the book about everything that happened. I was just reading websites like there is no book is what I’m saying. So nobody really knows for sure what happened. So when I was telling the story, it was mainly questions like, I wonder how did they get the elephants across the river? How did they get through the mud flats? How did they do this? How many people were they? You know, on and on and on. I was just speculating the whole time. I didn’t really know the answers to any of these questions, but they were interesting questions to ask. Yeah. So I like for 20 minutes I talked on the sofa telling that whole story and then I finally took a shower, got on the road and I started cycling and I completed the ride that day to Muar. Yeah. And thinking back now, a big part of those two days was how physically challenging it was. And not from a muscle point of view, not from, you know, I’m so tired because I’m cycling all the time because I barely cycled at all. It was like 40 km total each day total distance as the crow flies Melaka to Muar. I think it’s only like 42 km, maybe 45. So that’s a very very manageable distance on a bicycle. A typical long-distance cyclist is going to do anywhere from 100 to 150 kilometers per day. So the thought of doing 40 in one day that that’s very very easy and I only went halfway and then I did the second half the next day. So, it wasn’t like I was tired, but I think because I was talking so much while I was riding in this incredible heat and humidity, and I was doing so much physical labor with the camera, constantly parking the bicycle, taking the GoPro off, you know, taking it off my bicycle, mounting it here, getting everything ready, testing it, making sure the audio was still working. Then I go walking around. I’m still talking, talking, talking. Then I’m back at the bicycle, dismantling everything, remounting it all on my bicycle. In the middle of doing the remounting, the battery dies. I got to take it all off again, take everything apart, change the battery, retest everything, make sure the microphone’s connected, the battery. Okay. Okay. Enough memory card. Put it back on. Like doing I did that like a lot a many many many many times throughout the day talking all the time and then at some point I just became breathless like I could not catch my breath and I would it’s like hyperventilating. There I showed some of it in the video where I talked about how when I went to the tomb of Tun Teja I sat in the shade ate at a table like there was this restaurant there and I signaled to the owner like do you mind if I collapse over here for a while because I couldn’t walk you know I everything kind of went black and I just sat down and and put my head on my hands and just tried to sit there until my breathing got under control my heart rate came down but every time I got up to try and you know fire up my GoPro and go tell the story of Tun Teja I would just make it a couple of steps and I would feel faint again and I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t speak and I’d have to go back and sit down. And this went on all day long for the two days that I was cycling. And I think it’s just because I was talking too much. You know, like if you breathe really really fast, you hyperventilate. It’s not that you’re not getting enough oxygen, you’re getting too much oxygen and then you get dizzy and then you pass out or something. You’re basically hyperventilating. And I think I was hyperventilating the whole time because I was just talking way too much. So yeah, thinking back, were there any huge adventures that day cycling from Merlimau? Yeah, I mean I had some fun on that day. You’ll see it in the video. The big event was crossing the Muar River. Well, there were two big events. One big event was crossing from Melaka into Johor and that turned out to be a very big event for a lot of reasons I didn’t anticipate. So crossing into Johor state was a big thing and then crossing the river that marked the border between Melaka and Johor on Google Maps it was marked as impassable. It was closed. So then I have to do some sort of a detour to get around it. But it turned out that even though the bridge itself was buckling, the cement columns had all been broken inward. They were all collapsing. So the bridge wasn’t safe anymore. But local people still go back and forth all the time on their motorcycles. So I just rode across it on my bicycle. And that was a lot of fun. And I managed to stay on small roads most of the time, which was really good. And yeah, I rode across the final bridge across the huge Muar River into the big city and I saw the historical plaque. And for the video itself, I don’t know whether it worked or not, but I decided to end the video at the historic plaque. The original video, the extended cut went beyond that because my videos tend to be about the whole day. Starts when I wake up and it ends when I go to sleep, you know, everything in the whole day. But the video ended up being like 2 hours long. Like really, really, really long. And then I was thinking about that and then when I arrived at the historic plaque, I thought, huh, maybe that is the thematic ending to the day. It’s not the physical end of my day because I still had to find my homestay, ride my bike there like another 3 kilometers, see the city of Muar for the first time, you know, check into my room, unpack my room, give a guided tour of my new room like all that stuff that happens at the end of the day. That was like another 30 40 minutes of video and I made the executive decision to just you know collect it all delete. So I just deleted at least 30 minutes of video at the end of that video. It ends when I get to the marker in downtown Muar at the bus station. And maybe if somebody watches the video, it will feel wrong, like, “Oh, that was sudden. Why did the video just end?” Like Doug normally ends the video when he gets to his hotel. And maybe it was a bad mistake from a video point of view where people, oh, I want to see the hotel. What does it look like? I want to see the end of the day, but at the time, I was just feeling weird that the video was so long. There was actually two big big sections that I cut out. One big section where I was talking about technology problems on the physical difficulties of the day that I was encountering. It was a big long section and then I deleted and the end going to the hotel. I deleted those two sections to try and make the video shorter. But well, who knows whether that was a good decision or not. I mean, to be honest, once your video is an hour long, what’s the difference between an hour and an hour and a half, right? If anybody’s going to criticize your YouTube videos like your videos are way too long, the difference between 1 hour and an hour and 15 minutes or an hour and a half, they’re not going to be happy no matter what. So, it’s like even by cutting out those two big sections, I think my video still ended up being an hour and a half long. So, I thought, well, it might as well an hour and a half, 2 hours. What’s the difference? I don’t know. It just felt better to make it an hour and a half or something like that. Oh, it’s been live for 5 minutes. It’s 4:20 right now here in Malaysia. And that video went live at 4:15. So, in that video, you can see everything that I’m talking about here. So, yeah, that was the end of that day. And then I shot a video cycling around and that was kind of interesting as well because I got to contrast it with Melaka. I talked about how dense Melaka was in terms of the history and the subject matter there. And now Muar be an interesting town. It has its own history. It’s the royal city of Johor state. It has some beautiful buildings. It has a shoreline on the Melaka Strait. It has the river, the Muar River is huge compared to the Melaka River. So I woke up in the morning intending to make a video. It was going to be my reconnaissance video of Muar. So instead of doing a deep dive into anything, I was just going to get on my bike, ride around the city, film all kinds of things, and then now that I had I understood the way the city was put together, then I could go out and do deep dives into different neighborhoods, different sections, history, this and that. But the way it turned out after I did my reconnaissance ride, I kind of felt like I was done. It’s like, okay. That’s Muar. Because I rode from my homestay to the park, which is along the Melaka Strait. Beautiful park. I rode my bike along there. I got to the river. I rode my bicycle along this beautiful riverside park. That’s where the river cruise boats come and go. I saw the beautiful historic mosque that is there just from the outside but I filmed it. I and then I saw a couple of other historic buildings and then I was in downtown Muar. I went back to the bridge, the main bridge, shot some video there. I went into a very famous coffee shop called the 434 Coffee or Kopi 434 Elephant Bean or something like that. You know, I did kind of a touristy thing. Had my had a really good cup of coffee and then I ended up on Food Street, what they call their glutton street. You know, every big city has its food street. It would be the Muar version of KL’s Alor Street. You know, their food street in KL. They have the same in Muar. I went there and I just happened to be chatting with a local man and he and I had well I had lunch. He treated me to lunch inside this little corner restaurant. So I had the food street experience. I shot video there. I passed by the local beautiful Hindu temple on the way back to my homestay. I had I think the day opened with breakfast at one of my local kopitiam. So after I did that reconnaissance ride, I felt like I didn’t really need to do anymore. Like Melaka had so many things that called out to me like, “Oh, now I have to make a video about this and go to this museum and make a video about this place and this neighborhood and go there and go there, investigate this, investigate this.” But with Muar, yeah, I kind of felt like my reconnaissance ride, I was like, “Yeah, that was cool. This is a cool town.” And I didn’t really feel like I had to do much more in the city itself. It wasn’t calling out to me like I have to go to this neighborhood. I have to ride my bike here and find out what’s. There was a couple of places, but nothing major. So, yeah, it was very different from Melaka. However, one thing that did happen was when I was thinking about where to go next. So, I was planning ahead my bike ride south of Muar along the coast. And then I spotted this town, the where I am now, Parit Jawa. And because I picked out this town because it has a big harbor full of fishing boats. And I thought, “Oh, that looks like a cool place.” And since I already spent one night sleeping at a jetty, I thought, “Huh, maybe I can do it again in Parit Jawa.” I was going to come here and then maybe investigate the fishing harbor, do a bit of a deeper dive, find out more about the fishing industry, and maybe spend the night in or near the jetty here. So that was kind of my idea. But then I noticed a few things. For one thing, the word parit Jawa, I saw it everywhere. Every little town was called parit this, Parit that, Parit, Parit, Parit. It was everywhere. And all up and down the coast, I saw lines cutting through. Like if you go to satellite view, you see this grid of lines going from the interior to the coast. A line and a line and a line and a line. And I’m not going to talk about this endlessly because in my videos I do talk about it endlessly because in Melaka I was fascinated by the history in Johor. I became equally fascinated by the canals and parit means canal. So apparently there was well there still is like mangrove forest all along the coast and then back in the late 1800s early 1900s there was a land grant policy established by Temenggong Ibrahim and then his son Sultan Abu Bakar where what they wanted to do was open up the land for agriculture. But in order to do that, they needed to drain this peat bog, this peat forest. They needed to build canals, drain the water to make it suitable for agriculture. And they just made a policy inviting people to come dig a canal, drain the land, set up an agricultural plantation, and then we will give you ownership of some of that land. And for the coastline in particular, big work crews came from Java by boat, came over to Johor and took advantage of this policy. And then back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they dug I keep saying in my videos, hundreds of canals. That’s probably justified. There’s got to be at least 200 of them along the coast, maybe more. So I think you can say hundreds of canals. And these canals are like 6 kilometers long. So they had to cut the canal through the mangrove by hand and then digging out the canal by hand for six kilometers all the way inland through the mangrove through the peat forest. And they set up all these special what they call pintu air these special gates that allows the water to drain out but doesn’t allow the seawater to flood in. And it was like a massive hydraulic engineering project which transformed all of this land into the fertile agricultural land you see today. So when I started cycling, that was going to be my new topic to investigate these canals. And then I realized that in order to investigate those canals, I didn’t have to leave Muar. I was just going to ride down the coast and talk about them. But there were so many canals near Muar, even inside the city of Muar itself, that I realized I could do it as a day trip. So, I extended my time at the homestay in Muar and then I went out for a ride on my bike, basically a day trip. I just rode like 15 kilometers, 12 km maybe, down the coast to one of these canals. And then I could show what it looked like. And then I rode my bike back to my homestay, slowly going from canal to canal to canal, investigating little features of it, talking about the history of the canals. Hopefully I didn’t get too many of my facts wrong, but I found it to be equally as fascinating as the history of Melaka. It’s sort of like most visitors, you know, a typical tourist going somewhere on a holiday. They go to Melaka, they have some good food, they see some red buildings at Dutch Square, and they’re just there to have an enjoyable weekend, and they don’t really go any deeper than that. Yet, if you’re interested, Melaka has a massive depth to the history that you can investigate. Now here I was in Johor and again anybody and lots of people do I’ve watched a lot of travel videos lately on YouTube people on motorcycles in particular who are doing the you know bicycle or motorcycle they start in Johor Bahru and then they’re going to ride their motorcycle all the way up the west coast of Malaysia you know up the coast and then every day it opens with them getting on their motorcycle. They stop for some food at the side of the road and they just have your typical travel day. But on their way through Johor, they would have been passing over hundreds of these canals, like bridge after bridge after bridge after bridge after bridge, canal, canal, canal. But to them, it wouldn’t look like anything special because they just look like rivers, right? Until you stop and think about it, until you notice, hold it. They’re in perfectly straight lines. They’re perfectly spaced every 3/4 of a kilometer. Canal. Canal. Canal. And there’s, you know, unless you notice these things. And unless you notice that every single one of them has the same name, Parit, you wouldn’t know that there’s anything going on. But it turns out that Johor has a history all its own, distinct from Melaka. And you can use these canals as a starting point to learning about the whole history of Johor. And of course, Johor’s history is tightly connected with Melaka as well because the Sultan of Melaka retreated into Johor. And then there’s a long long history that eventually led to them establishing the new Sultanate in Johor. So you’ve got that whole historical connection as well. But anyway, so that was my new project and I did a day trip, shot a whole video just about investigating these canals. And I think that video, to be honest, is pretty terrible because I think for 2 days in Muar, I studied this topic. Just studied it and studied it trying to learn as much as I can. But you can’t really, at least I’m not smart enough to absorb everything that I need to absorb in such a short amount of time. And I thought I had the whole history, everything in my brain, everything I wanted to talk about. So I got on my bicycle, I started riding, I hit record on the GoPro, and I’m going to tell this amazing story, the canals of Johor. And then I didn’t know where to start. Like I didn’t have a script. All I had was all this information and then it was it all came out in a jumble and I could feel that I was repeating myself going over the same stuff over and over again and that and I would tell the story out of order because I would forget about something and I would be telling the story get to this point and then something would remind me oh yeah yeah because 30 years earlier you go back here then this happened and you know tangents. So I think the whole video is a complete jumble. A fascinating topic and if anybody sticks with the whole video and absorbs it, I think it will be an interesting topic. But I think the video just was like just a real disaster. But I did my best. The funny thing is that after I shot I went out for that day trip to investigate the canals and then I stayed in Muar for two more days because I needed to edit that video and that was a big big project and I was working on the podcast stuff at the same time. But then I eventually left on my bicycle from Muar and I started cycling and I was going to cycle to here Parit Jawa and a funny thing I mean it’s very very close I think if you go in a straight line I’m only 15 kilometers away from Muar and I made that choice because I wanted to see Parit Jawa I planned on spending the night here and I figured, well, if I’m only going to be riding 15 kilometers, that means I can leave at noon because my homestay had a really nice room. I was so comfortable there. I was like living in luxury. And then if you if you’re cycling and you leave at 6:00 in the morning, it’s like you paid for that time from 6:00 a.m. to noon cuz checkout time is noon. You paid for 6 hours of luxury, but you’re not using it because you left at dawn. In this case, I realized if I can leave at noon, ride 15 kilometers, and I’m still arriving in Parit Jawa at 4 or 5:00. Plenty of time, right? So, I decided to stay here at night, meaning I could hang out in my homestay room until like 11 or 12:00 and then I can check out, enjoy my room for the whole morning, go have breakfast. I didn’t, but I could have gone to have breakfast, that sort of thing. So, that worked out really well. But the interesting thing is by then I had edited my video about the canals, the big story. I had finished that video and in editing that video, I’d had to do a lot more research, like double-checking that things I said were true. And I was like, “Oh, what was his name?” Because when I shot the first video, I couldn’t remember the name, for example, of the Temenggong Ibrahim. I think I know his last name, whatever is Ibrahim now. But at the time, I didn’t know that. So, I had to look it up. So, I was looking up all this information, going over it, like while editing the video, I was still studying the topic. So even though my canal video was finished now that I was riding my bicycle to Parit Jawa, I was talking about the canals again and now the information was coming out much more smoothly because in doing the editing everything had sharpened in my mind. It’s like okay now I know exactly what I’m talking about. So I kind of did a my cycling video from Muar to here was canal video take two. I basically retold the story of the canal but in a much more efficient way, much more linear, more information and a lot more detail because I had learned a lot more about the canals when I was editing the first video. It’s almost like I should go out and make one video and editing the video, I finally understand what I should have made the video about. So, I should make a video, edit the video, and then just delete the whole thing, treat the first video as just a test run, and now, okay, now I know what to talk about, and then I can do it a second time, and then I can get everything correct. So yeah, that was a great day though, cycling here to Parit Jawa. The highlight of the day was a canal that turned out to be much more than a canal because when I was looking ahead, I saw all these individual canals and some of them had fishing harbors and each one of those I made a mental note. Oh, as I’m riding, I can ride down the road. Check that one out. Check that one out. Check that one out. So, I had a plan in my mind of where I was going to go. And the very first one, a little fishing villages on one of the canals had a huge Chinese temple. And it had a little coffee shop like in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it really felt like the middle of nowhere. Beautiful ornate complex, much more than a temple. It was like a compound. And part of the compound was a nice little cafe. I think it was called the Bliss Brew Cafe and I had like one of the worst coffees of my life there. It was terrible, but I really appreciated the effort they put into making it and just the setting was amazing. So, I stopped off there and then I stopped off at some other canals and I was really focusing on the names of the canals because I’d learned a lot more about the way they gave the canals names. So, I stopped off at each canal and I focused on the name of the canal and what you can learn about the history looking just at that name. And then I go to the next canal. Oh, look at this name. It means this. This one means this. And then I finally got to the Kasim Canal, Parit Kasim, and I went cycling along the canal and before I knew it, I was in the middle of a fully developed mangrove nature park. It was a preserved mangrove with a boardwalk and all kinds of information signs and I had no idea it was there. And yeah, it really was amazing. It was so so cool. So that was kind of the highlight of the day. Anybody going to Muar and if you had your own transportation, I think it would be kind of a no-brainer to just ride out of Muar and go visit this mangrove park. It was nice. It was really, really nice. And they had information displays about mangrove trees, plants, all the flora and fauna, all of the ecology and biology of the mangrove. Really really nicely done. I was super super impressed with that place. And then yeah, it’s just up the road here. I’m practically right beside it right now. And then just up the road from that mangrove park, I arrived in Parit Jawa. And in my video from that day, I deleted a lot of this stuff because I realized I have a bad habit of just talking about future plans and nobody needs to know what I’m thinking about doing. They just need to see what it is I end up doing. Anyway, I kept talking about camping out because I assumed the entire time that when I got to Parit Jawa, I mean, there’s nowhere to stay here. There’s nothing. I mean, there might be a couple of homestays, but they would be very difficult to contact the owner as a foreigner. And they’re meant for big groups. They’re meant for families. They don’t rent out rooms normally to one person. And there was no hotels of any kind on Google Maps or Agoda or anywhere. So, there’s nowhere to stay here. So, all along, every time I was at one of these canals, I was looking around and talking on video and going, “You know what? Yeah, I could put up my tent here and I could put up my tent here and and then when I got to the mangrove park, I really focused on that. Oh, you know, this would be an ideal place. Maybe out near the parking area or here or here. Maybe they have a bathroom and I can get water here and put my tent here. I can sleep here.” So, the whole time I was contemplating where can I spend the night. I get to Parit Jawa. I’m doing the same thing. I’m looking at all the fishing boats. Look, I’m looking for the sofa. You know how I found a sofa that I could sleep on at the other jetty? I thought, well, what about this jetty? Where’s their sofa? I was looking for that perfect combination of sofa, fan, electricity, and a bathroom all nicely put together. So, I was wandering all around Parit Jawa. They have a park here, big like a children’s playground park with a tower. And yeah, you could I was looking for anywhere where I could put a tent. And then I’m cycling around and out of nowhere I spot a motel. I mean, you it was called What’s where I’m staying right now? I saw a sign. The I forget now. Lodging. Marina Lodging. And when I rode by the first time, I kind of went, “Come on, give me a break. There is no way I can find a place to stay. My luck is not that good.” I just assumed it would be fantastically expensive, way out of my budget, and that it would be fully booked anyway because it was a weekend. So, they’re going to be fully booked. It’s going to be way too expensive. And I just kept riding around. And then at one point, I went, “Well, come on. Let’s go check.” This is in the video, actually. Yeah. Let’s let’s go ask. It can’t hurt to ask. So, I went in and whether it was the real price or not, I’m not sure whether the price I got was the regular price for everybody, but the woman I spoke to showed me a room, this room, and said 60 ringgit. And maybe I agreed too quickly. Like, I’m starting to think now. Maybe she said 50 ringgit. And I just heard 60. But I was so excited about this village. I thought the fishing, the boats, the whole area was just so so interesting. I really wanted to stay here. And I thought cycling only like I don’t know how long I cycled that day. 30 kilometers at the most. An easy easy day. I thought it would be such an easy day that camping out would camping outside no problem. I thought I would be full of energy, clean and dry, feeling good, feeling energetic, and oh yeah, I can easily camp outside. By the time I got here, I was a wreck. Again, hyperventilating, overheating, covered in sweat, dirty, all of my technology felt like it was falling apart. All my batteries were dead. Everything was dying. And I thought, how in the world can I make a YouTube video sweating to death inside a tent somewhere right now? I was like, this is going to be miserable. So, as soon as I walked in here and she showed me this room and she said, 60 ringgit, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I just jumped on it instantly. And again, it was kind of thanks to some Planet Doug viewers who had stocked up my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. So I was a they have a QR code here and I asked, “Oh, can I pay with a Touch ‘n Go?” Next thing I knew, I was, you know, beep scanning the QR code, 60 ringgit, and yeah, I had a paradise room. It’s pretty I mean, it is basic. If you do value comparison, it’s very poor value compared to my homestay. Like my homestay in Muar, the longstay homestay, it really was an incredible value. I don’t Yeah, the whole you can only you can find this in the extended cut of the video where I talk about this. One unpleasant surprise was that my homestay room shared one bathroom with the neighboring room. So it was like two rooms side by side with a bathroom in between them. So we each had a door into the same bathroom but from opposite sides. And that was a little I didn’t realize the room was like that. That was a bit annoying because you never know who’s in there and you have to knock on the door. Anybody in there? Anybody in there? And then the whole time you’re in the bathroom, you’re worried that they’re going to, you know, burst in from their side. And I’m sitting in my room on the bed editing video. And every time, I don’t know why people do this. Every time they go into the bathroom from their side, they it’s like they attack my door, like the door on my side, they grab the handle and they’re like, you know, wrenching it up and down, pushing on the door. It’s like it’s like they’re trying to break through the door to get into my room. I don’t know why they do that, but anyway. So, it was kind of annoying to have that shared bathroom situation, but other than that, the room was huge, luxurious by my standards. The bathroom was big, hot water, luxurious, lovely place, lovely people, and it cost me 51 ringgit per night. This home, this room in the homestay, it was like an incredible value for Malaysia. 51 ringgit for a room that big, that nice. I could have fit 10 Planet Dougs in that room. It was so big. So, yeah, it was really nicely appointed. Beautiful place. Lots of room. Yeah, amazing value. This room is 10 ringgit more at 60 ringgit per night, but it’s, you know, much much smaller. The the room is like a the bathroom is like a closet. You kind of have to go in there and you turn on the showers. Cold water. It’s only a cold water shower, so there’s no hot water. You know, everything about it is it’s low budget. So, technically, it should be cheaper than the one in Muar, but it is more expensive because yeah, they’ve cornered the market. They’re the only game in town. They can charge whatever they want. So, that that’s why it’s even more expensive. But there’s still Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, I took the room and then I’ve ended up staying here three nights so far and one more night tonight would be my fourth night because again, YouTube video editing. I had to edit the video of my cycling day, cycling from Muar to here, all the experiences at the mangrove, all the other canals that I visited, touring the village when I got here, my meals, all of that. I shot video and I needed a whole day just to edit that video. So that’s day number two. And then when I had a full day here, I just went out exploring. So I grabbed my GoPro and I went out walking around. I shot a video exploring Parit Jawa. And they have an old street here. So, it’s like an alleyway that they developed to look like it looked back in the 50s or 60s, you know, kind of nostalgia, vintage, kind of a recreation of a typical street from that era. They have that here. It’s their big tourist attraction. I went there. That turned out to be really interesting. Which I wasn’t expecting at all and mixed in with my experience of Parit Jawa again I talk about it in the main video is that by absolute just coincidence two other YouTubers Sarah and Ryan it’s a name of their channel they just started a 20-month journey in Asia very professional YouTubers they put me absolutely absolutely to shame. This guy Ryan, I should save this story for later on because I’m going to talk about them, but he’s very professional, pays attention to detail. Anyway, he and his girlfriend Sarah traveled up the coast of Malaysia and they stopped off here in Parit Jawa. So, I saw their video about their experiences in Parit Jawa. They were only here for like 2 or 3 hours. They were on their way to Muar and they just sort of stopped off here. They didn’t spend the night or anything. But so the whole time that I’ve been here, I’ve been referring back to their videos, like their experience of this town, looking at it through their eyes, just, you know, stopping off for 2 or 3 hours. So they went to Old Street as well. A local man took adopted them kind of as a guide and took them to the old street and they kind of looked at it and I don’t think they were that interested in it. They kind of went there just being polite cuz the guy was so eager to show it to them. So they just went along but they didn’t really they weren’t strongly interested in it and they just kind of walked around and you Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Took a couple of selfies together and that was the end of it. But here on Planet Doug, of course, I go there and I’m in this tiny old street for like I don’t know 3 hours in like one small block because I’m zeroing in on every tiny little detail. And that turned out to be very interesting. So, for example, there was like a vintage poster, like a big billboard that looked vintagey, and it said on it master, Old Master Q comic, and had some like cartoon characters on it. And then normally you would just as a YouTuber, you know, you take video. Oh, look at that oldtimey poster. Cool. You know, then you go. But I stopped in the shade, got on the internet, and what is Old Master Q? What the heck is this? And I find out that Old Master Q is a real comic from Hong Kong. And it’s like this, a Chinese man, and his sidekick, Big Potato, and then another man. There’s a like a trio, these comic book characters. I in the video I compared them to Tintin. It was a little bit that reminded me of Tintin. And it turned out that this banner was a poster for a movie that was based on a classic story called Water Margin where these three characters go back in time to like the Song Dynasty I think and with a time machine and they have all these adventures with historical figures. So anyway, I was reading all about Hong Kong cinema, Hong Kong comic books and pop culture and Old Master Q and all these characters. And then every time I saw a poster or some sort of item, I would do I would look online like what is this? And I find out that all these posters were real. They’re real movies. Hong Kong cinema in particular. One was for the story of A Long, something like that. It was a famous famous movie from the 80s with Chow Yun-fat. He was the star. He was some kind of a race car driver or motorcycle racing driver, you know, tragic love story on the racetracks kind of thing. And everything looks all very vintagey. Any I had a lot of fun. I had like so much fun exploring this old street because I did a deep dive into the actual history of every object that I saw, you know, every poster, every banner. So, that was really cool. And then I spent a full day editing that video. And then I was supposed to be on the road today. I’m supposed to be riding my bike to Batu Pahat. Is that the name of the town? I’ll have to look that up. It’s the next kind of, you know, major town up the road. It’s like 40 kilometers away. That’s where I’m going next. I was going to go there today, but then I wasn’t finished that video yet, and I decided, okay, I’ll finish that video in the morning. I’ll relax, enjoy Parit Jawa, work on some of my gear, record this behind-the-scenes video, and then I can leave tomorrow, assuming all goes well. We’ll see. Yeah, my hostess here, a lovely woman. She lives in an apartment in the back. I haven’t seen any other guests. I haven’t heard a sound, nothing going on in this hotel, but she has a little apartment in the back. And then they have a she has a doorbell on the front desk because the they have a lobby here, but it’s always dark and it’s always empty. There’s nobody there. But there was a door a little button you push. So every day I kind of I wait until an appropriate time and then I go out there, push the bell, beep, you know, I hear the doorbell go off in her apartment. She comes out, she’s smiling. One more night. One more night. Yeah. Yeah. One more night. And I get out my phone and scan the QR code and I pay for one more night. So I’ve paid. Yeah, I stayed here for four nights. Who in their right mind comes to Parit Jawa and stays here for four nights? Well, the answer to that is a YouTuber because our time doubles, right? One day in the real world is two days at least for a YouTuber because you do one day of living, one day of video editing. It’s usually one and a half days. So, one day of living, a day and a half of editing, a day of living. So, even though I’ve been here for four nights, from a real person’s point of view, I’ve only been here for two nights. If you see what I mean. The other two nights were spent just listening to the fan on my laptop revving and about to explode. So yeah, that’s been my time here in Parit Jawa. It’s a little bit of a tough town to love. It’s an interesting town. Again, this relates to Sarah and Ryan because they visited this town more like a normal YouTube travel vlogger. So, I think they probably saw the fishing village on Google Maps satellite view the same way I did, just looking and going, “Oh, look, look at that cute fishing village.” And in their mind, again, I’m just reading their mind. I’m just guessing. They’re already looking ahead thinking, “Ah, when we travel up the coast, we can stop off there.” And I think in their mind, they already know the story they’re going to tell that in their mind, it’s a quaint historic fishing village where life hasn’t changed for a hundred years, something like that. So when they get here, they flew their drone over the harbor and from up above with the color grading that they used. Really powerful color grading. Probably a bit too much to be honest, but they made it look amazing. Like what a beautiful place. And the people are friendly and what a wonderful amazing place. But that is something you might see if you just drop by. You know, you just show up, have some asam pedas. They’re famous for their asam pedas here. Malaysians are very popular with Malaysian tourists to come here because everybody comes here for their asam pedas fish soup basically. And yeah, you could come here, fly your drone, put some beautiful music. Wow, what an amazing fishing village. Stay here for 3 days, four nights, and really walk around. It’s got a lot of rough edges. I mean, I’m accustomed to fishing villages, jetties being a bit rough around the edges. This one is really rough. I mean, the mountains of garbage and junk everywhere. I mean, they need somebody to be honest. I mean, I don’t mind it. I mean, I think it’s fascinating. I walk around. But if you look at my video, it’s like I mean, their video was glorious music showing everything how beautiful it is from the air. The Planet Doug point of view with my GoPro is at ground level and my video was like, “Wow, look at this pile of junk.” And I walk 10 ft. Oh man, look at that pile of junk. There’s another I mean, it’s just junk pile after junk pile all the way around the jetty. There’s garbage and junk. Piles of machinery, boat engines, fishing nets, paint cans, fires, like random garbage fires lying around here and there. I mean, it is quite something to see. So, you can look at the town from those two different points of view. I’ve had trouble settling in from a food perspective because I’m not a big fan of fish. Like, “Show me a pot with spicy red soup and a couple of fish heads floating in it.” That kills my appetite. It does not make me hungry. So, I have no interest in all the seafood that they make here. And if you’re not eating the seafood, well, then you’re struggling a little bit. They do have a lot of It’s mainly a Chinese town, all Chinese restaurants, and you can get I mean, I’ve been surviving. I get noodles, noodles and noodles and noodles, things like that. But it isn’t as easy as Muar for example. Like I love kopitiam like a kopitiam with 10 different food stalls in a circle and you can get all kinds of different dishes from all of them though. That’s what keeps me alive in Malaysia. And here they don’t have anything like that. So it’s all these Chinese restaurants and everybody’s having seafood. And then when I go in and I’m looking, all I’m looking for is like a buffet style where I can just serve myself. Rice, eggplant, cabbage, this, this, little bit of chicken, I’m done. They don’t have anything like that here. And there’s no shops. Like there is a 7-Eleven, but it’s way inland about a kilometer and a half away. There’s like the main center of town is not here at the jetty. It’s way out in the middle where two roads intersect. Here at the jetty, there’s nothing. I haven’t found a single shop of any kind. So, there’s nowhere to buy a cold drink or a bottle of water or any snacks. Nothing like that. Certainly no. There’s no 7-Eleven down here. There’s no 99 Speedmart. There’s no I haven’t even found like a single like family-run corner store. Like nothing. All I’ve seen here are fish food, like seafood restaurants. That’s it. And yeah, so if you don’t live on fish food, I when I go out to find something to eat, I do struggle a little bit. So it has been hard feeling completely at home here. I haven’t found that one restaurant where I know that it isn’t a struggle to get something filling and simple and inexpensive to eat without a lot of drama. Every single day in terms of food has been drama here because I keep trying a new restaurant and every time I walk in, yeah, people just sort of look at me like, “What?” You know, and this is not a tourist town for Westerners, put it that way. And people are not running up to me. Oh, welcome, welcome. What can we do? You know, yeah, they’re just busy living their own lives and they just wait. They’re just waiting for me to tell them what I want to eat, but I don’t know what they make, right? That’s always the struggle for me. I walk in and I’m like, well, I don’t know what to order because I need you guys to start the process because I don’t know what you make here. There might be a lot of Chinese written here and there, but the local people, they don’t refer to menus or photos or anything like that. They know what they make. So, they just go in and they just say, “Oh, I’ll have this and this and this,” but I don’t know what to order cuz I don’t know what you guys make here. I can’t tell from my surroundings. And these restaurants, for whatever reason, they never have any vegetables. It’s like, I don’t know how they survive. It’s like, come on. I found one place here one day suited me and that that’s the other issue that I always find in these places where I it was like stumbling across a gold mine. I mean the food was not great to be honest. It was not high quality at all. But they did have a bunch of tubs laid out and then I could lift the lid off each tub like, “Oh, here’s rice.” And then you get some rice and then there was eggplant, a big thing of spicy eggplant. So, I loaded up on eggplant and then I went looking for the other vegetables. You know, I want my cabbage and I want this, but that was it. All they had was the eggplant and everything else was meat, meat, meat, meat, fish, fish, fish, meat, meat, fish. Like, vegetables are in short supply most of the time. Vegetables are really hard to find. It’s like gold. But anyway, I did that day manage to have rice, eggplant, and chicken. And then they never opened again. Like that one day, that one afternoon, they were open. And I’ve gone back there over and over every day, morning, lunch, dinner, back. They’ve never been open since then. So, I never know why these places open when they do and why they’re closed almost all the other times. There was another restaurant I spotted on the corner and I saw some people eating some like fried noodles. I said, “Oh, that looks tasty. I’ll come back here.” I come back, they’re closed. It’s like, it’s dinner time on the weekend. How is it you’re closed? So, I can never figure out when places are open, when they’re closed. I always go there at the wrong time. So, anyway, what I’m saying is the town has not meshed with me. Like, I don’t feel totally comfortable here. It’s a really amazing place to uncover. Like when I first got here and the scenery, all the junk piles, the like there’s shops here where they do machine work, you know, rebuilding the fishing boats and the engine, things like that. And they just have decades worth of old engine parts piled up everywhere with, you know, with machine shop tools everywhere and then old abandoned houses. You know, when I first got here, I was still talking about like a where am I going to camp? And then I was thinking, well, there must be a public bathroom here somewhere. And if I can find where the public bathroom is, maybe near there I can set up my tent. So, I’m walking around the jetty and I come across this little shack. And it was it used to be the bathroom, but the building it was attached to had been torn down. So, one entire wall of the bathroom cubicle had been ripped open. So, the whole wall was missing. So, it was like a bathroom cubicle full of debris and garbage, but it had a door, but no wall. So, I joked, “Well, okay, here’s a bathroom. It has a door on it for privacy, but no wall.” And then just about a 100 ft down the jetty, I found another bathroom, kind of like an outdoor, you know, shack kind of thing. And it had three walls but no door. So that was the joke. You know, you can you have to pick which one you want. You can have the bathroom with a door but no walls or you can have the one with walls but no door. But neither one still there was no toilet. There was no hole in the ground. It was just filled in with garbage and debris, you know. And yeah, like junkyards everywhere. Yeah, it’s pretty pretty rough around the edges. Especially for a tourist town, which yeah, I think is kind of cool, but it’s not picturesque. It’s not quaint from that point of view. You know, once you start focusing on the ground, you know, you see all the garbage and the junk. It’s pretty it’s a pretty wild town. So, yeah, it’s just about time for me to leave here. Unless I change my mind tomorrow. There there are other things I can do here. There’s a hiking hill. Bukit something about 6 kilometers away. I could set aside a day to go hiking. Whether that would be an interesting topic for a YouTube video, I don’t know. There’s also an area here. I noticed on Google Maps there’s like a big district of furniture factories. As far as I can tell, they make furniture. And all around them, I noticed there was all these hostels listed. When I was looking for accommodation, I Oh, look. Hostel, hostel, hostel, hostel. What the heck is that? Way out in the countryside. But I’m pretty sure those are all like dormitories for the migrant workers, the foreign workers who all work in those furniture factories. So, I thought, you know, just as sort of a social economic investigation, I could ride my bike out to these furniture factories just to take a look at them. Maybe meet up with some of these workers there and just chat with them about that. So, I could combine something like that with the hiking, but I probably won’t because the next town along the coast, it’s got a odd no, let me look it up. Batu Pahat. Batu Pahat. It looks like a pretty interesting town. It’s a big town. Might even have some affordable accommodation. I saw some places there. They at 45 ringgit per night. But what interests me about this town is it’s right on a river. So all the way along the coast so far in Johor it’s been nothing but canals. Canal canal canal. But Batu Pahat is actually on I assume the Batu Pahat River. Big river. And down near the mouth of the river outside of the city, there are some huge shipyards, like dredging equipment. Maybe ship repair stuff like that. That looks like a really fascinating area to explore. Right up my alley. So I could base myself in some sort of a cheap hotel. The other YouTubers Sarah and Ryan, they stayed in Batu Pahat. Stayed in Hotel 57, but they didn’t have a good experience there, so they wouldn’t recommend it. But they Yeah. So they I could stay there, Hotel 57, and then to ride down to the shipyards. It’s about 6 kilometers. It’s not so far. Yeah. So I could base myself in Batu Pahat and do day trips down to the shipyards. That I think that would be very interesting. So it might be better use of my time to ride tomorrow down to Batu Pahat and then base myself there and then investigate that town a little bit. So that’s probably what I’m going to do. So that should catch you up on Planet Doug videos.

I don’t think I’ll have a lot to say about this first YouTube travel vlogger. He was someone that I discovered a while back because he was in Sumatra on a motorcycle and he was just about to cross over from Sumatra to Malaysia shipping his motorcycle by ferry out of Tanjung Balai. And so there was a lot that I recognized because I’ve gone in and out of Tanjung Balai by ferry many many times. So I kind of followed his story and I talked about him already. The channel is called Later Rider. And then what I decided to do was go back in time to the beginning of his trip just to see where it all started. And this was a while back that I watched these videos. So they’re not really first and foremost in my mind right now. So, I don’t think I’ll be able to talk about them with any kind of passion or anything, but I do remember watching them and he bought a V-Strom 650 while he was in England in the UK and then he shipped it to Sydney, Australia, and his plan was to ride it from the Sydney Opera House back to Bristol. And this whole idea jumped out at me because I’ve come across it my entire life even before YouTube existed. Even before the internet existed back in the days of travel books where somebody might be sitting at home and contemplating travel like the adventure of travel and then they you can’t help it. You just instinctively get out your map of the world and then you get a globe of the world perhaps and then if you have your map and then you draw a line going all the way around the entire world. It’s just such an instinct to do that and almost from the beginning my instinct has always been that that’s the wrong way to do it. It feels like by drawing the longest line possible, you get to see the whole world. And yet, it always strikes me that the longer you make that line going in a straight line from country to country to country, the less you see because all you’re doing is moving for one thing. And you’re only seeing one strip of land. You know, you go down the main highway on your motorcycle, you see 10 ft in this direction, 10 ft in that direction, and that’s what you see because you just rode on the main highway from one border to the next border. So more, you know, more rewarding, more emotionally fulfilling might be to go to one country and instead of just drawing a line across that one country, you just maybe you can base yourself in the middle and then do loops, you know, like a web. So you follow a web throughout that whole country. So you see the farming land, you go into the mountains, you go into the lake district, you go into the coastal area, you go out to the islands, you explore the capital city, you know, you see everything in that one country that might be more emotionally fulfilling. And yet this draw, this incredible pull to draw a line around the whole world is so strong. Most people end up doing it. So they link together 50 countries with this line. And then you know that that was his dream. You know he worked his whole life I think. I don’t know much about him from his previous life, but he clearly Later Rider has lived a good life and has saved up a lot of money and now he’s retired and it has always been his dream, I guess, to ride a motorcycle around the world. So, he picked a spot an iconic location that would look looks like mentally you can imagine it. There you are at the Sydney Opera House, which to someone from Canada, maybe someone from the UK, is this exotic location, recognizable to everyone. And there you are on your V-Strom 650 setting off on your journey around the world. It seems glamorous and exciting and wonderful. So, I get the attraction, but maybe when the dust settles, all you’ve done is ride your motorcycle for months and months, and all you’ve done is border crossings, visas, more border crossings, visas, customs, carnet, all that kind of stuff. And you can take that in and then turn that into what looks like an amazing adventure in a video. Like depending how you edit the content, but then when you break from my point of view, when you break down the logistics, it may not be the best choice, but that is what he wanted to do. And I guess from what I can tell going I watched all of his videos from Indonesia, which is what I mainly focused on. He originally rode all through Australia and I skipped all of those videos because I’m not that interested in Australia as a travel destination. I only picked up his story when he crossed over from Australia to Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste like in his case I get the impression that he’s not that act he’s not really that interested in any of the countries that he’s passing through. Maybe if he slowed down he would find wow I’m fascinated by this country but he’s more about being on the road being he’s more about the motorcycle journey than he is about the places where he’s visiting but yeah so he shipped the bicycle to Australia and a lot of people left comments after you know following his stories like don’t you think it would have made more sense to buy a motorcycle there? Like, why go to all the expense of shipping it all the way from the UK? And he says in his videos, “Yeah, you’re right. If I did this again, I probably would not buy my motorcycle in the UK and ship it to Australia. I would go I would fly there and then buy a motorcycle when I got to Australia.” He says that’s probably what the way he would have done it. But anyway, he rode through Australia, but then almost before he got started in a way, now he had to ship it again because Australia is a giant island. So that that makes the trip kind of difficult as well. He landed and shipped his motorcycle there, rode across Australia, and now oh, I got to put it on a boat again. And what he did, I guess, was ship it to Timor-Leste. And then it would take so long for his motorcycle to do that, he flew to Bali. And he stayed in Bali for a couple of weeks, 3 weeks, a month, I’m not sure how long, waiting for his motorcycle to arrive. And he wasn’t shooting any video about that at all. Again, he’s not really a classic YouTuber or a classic traveler. He’s a motorcycle traveler and he wants to make videos about being on the motorcycle. So he didn’t shoot any videos while he was in Bali. And then when his motorcycle arrived in Timor-Leste, then he flew there, reunited with his motorcycle and then rode across Timor, crossing the border from there into Indonesia. And I definitely got the impression he was not that interested in the countries because I mean I I’m roughly the same generation as him and I grew up drowning in the stories of the fighting on Timor. I mean there is so much history there and and this island you know the fighting that went on on that island. And there’s so much history there to do with the colonial periods of Indonesia. There’s a great deal of meat on the bone in terms of religion and culture and history and military. Everything’s happening on that island, but it never comes up. He never mentions any of it. He just rides to the border, crosses the border, and then his videos are all about riding across the Indonesian islands, getting to the end of the island, getting onto a ferry, crossing over, and then going on and on like that. There’s a couple of interesting moments he talked about episode 10. He fell asleep. He it was funny in the video he he mentioned he he thought about not telling the story because you know he knew he could be opening up to a lot of criticism but yeah he was so tired he took a ferry overnight ferry landed and then he just kept like he landed in the morning at kind of a small coastal town that built up around the ferry but then he had his eye on a nice hotel in a city and on a motorcycle, everything looks closer than it really is. Like in my in my world, if I took that overnight ferry from this island to that island, wild horses could not drag me away from that town. Like when my ferry docks in the early morning in that coastal town, I am staying in that coastal town. As I said, you you’re not getting me out of that town. I’m looking for a cheap hotel in that town because I’m exhausted. I’m tired. I need a place to crash. And that town, that whole region, there was a peninsula there. This looked amazing. I could spend a month in that town exploring that peninsula, that area. But when you’re on a motorcycle and you plot, okay, my ferry is landing here, but there’s this town up here that’s 150 km away and they have a really nice hotel there, this small town. It’s like just local low-budget hotels. So he put his eye on this town with a nice hotel, you know, 150 km, you know, but that takes hours to cover in Indonesia. We’re not talking about highway driving, right? So he had been awake all night on the ferry. Now he was on and he he fell asleep on the motorcycle because he was so tired. And he says the only reason he woke up is that he fell over his head hit the handlebars of the motorcycle hit the dash and when cuz he fell asleep he slumped forward and when his head hit it woke him up and then he stayed on the road. But yeah, it could have been could have been a disaster. But the town was called Larantuka. Yeah, ferry to Larantuka. And again that I was thinking of that story just because of this difference between you know arriving in this town by ferry and then again I would just they had little they had little hotels there like nice little low-budget hotels. I’m sure this is Indonesia. They have low-budget hotels everywhere but he likes the nicer hotels the more expensive ones. So he he just kept kept driving. When you have 650cc of motorcycle power, well, that’s what you are going to do. You’re just going to keep driving and driving and driving. Yeah, he rode across Flores episode 11 and he did talk a lot about how cheap everything was. And I’ve come across that in in other YouTube videos as well where a YouTuber eventually gets criticized for that because maybe you flew into Indonesia from the United States or from Australia and just because of the way the currencies work, everything seems cheaper to you. And then when you first land there, the words come out of your mouth. It’s like, whoa, this was only I just had this amazing lunch. I had this and this and this and a drink. And it only came to $3. So cheap. Everything is so cheap here. But if you keep repeating that over and over again, eventually someone from Indonesia is going to pipe up and say, “Yeah, maybe for you, but not for us.” I mean, you have to take into account the local economy. This is my salary, and for us, these are normal prices. And it’s kind of weird when you keep talking about how cheap everything is. Well, yeah, that’s only because of the vagaries of currency exchange. You’re lucky you arrived with US dollars and now you’re spending Indonesian rupiah. Seems cheap to you, but you know, don’t keep telling us how cheap everything is because no, it’s not not for us. So, I was, you know, he does tend in that direction. And again, from a from someone who travels more on the low-budget end of things, he’s talking about how cheap everything is, but here in Flores was $66 a night. Yeah, it’s was that 1.2 million? Yeah, 1.2 million rupiah per night. Almost $70 US. And that he paid. And he talked it was a beachside resort. And as he was riding away, he’s like, “Oh, this place was amazingly cheap. I couldn’t believe how cheap it was.” And I’m thinking, $70 a night, you know, that’s what, 70? Yeah. Two over $2,000 US a month if that’s what you’re paying every night. That’s Yeah, that’s not cheap. But for him, it just strikes him as a very very cheap. Yeah, he talks about that a lot. How cheap everything is in Malaysia. Yeah, he his latest video he rode from he crossed the border into Thailand. I just started I watched that video this morning again. It was only about the border crossing. He was in Malaysia for a number of days I guess but he didn’t shoot any video at all until he was on the motorbike and then he rode out of KL to Batu Caves. He stopped off there I think shot a video at Batu Caves and then he rode his motorcycle to the border with Thailand. But he didn’t shoot any other video in Malaysia at all. So all of his time that he spent, whatever he did, he didn’t make any videos about that. But in this video, crossing the border into Thailand, he did comment. He’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got all this money.” He needed to. He was going to buy gas. He was going to fill his gas tank on his motorbike. And he says, “Yeah, I have to do that cuz I got all this money to spend. I have all this leftover Malaysian ringgit.” And he said, “Yeah, like when I landed, I changed money or I withdrew money and then it’s so cheap here. I never spent any of it.” He I couldn’t I couldn’t spend the money here even if I wanted to cuz everything is so cheap. So it’s like even Malaysia struck him as super super cheap. But I think it was also because you pay for everything now with cards. Everybody pays with e-wallets and cards. So even if you do withdraw a lot of even a reasonable amount of money, you might end up with leftover cash because you just end up not spending cash anymore. And he hired a fixer. So when he arrived at the border in Thailand, there was a fixer waiting for him to do all the formalities for him to get his motorcycle into Thailand, pay all the taxes and get the licenses and the permits and the carnet, all that kind of stuff. He said it looked kind of complicated to get into Thailand and he didn’t want to face it on his own. So, he hired somebody to meet him there, a Thai fixer. So, that’s how he got in. Something else that jumped out at me though is most of the videos are about being on the motorcycle, right? It starts with him on the motorcycle, ends with him getting off the motorcycle. And they’re pretty popular videos. You know there so many people in the world enjoy motorcycle videos and then there might be there’s one video here he episode 12 and this video is actually about something like it’s a it’s a subject it’s called I found a thousand-year-old village while riding through Indonesia. So he stopped got off his motorcycle and he did a tour of this village. I don’t remember any of the details anymore. I don’t think he even did a very deep dive into the history. But again, this was like the first video of his that I really really enjoyed because he actually stopped and looked at something. It was an interesting village seeing people, the way they live, the houses, the countryside. He was actually in Indonesia. But that video, the one that I liked the best, was by far the least popular on his channel. Which again gets back to this idea I think that even YouTube viewers really want to see somebody moving. They want the glamour of the journey moving from A to B with progression following their journey and they see it as glamorous and exciting. As soon as you stop and look at something that’s actually in that country, the views just drop off a cliff. Like nobody clicks on that video, you know? So, it’s kind of even as a YouTuber, you kind of get pushed in that direction. I was kind of surprised at how much trouble he had riding the motorcycle though. There were many cases where he would book a hotel online and then when he got there, it turned out that the access road was a little bit rough. Like it was off the main pavement and it was like kind of a bumpy rocky typical Indonesian countryside road and he really really struggled with those and he talked about it all the time that he’s like oh my you know he he didn’t like it he did not enjoy that riding at all and he was always at risk of dumping the motorcycle like falling over and it kind of surprised me because the other moto vloggers that I followed you know Itchy Boots for example like is there something different is there something wrong with the V-Strom motorcycle because it did not seem to be suited to to anything other than flat pavement. And yet, as far as I know, the V-Strom is is an adventure bike. It’s designed for round the world. It’s categorized as an adventure motorcycle. And yet, like someone like Itchy Boots, her motorcycle just eats up the dirt and the mud and the rock, never has any problem. And yet, this guy was like, he’s just constantly on the edge of falling over. Every time he gets even off a little bit of pavement, a little bit of a rocky road, it seemed like he was teetering and and about to fall over. So, it made me wonder about this motorcycle. Like maybe if you’re going around the world, this V-Strom is not the motorcycle. Like maybe it’s top-heavy and it’s just awkward on rough road. So I guess maybe it’s not a it’s not really an adventure bike. Maybe. Yeah, I’m not really sure. He did go up Bromo, Mount Bromo. And I found that interesting because I climbed Mount Bromo many, many, many years ago. So long ago that I barely remember it. I only remember like waking up at an incredibly early hour because back in those days maybe we walked hiked much farther than you need than today or something. But I remember going to sleep and then I think my alarm went off at 2:00 in the morning. You know, it’s like 2 or 3, you know, beep beep beep. Oh, time to get up to climb the volcano because you got to get to the top of the volcano in time for sunrise, which is what everybody does. So, I went to Bromo a long time ago. But he he went up there and yeah, it looked like a pretty good day. But again, I noticed watching his videos and watching videos from a lot of other people, everyone seems to have a lot more energy than I have. So, for example, if I’m going to go up Mount Bromo, to me, it’s a whole week experience. I arrive at Mount Bromo, I need one or two days before the Bromo hike just to kind of ease into it and enjoy the anticipation and think about it and get ready for it. And then I have the day building up to the day of climbing Mount Bromo, having that whole experience. Then I need two days to decompress. Like if I’m shooting a YouTube video, of course, I need a whole day just to edit the video from the volcano climb. But even if I’m not shooting video, I need two days just to write letters about it. Journal entries just to think about it to recover from the physical challenge. And then 2 days later, then I can finally wake up and move on. But in his case, I’m pretty he stayed in a hotel near Bromo and then he woke up in the morning, went up and down Bromo, and then checked out of his hotel and then rode for the rest of the day and checked into a new hotel. And I I just never ever do things like that. I just don’t have the energy for that. Like I I can’t even imagine. Like you tell me that okay tomorrow like I talked about doing that hike here in this town Parit Jawa there’s a hiking hill there if I’m going to go hiking tomorrow on that hill that is my whole day and I’m staying here at night there’s not a chance on earth that I’m going to wake up ride my bike out to this hill hike the hill get back on my bike come back to this hotel pack up, check out, and then ride to the next city. Not a chance. I do one thing per day. And if I’m doing something on that day, I’m staying the night in that town. So, everybody else has way more energy than I have. I’m so slow. It’s kind of crazy.

He also went to the big temples. Prambanan, Borobudur. Now, it was interesting to see his experience there because I went to those temples as well. But I went there such a long time ago. It was totally different experience. It’s so organized now. Very, very slick. And back when I went, I have memories of a little shack where you kind of gave a little bit of money and you got a tiny little piece of paper as your ticket and there you go. You just walk over to the temple. But now it’s a full-on developed attraction with a lot of regulations and rules and you know, things that you do. But yeah, I don’t have I guess it was so long ago that I watched his videos. I don’t have a lot of specifics to talk about. I just thought I’d mention him because he’s left Malaysia already. I was hoping he was going to post a whole lot of videos in Malaysia, but he basically went to Batu Caves and shot a video of Batu Caves and that’s his whole Malaysia experience basically. And then he went to the border. So then he yeah crossed into Thailand. That is Later Rider.

I don’t think I’ll have a whole lot to say about Lav and Ali either, but I started following them because they also started riding a motorcycle here in Malaysia. And their first couple of videos yeah they started down at the southern tip of Malaysia that place which is advertised as the most southern point of all of mainland Asia a lot of motorcycle riders start at those places and then then they rode all the way from there to Melaka in one day spent one night in Melaka then rode all the way from Melaka to KL in one day and you know barely did anything along the way. So again, they’re they are true moto vloggers as well where yeah, they’re not messing around. They’re all about being on the motorcycle. And yeah, I mean, their entire experience of Melaka, I think, was probably 2 hours. They arrived at the end of the day, checked into their hotel, it’s already getting dark, and then they went to the main square, rode around on a on a trishaw with, you know, the Hello Kitty trishaw. Looked at a couple of things, had some food on Jonker Street, and then they went back to their hotel, woke up the next morning and drove away. So that was all of Melaka for them. And then they rode all the way. I mean, this whole coast that I find so fascinating here in Johor, I think they would have crossed over all of these canals without even realizing they were canals. To them, they would have looked just like rivers. So again, it’s a whole different style of experiencing a country. Again, it’s mainly about the motorcycle. But anyway, when they were in Kuala Lumpur, they also went to Batu Caves. Everybody goes to Batu Caves and they also went up to So they went to Batu Caves and then went to Genting Highlands. And I really enjoyed that video. This was called inside the Las Vegas of Malaysia. I assume that refers to Genting Highlands, but it started with Batu Caves and they made a fun video overall. They gave a lot of good information about Batu Caves. I thought they did a really nice job. The video was kind of fun. They talked about the traffic lights of Malaysia, which I thought was I could really relate to that. They’re trying to leave KL and all they were doing was waiting at red lights. It was like traffic light after traffic light after traffic light and it took so long for the light to go from red to green. It just about drove them crazy. And that’s something I’ve picked up on and and they joked about that. And then they got up to Genting Highlands and they wanted to go to this building or lookout point or something and then they rode their motorcycle into this big parking garage kind of thing up to the gate and then they were stymied and this always happens to me which I really enjoyed this part of their video. Like they’re doing these big attractions like Genting Highlands, Batu Caves, but they’re also grounding their story in day-to-day logistical struggles. And a lot of YouTubers skip all of that, but I really enjoy seeing how it really happens. So, there they are riding up their motorbike and they get to this gate and then, well, how do we get through the gate and they’re trying to pay? They have all the cards and the buttons and the scanners and they’re doing this and they’re doing that and they have they cannot figure out how to pay and they they eventually find out that they can only pay with Touch ‘n Go. That’s the only payment they’ll accept and they don’t have Touch ‘n Go. So they’re stuck and now they’ve got all these cars behind them and they have to somehow turn their motorcycle around in this very tight area because they can’t go forward and they can’t go backwards. Anyway, I kind of enjoyed this look into the logistics of their life. And they talk about that as well. You know, I went I recently went to the dock at Pulau Besar and I tried to get through the gate there and I couldn’t do it. You know, I showed up and the gate was down. I couldn’t get through it. It had a Touch ‘n Go symbol and I’m trying, you know, how do I scan? How do I pay my two ringgit? And I ended up pushing a button, thinking the button maybe would summon the QR code that I could scan. But it turned out the button was an intercom. And I heard a phone start to ring like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” I didn’t want to do that. But then a woman answered in English and said, “Oh, hello. Can I help you?” Like, “Yeah, well, yeah, I hope so. I’m trying to get through the gate. I have Touch ‘n Go on my phone, but I don’t know how to pay.” So, you know, I have those struggles all the time. And I include everything like that in my videos. So, I kind of really enjoyed it that I saw Lav and Ali having the exact same problem on their motorcycle trying to get through the gate, fighting with Touch ‘n Go, and then they can’t get through the gate. They can’t find a place to park and this and that. So, it’s not always smooth sailing. But yeah, again, I watched that video a long time ago, so a lot of the details aren’t in my head anymore. And their most recent video, they went to Do I still have it called up? They went to the Highlands. The video is called I haven’t watched it yet. Why is there a British village in Malaysia’s jungle? And I know. Yeah. Fraser’s Hill. They went to Fraser’s Hill. It’s a place, yeah, I’ve wanted to go to on my bicycle, but I haven’t been there. But yeah, so they went there and I think that video is going to be very entertaining as well, but I haven’t watched it yet. So, that is Lav and Ali. And even though they’re moving really fast and not doing a deep dive into anything, moving too fast for my tastes, they’re I find their videos kind of entertaining. Even when they left from Melaka to ride up to KL, there one of the main places they wanted to visit. I think I talked about this before. This is sounding familiar. They wanted to visit a turtle sanctuary and they’re very excited about seeing the turtles. They thought it’d be really good for the video. And then they get there and of course it’s like they’re living on Planet Doug. It was closed and you know they saw some woman there and they no closed. Sorry. And that was the end of their whole turtle experience. And it was interesting also that while they were there, they realized they couldn’t go into the turtle sanctuary. So, they thought, well, we’re on the coast. Why don’t we dip our toes in the ocean? Like, we’re here, our cameras are running. Let’s film something. So, then they walk down to the beaches where the turtles would have been, I guess, and they’re going to take video. But then in the video they talked about how difficult that is to do when you’re on a motorcycle and that that is another aspect to moto vlogging particularly when you’re traveling on a big bike and you’re worried about safety and security. So, you’re decked out head to toe with protective gear so that if you do crash, you know, you got the skid plates, you got the armor, you’ve got the heavy thick jackets, you’ve got the riding boots, you got the big helmet. So, there you are, and you come up with, “Oh, let’s walk down to the beach.” Well, you have to be fully committed to walking down to the beach because, as they talk about, it’s a huge job. The helmet, the jacket, the layers, the armor, the boots, you know, all of that. Just to walk down to the shore in your bare feet and then put your feet in the water just for the video, right? Oh, here we are on the beach of Malaysia. And then you can shoot some of the waves and then how long does it take you to get all your clothing back on again? All of the armor and the boots and the jackets and the helmets and all the cameras and the microphones. I mean, you’d be drenched in sweat by the time you finished undressing and then you might start cooling down finally and then you got drenched in sweat just from putting the gear back on again. And that also explains why people on motorcycles travel as far as they do. I’ve noticed even in, you know, Itchy Boots will often get on the motorcycle and you can tell when you watch her video that she was really reluctant to get off. Like once you get on the motorbike and you’re riding, you want to ride for the whole day until you get to your destination. Like stopping somewhere to get off the motorbike and go exploring. It’s like h can’t face it. Said, you know, you got to take off all your gear and then go somewhere and then come back, put it all back on again. It’s so much work. There’s this tremendous pressure to just stay on the motorcycle and keep going until you get to your destination. You know, get suited up once in the morning, take off your gear once at the end of the day, and even that is kind of challenging. So I see that pattern with people who travel, you know, long distances on motorcycles.

The final vloggers I wanted to talk about, I’ve already mentioned them, Sarah and Ryan, and I’ve done a little bit of a deep dive into them. And it’s a little bit more recent that I watched their videos. So, I have a lot more perhaps to say about them. And they’re in Malaysia right now. And they are posting in real time. That is getting more and more rare these days. So that when you look at one of their videos here in Malaysia, go to the video description, Sarah and Ryan, and then in the video description, it’ll say the date it was filmed. So the most recent one that I just watched, they went out to Pulau Besar. Yeah, they went out to Pulau Besar. And it says in the description that it was filmed on October 4th and they just posted it yesterday. Yesterday was what? The 18th. So it’s like 2 weeks behind. Oh, I’m trying to power up my phone, but it’s not plugged in. Give me a second.

So, they’re very organized YouTubers and they actually tell you in the video when they filmed it and they’re about two weeks behind. So, every video you’ve watch, if you see, okay, the video is in Melaka, they were in Melaka 2 weeks ago, but they are still in still in Malaysia, which is kind of cool. So, when I discovered Sarah and Ryan, it’s because they had just begun their journey, and they’ve been planning this journey for a long time, and they are the most organized YouTubers I have ever seen. It just blows my mind because I have talked in the past like guys like Later Rider, this British YouTuber, he’s very casual about it. I think he’s making his videos mainly for friends and family. The fact that people like me, like a wider audience are watching his videos, I think it came as a surprise to him. He wasn’t expecting anybody to be interested, which is why he’s not including a lot of details, you know, he’s just it’s like sending a letter home to his friends, but a video letter, right? So, I always get annoyed when I watch a video from a YouTuber and I have no idea where they are and when they were there, where they came from, where they’re going. But if that annoys me, Sarah and Ryan, I think Ryan is the main driving force of the of the YouTube channel. He is very much at my up my alley. He is so organized. It is incredible. So, they planned a journey in advance, 20 months in Asia and they were in Europe. I’m not quite sure. I’m confused about where Sarah is from because they their original videos where they’re planning the trip. They appeared to be in Switzerland. So, her family was living in Switzerland. So, I thought she was Swiss, but then I I saw them mention Italian and Italy a few times. So maybe her family is from Italy, but they’re living in Switzerland, something like that. But anyway, they’re in Europe and then they’re planning the trip and packing, shopping, getting ready, booking the flights. They showed that in in the videos, like all of the preparations, booking the flights, getting the visas, shopping for clothing, for backpacks. They went through all of that in a couple of videos. And their idea in advance was 20 months traveling in Asia. They plotted the route out in advance and Ryan wanted to post three videos every week and he records everything. So like when you’re watching the video, it tells you like he thinks there’s going to be 600 videos, I think. So, it’s like vlog one of 600, then vlog number two of 600. Like, it’s like precisely organized. They keep track of how much money they spend down to the penny. And that’s right in the video as well. It breaks it down how much money they spent that day. And then it breaks it down for for a daily average, how much money they’re spending on average per day. And he gives exact information about how long they stay in each place. It’s like, and then if you go into the video description, every place that they visit has a Google Maps pin. You know, I’ve tried to do that in the past, but I’ve given up because it just takes way too long and I have too many other things to do. But he might go to like 10 different places in a video. And then he puts in the video description the name of the place and then the pin to it in Google Maps. Name of the place. Google Maps pin. Name of the place. Google Maps pin. Every website is listed. Every hotel they stay in. The Booking.com page for that hotel is listed. Every imaginable piece of information is listed in the video description and put on the end screen of the video, the opening screen of the video. And then he is a very professional YouTuber as well where the video has the perfect travel vlog structure where he has an intro with a voice over like previously last video and then boom boom boom boom boom boom boom with highlights showing everything they did in the last video this and now we are here and we are going to do this. It’s like 45 seconds long. Filled with rapid-fire clips telling you everything they did in the last video and everything they’re going to do in this video. And it’s so well done. It’s so polished. It’s so professional. It might even be too professional. I’m not sure because I have seen a couple of comments like somebody wrote a comment saying, “Oh, you know, that that intro, it sounds like AI to me. You know, it doesn’t sound real.” But I think it really is Ryan and he’s just speaking fast because they’re all about making a successful YouTube channel and he’s clearly studied what works on YouTube, what doesn’t work. And if you want people to watch your travel videos, this is what you do. And you don’t make an hour and a half long rambling tour of the canals of Johor. No. That’s what that’s what you do on Planet Doug. But if you want, you know, 80,000 people, 100,000 people to watch your video, well, this is what you do. Professional edits. And even the video itself is very professionally done where he’s got B-roll, tons and tons of B-roll. So, they have their A-roll talking to camera, but throughout the entire day, he’s clearly very focused. He’s got like a DJI Pocket 3, the newest best pocket camera. Very high quality video, and he’s shooting a lot of B-roll. They have a drone. He makes sure he gets drone footage. They get tons of establishing shots. So, everywhere they go, he makes sure to get an establishing shot. And then he combines all of those clips with fancy J and L cuts so that as they’re speaking to camera on the A-roll, then it cuts to the B-roll to the establishing shot and then the drone footage with music seamlessly integrated. It’s like amazingly well done from a production point of view. I’ve never seen that level of attention to detail anywhere on on YouTube. Like I’m not saying that I absolutely love it because I think the pressure of making that kind of video, a polished professional video that has mass appeal pushes you towards a certain lifestyle, a certain way of experiencing the world, which I know I wouldn’t enjoy. So I mean for example here in Parit Jawa is a perfect example that they came here as a stopover you know they’re on the bus they’re traveling by bus up the coast and they saw this quaint fishing village which to them was a quaint fishing village and they got off the bus walked here flew the drone and they were here for 2 or 3 hours and they got then they got a Grab and then they took the Grab from here to Melaka and that’s like 10 minutes devoted. Well, maybe not even 10 minutes, but yeah, 10 minutes devoted to that to this town. And they made sure they got drone footage of the fishing boats, which looks glamorous and romantic. And they tried the local stingray, asam pedas, and everything looks amazing. Everything is wonderful. The people are friendly. And then they’re both happy people. I mean, Sarah in particular, she smiles more in one video than I do probably in 10 years. That’s probably not even an exaggeration. She smiles more in one day than I do in a year easily, maybe 10 years, because she’s just energetic and and upbeat and loves to smile and just enjoys life. Very very different tone from Planet Doug. So, and then if you have a rigid schedule that pushes you to focusing on the big highlights like here on Planet Doug, I spent an entire day taking video of the junkyards of this village. But, you know, posting a video about the junkyards of coastal Malaysia, it’s not going to have mass appeal. They know that, like Sarah and Ryan. So, they came here and they made sure that they took video of the beautiful fishing boats from the air. That’s a key distinction because it looks amazing from the air. Come down to ground level and things start looking a lot rougher around the edges. And I have to say I wonder if there’s a certain self not censorship but a certain style gets imposed. Like a story gets told because you know that story works in a video but it may not be what it was actually like in real life. Again focusing on Parit Jawa. I’ve been here for 3 days. I know this place really well and I’ve gone all the way out to the main road where they would have been dropped off. So, and they had their backpacks with them. So, their actual experience of this town was getting dropped off a kilometer and a half away from the fishing harbor. Full heat of the day, incredibly hot and humid. They have their entire backpacks, heavy backpacks, and a knapsack on their chest, backpack on the back, you know, knapsack on the front, all their camera gear. And then they had to walk all the way here. And that would have been brutal and tiring and hot. And then along the way, a local man stopped on his scooter, like a local friendly guy, didn’t speak much English, and basically wanted to help them. It’s like, “Oh, look, these foreigners are here.” And essentially attached himself to them and said, “Oh, come I want to show you something.” And this guide, this local man, he wasn’t like a real guide. He was just a friendly guy that they met, took him took them to the old street that I talked about earlier. There’s this alleyway that is like a full-on vintage recreation of a 1950s 1960s alleyway with all the houses designed to look like they come from that time. Anyway, it’s a tourist attraction and Sarah and Ryan from the very beginning they have framed their journey as we are going to go where tourists never go. We are going to show you the things that other YouTubers don’t show you. That’s a theme of their YouTube channel. So, my guess is that when this guy took him to the local tourist attraction, they weren’t really that thrilled by it. It’s like that’s not what we’re here to do. Our whole point of coming here was to show a real Malaysian fishing village. We’re We want to get off the beaten track. We don’t want to go where the tourists go, so we go where nobody else goes. And as soon as they get off the bus, a local person drags them to the most touristy thing you can imagine, an old street, which is designed entirely for people to take Instagram photos and Instagram reels. So, where this man took them went completely opposite to what they were actually hoping to film. And then this guy stayed with them the whole time. I mean, they were here for hours and then this guy would not leave them from what I can tell. Like reading between the lines cuz I’ve had this experience in the past myself. I kind of know what it’s like. And they were hope they were hoping to try asam pedas, the local delicacy. And in their mind, I think they were imagining a nice restaurant, air-conditioned, and then you can go in, sit at a table, set up your cameras, a menu comes, you can have an interaction with the waitress. Oh, asam pedas, what tell us about it, what it is like, you know, and then they order it and they can get a beautiful, nicely filmed segment of trying the famous asam pedas of Johor of Parit Jawa. But instead, because this man had adopted them, he took them to a local asam pedas, which is like an outdoor like a kind of a food court with like kind of like picnic tables, like not chairs. It’s not restaurant seating. It’s not air-conditioned. It’s outdoors. And then they’re just these big aluminum tubs, you know, they they pull the lid off the tub and nobody speaks a word of English. I’ve been to all these restaurants here. Very very little English here. It’s really hard to communicate. You don’t know what’s going on. So, they walked all the way here with their backpacks. They were climbing all over Old Street up and down these narrow stairways. Poor Ryan is like sweating like a madman. And now instead of a nice restaurant where they can sit in comfort, they’re here in this crowded busy place with these giant aluminum pots, nothing but fish heads and sauce, and they don’t know what’s going on. And then they sit there and Ryan is like wiping the sweat off his face. I can’t imagine eating that hot spicy asam pedas in that environment. It just cannot possibly be enjoyable. And my the reason I’m talking about this at length is that I’m pretty sure that all of these things that was happening was actually unpleasant. You know, walking all the way from the highway in the hot sun with your backpack, getting dragged to a local touristy, you know, the most touristy thing you can imagine, then being dragged to this outdoor market, was so uncomfortable eating this asam pedas. And this guy would not go away, like just kept following them and following them and following them. So I think the reality was that it was really quite an unpleasant experience. They flew the drone, you know, they got the shots they needed, but now they had to go all the way back to the main street, a kilometer and a half walk with their backpacks all the way there, and now they had to somehow wait for a bus. It might have been that video where a bus finally came and then it just blew right past them. Like it didn’t stop. It wouldn’t pick them up. Or maybe this video there just was no bus. They couldn’t figure out how to get on a bus, how long they had to wait for a bus. So, it’s such a like once you stop off in a small town like this, that’s great. You can get dropped off, but now how do you get out? That’s really hard. And they wanted to get to Muar because they had booked a hotel room in Muar. So, in the end, what they had to do was get a Grab. And I think even getting a Grab is really hard in these out of the way places. Their whole idea was to travel by local transportation up the coast of Malaysia. But then every town they got to, they found out that it was hard to move on. Like they went down to the southernmost tip to see the mangrove park there. And then they wanted to go back to their home, their hotel in Pontian. But how? There’s no bus. There’s no shuttle bus. There’s no Grab. I think it took them like an hour working with local people, getting local people to help them before they could finally get some kind of a taxi to come and pick them up. It’s a huge hassle to travel to these little local towns to get in and out of them, right? It’s a hassle. So then you know the so the whole experience was probably very uncomfortable and yet the video makes it look like the greatest day ever if you see what I mean. So I think in reality stopping off here was a very unpleasant experience for them. It was an adventure sure but it was physically grueling and I don’t think it worked out the way they hoped. But then they man then they would edit the video because they know a YouTube audience doesn’t want to hear about oh I was so hot I was so tired this local guy followed us everywhere he couldn’t speak English but you know he wouldn’t go away and we had to do this and he he brought us here and we’re trying to get rid of him but we couldn’t get rid of him. Oh it was such a terrible experience. Nobody wants to hear about the reality. They want to hear about the fantasy of what an amazing day you had and listen to this incredible music and this beautiful drone footage. Anyway, and then actually with this video from Parit Jawa, I left a comment on the video because yeah, I’m here and I came here and I found a hotel. Like there’s actually this amazing little hotel here and I knew they had a like a rigid schedule. They already had a room booked in Muar, but I thought, you know, I could just share my experiences with them. So, I left a long Planet Doug comment on their video just talking about, you know, did you know cuz I know a little bit about the history of this town, the canal, that sort of thing. And then I mentioned that, oh, by the way, that there actually is a hotel right on the jetty. The Marina Lodging. It’s not on Google Maps. It’s not on Agoda or Booking, but there is a little hotel here. So, if you guys had known about it, you could have spent the night here, just dropped off your bags in this room. You could take a shower, get relaxed, rest, and then you could have gone out exploring, and that probably would have been a much better experience. And then Ryan or Sarah, I’m not sure who replies to the comments, wrote back and said something like, “Well, yeah, we even if we knew about it, we couldn’t stay there overnight because we have a schedule for our videos, you know, every 3 days and we already know what the topic of each video is going to be. So we can’t just change our schedule because then we fall behind in our video, you know, very very polished production schedule and system.” So that it’s a very different way of yeah, way of doing things. So I think I went off on that long tangent talking about how I admire the incredible work that goes in. Like Ryan, he works hard on these videos. The editing must take forever. His their videos are like 25 minutes long. He knows that’s the sweet spot as well. But at the same time, these videos being 25 minutes long would take a long time to edit because of all the work, you know, that that he puts into it. It’s really been a fascinating experience for me as a as a wannabe YouTuber to do this deep dive into Sarah and Ryan. So for example, his YouTube channel in terms of the Asia trip is quite new. They they landed in Singapore, spent maybe one or two nights in Singapore and then they crossed over to Johor Bahru. So this 20-month trip just started, but his first video on his YouTube channel was like 5 years ago. And the very first video is sort of a hello YouTube kind of video like I’m starting my YouTube channel. And he looks exactly like a Casey Neistat knockoff because you know most like a lot of YouTubers would watch the success of Casey Neistat and then consciously or unconsciously mimic the things he does because he was so successful. So Ryan in his very first video, he’s got like the full-sized mirrorless camera, probably the exact same camera that Casey Neistat was using, a Canon something or other with the same big shotgun mic on the top. And then the GorillaPod, you know, the full-sized big GorillaPod. That’s what Casey Neistat used. And he must have the arm strength of the Hulk, cuz I’ve talked about that in the past. Holding that heavy rig out at arms length, you really’ve got to tense up your muscles. And that’s what Ryan had. The exact same Casey Neistat rig right down to the full-sized GorillaPod. Same music that Casey Neistat used. Exactly the same sort of the music is sped up so you get that like that weird insect-like voice, you know, but and also setting up the camera in a room, then leaving the room and then coming back in, opening the door, filming yourself entering the room, constantly setting up the camera to film yourself. So, he’s basically copying the exact Casey Neistat playbook from the type of camera and the shooting style, the music, the editing, everything, which is kind of cool. And then he had a whole bunch of videos where he looked like he was searching for what his YouTube persona was going to be. There are a bunch of videos very technical like about camera gear, shooting drones, editing techniques, kind of like hardcore videos about gear and the method editing video, that kind of thing. And then he moved into traveling videos. And apparently for five years they’ve been traveling but making videos as a freelancer. So they were making money while traveling and editing videos for other people. They had all these clients. So I guess he was good enough skilled enough at video editing that he did it for other YouTubers. Like other YouTube travel vloggers hired him through online you know websites whatever as a freelancer and that’s how they made money and he talked about them putting in like 60-hour work weeks 70-hour work weeks while they were traveling just sitting in the hotel just like I do sitting on a hotel bed they had video clips of him and Sarah sitting side by side each of them with their MacBook Pro and they’re both they all and they all have their own clients and they’re basically editing travel videos and probably commercial video. They don’t talk about exactly who their clients were, but they were working full-time putting in like 70 hours a week while they were traveling making videos for other people and making their own videos from time to time. And then they saved up all of their money and that brought them up until this trip where they quit. You know, it’s the classic. The video is your classic. We quit our job and we’re going traveling. You know, we sold our possessions. We quit our job. But in this case, they didn’t really have to sell their possessions because they were already traveling, but they basically cancelled their contracts with all their clients. And now they wanted to put all their skill as video editors into their own videos, keep traveling for 20 months, and then make enough money to live and to live well. And it looks like they’re well on their way. Like right out of the gate, boom, all their videos are like, you know, 100,000 views, like 70,000 views, 60,000 views. And I think they they said in their most recent video they were amazed how popular their videos were like right out of the gate. And that could be because they were in Singapore and Malaysia and in this area people are very interested in YouTubers. So they got they got the Malaysia bump right right out of the gate. But yeah, most organized people I’ve ever met. They really are. And I really appreciate that because it allows me to peek behind the curtain. So for example, what I struggle with is life video editing balance. Like I already talked about one day of living. I need at least one day of work like dawn till midnight. A full day of editing the video from the previous day. So your entire life is cut in half. If I’m in Malaysia for 30 days, technically I’m really only in Malaysia for two weeks. All the other time I’m shooting, I’m editing the video from those two weeks. It’s like one day living, one day editing, one day living, two days editing, one day living, two days editing. That’s just how it works. And you start to feel like you must be doing something wrong. That you’re not working hard enough. You’re not working fast enough. You’re not efficient enough because no other YouTuber seems to have this problem. What it is, what is it that I’m doing wrong? But then I noticed Sarah and Ryan being so upfront, being so open about everything, they give all the information. He mentioned in the video that they spent 11 days in Johor Bahru in a windowless hotel room doing nothing but editing video. And I was like, “Ah, that makes sense.” I was so glad they included that little detail because they were in Europe and then they flew to Singapore. So that’s one video, right? They flew from Europe to Singapore, shot video the whole day, then they spent like one or two days in Singapore exploring, shooting video. But then as soon as they finish that, they crossed the border into Malaysia into Johor right away. Why? Because it’s so much cheaper in Malaysia than Singapore. So they had a backlog like right out of the gate. They needed to edit the flight video. They needed to edit two Singapore videos. So they crossed the border. That’s another video. And then they landed in Johor Bahru. They found a low-budget hotel. And then they spent 11 days in Johor Bahru editing those four videos, the flight video, the Singapore videos. They hunkered down, edited all those, uploaded those videos, and then they could start their bus ride up the west coast of Malaysia. So that little bit of behind the scenes information telling me that they spent 11 days in Johor Bahru in a cheap hotel, no window, the cheapest place they could find and just edited videos for 11 days straight. And then they of course they they had to shoot a video about Johor Bahru. They didn’t seem to like that city very much, but they didn’t do anything there. They didn’t sink their teeth into the history at all. I mean, I could spend months in Johor Bahru, you know, doing that, but that’s not what they do. But anyway, they did go out and they went to a couple of places, but now that they went exploring in Johor Bahru, well, now that’s another day of editing to finish that video and it kind of snowballs, right? But I really enjoy, like I said, all that information and just seeing that they struggle with the same thing that that I struggle with. Yeah. Very very interesting for me to watch these videos. Interestingly, they did get in trouble a number of times. So when they went from Singapore to Johor Bahru, you know, they’re always looking for the the title, the video title that’s going to get people to click, make it interesting, some sort of a adjective that makes the video exciting. And they called the video leaving Singapore for Malaysia’s forgotten border city. And there were a lot of comments from Malaysians taking exception Singaporeans too. Like what do you mean forgotten city? It’s not forgotten. It’s like one of the busiest city. I mean the border crossing Singapore to Johor is like the busiest border crossing in the world. You know metropolitan Johor Bahru the whole metro area is the second largest urban center in all of Malaysia. Second only to KL and the Klang Valley. Maybe you forgot about Johor Bahru. We certainly, you know, but of course what they meant, Sarah and Ryan, is that tourists never go here because that’s their whole theme. We go where places where other foreigners don’t go. So they’re saying that outside of Malaysia, nobody has heard of Johor Bahru. Backpackers don’t go to Johor Bahru. YouTubers don’t go there. So that’s why the city is forgotten. But somehow putting it in the video title, forgotten, it doesn’t quite sound right. So a lot of Malaysians and Singaporeans are like, “Hey, come on. Forgotten. That’s not right. That’s wrong.” So they got they got a lot of push back for that. And I noticed they did get some criticism, too, for saying thank you too many times. And that’s a classic western thing as a backpacker. You go to a new country, you don’t speak the language and you do learn how to say thank you. So everybody that goes to Malaysia, Indonesia, they learn how to say, you know, to say thank you in the local language and then we are so unsure of ourselves as we travel around. We can’t help it. We thank everybody like like a hundred times a day. We’re say, “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank every comes to your table. Oh, thank you. Thank you. You know, it starts to get over the top after a while. Like every time Sarah and Ryan would get off a bus, they turn around to the bus driver. Thank you, Terima kasih. Terima kasih. They walk out of the restaurant. So, after a while, you watch these videos and you start thinking, come on, can we lighten up on the over and over and over again, it starts to feel a bit weird after a while. It’s like you don’t have to thank everybody every five minutes. And then they somebody left comments on their video saying, “Listen, we appreciate you learned how to say thank you in the local language, but can you learn a few other words? That would be nice.” Right. So, I kind of I kind of enjoyed it that they got they came in for some criticism and and I think it’s Ryan. He’s willing to get into the comments and and push back a little bit and explain themselves. So, he’s willing to get into the get in there and and fight with the people leaving negative comments. That was that was kind of funny. Yeah, the I guess yeah, it it made sense that maybe Johor Bahru didn’t jive with them. And again, I wonder if this is a mistake where it made sense when they planned their YouTube channel that they’re not going to focus on the normal things because it’s all been done before. So, we are going to focus on the things that are unusual that other people miss. But it feels almost like there’s a a scale here where if you go too you want to go in one direction, but you don’t want to go too far. So, it’s sort of like the far end is, you know, going to Melaka and you go to Jonker Walk St. Paul’s Hill and you take the river boat. Like you do the three things that everybody does. You ride a trishaw and your video is exactly the same as everybody else’s video. You go to all the same tourist attractions that every tourist goes to. That’s boring. So that’s the extreme in that direction. And their idea was okay, we’re not going to do that. We are going to go to the things that nobody goes to. We’re going to show people the side of Melaka, the side of Johor Bahru that nobody knows about. But I feel like there’s a risk that if you go too far in that direction, you’re also going too far. You don’t want either extreme. So in Johor Bahru, their their video title is quite odd actually. It’s called We Tested Johor Bahru, but something felt off. And here’s the intro. Like I said, very professional. 42 seconds long. This is the whole intro. In our last video, we used the public bus system to venture across the land border between Singapore and Malaysia. And then we headed out to explore the undiscovered border city of Johor Bahru. With a couple of days before we leave. We wanted to figure out if Johor has a funky side. So what they did was do an internet search for all of the weirdest things, the craziest things in Johor Bahru. So their whole video is about them going to the weirdest things they could find in the city and that that is their whole focus. So, for example, there was some sort of a place like an escape room where they put electrical like electrodes on your body, hook you up to a machine, and then they got a big dial on the machine where they jack up the electric current which causes pain like your muscles start spas like spasms and when they jack it all the way to the end, it simulates the pain of childbirth. So the idea is you strap yourself into this machine with these electrodes like you’re being tortured and then they jack up and see how much pain you can tolerate. So that was one of the weird things you could do in Johor Bahru. So that’s one of the things they put in their video and they went to a whole bunch of other places that were kind of weird and odd and funky. So that was their whole video about Johor Bahru. And then if you do that, okay, nobody else has made a video like that. But for my money, you’ve missed the whole point of the city. I mean, Johor Bahru is a fascinating city which has a thousand stories to tell. Historical stories, modern. I mean, there’s so much happening in that city. Okay, those are maybe the obvious stories. Let’s focus on the weird stuff. But by focusing on only the weird, you kind of missed the city completely. So I think there’s a risk in that. And I saw that when they went to Melaka as well. They clearly went to Melaka and they planned ahead and looked for all the things we can do in Melaka that other people don’t do. So they deliberately avoided all the history. For example, the the ruins. They they would never go to a museum like I do or see the ruins of the fortress or the church ruins, you know, the riverboat ride, the history of all the different neighbors, all that stuff that I focused on. They made a choice to just ignore all of that and instead they signed up for a whole bunch of cooking classes where you do hands-on preparing a local delicacy of this or that. So, they tried really, really hard to do unusual things that don’t usually get featured in YouTube videos. And of course, from my point of view, I was just gritting my teeth the whole time because ah, you know, I’m so deeply, you know, immersed in the history of Melaka. I found that so fascinating. And from my perspective, their video missed the point of Melaka completely. Yeah, I get the idea. You don’t want to do what everybody does, but if you go too far in that direction, you miss the city entirely. And there was one point made me smile in the video where they almost like reluctantly went to Dutch Square. You know, Dutch Square is the heart of the colonial buildings of Melaka. And you know, every visitor, every tourist goes there to ride the trishaws, to take pictures of the building, to take all of their selfie photos. You know, it’s the the beating heart of Melaka tourism. And because of that, they did not want to go there at all. But they did end up there at some point. And when they were on their way to Dutch Square, Ryan even apologized for even going there at all. And he says, “So, we couldn’t do Melaka without visiting the Dutch Square quickly, could we?” So, he’s like saying, “Yeah, I know we’re supposed to be doing non-touristy things, but come on. We have to at least look at Dutch Square, right? So, here we are.” And then he turns to Sarah and he says to her, “I don’t suppose you happen to know why this is called the Dutch Square.” And then Sarah looked around and she said, “Because I believe the church is made from the Dutch.” She was pointing to Christ Church there. And then she says, “But then also, if I’m not wrong, the house next to it is British. So I think it’s like a meeting of culture slash architecture slash colonization.” And then Sarah says, “Fun fact, there were Dutch, there were Portuguese, there were Brits, and there were even Chinese here. This is the reason Melaka is one of the most cultural hubs in the whole country, which is also one of the biggest, it was one of the biggest trading centers of the country.” And then Ryan says, “Yeah, apparently back in the day, Melaka used to be the hub for spice trade.” So that little back and forth, that was their entire commentary on all of the history of Melaka and everything is wrong. I mean, it just misses the point completely. And you know, so I’m like gritting my teeth the entire time like, you know, you’re Oh, you’re missing so much. And you can see some very basic misunderstandings where now so many people do this when they talk about Melaka they talk about the country right they think of it as Malaysia so even when they’re you know thinking about Melaka you know she says this is the reason Melaka is one of the most cultural hubs in the whole country but of course when Melaka was Melaka. There was no country. You know what I mean? People fall into that trap all the time. Malaysia, like official Malaysia, the country we know today, it didn’t really come into existence until like 1963 or 65. I mean, the Malay Federation achieved independence in 57, but Malaysia, the name Malaysia didn’t even come into use until 1963. And the country we know of as Malaysia today didn’t really form until 1965. And yet, you know, they they talk about Melaka as the country. They say the Dutch colonized Malaysia and things like that and they don’t, you know, they miss the point entirely about what Melaka is and what it was historically. So I think if you try really hard not to do the touristy thing, you swing too far in the other direction and you miss the point of the city entirely of the history of of Melaka. Yeah. And then their their most recent video, the one that I w I just watched it today. They just posted it. They went out to Pulau Besar and that makes a lot of sense because it really is kind of unknown. Most people who go to Melaka have never heard of this island. I spent months in Melaka and when I finally the very first time I tried to leave from Melaka, I got on my bicycle and I tried to cycle away. I didn’t make it but I tried. I made it as far as Pulau Besar and I’d never heard of the place before. It was like it came as a surprise to me and I was actually doing a lot of reading, a lot of research and even I had never heard of the place. I just happened to be riding my bicycle by and I was looking at Google Maps and it’s like, “Oh, look, there’s a ferry dock. Wonder what that is.” And I went there and said, “Oh, they have a boat that goes out to an offshore island.” I’d never heard of the place. So, it does make sense that they would choose to go there to fit into their theme of yeah, going places where no other foreigners go. It is quite unusual, but I had a lot of fun watching their video and contrasting their experience with mine. Oddly enough, in this case, they did a much deeper dive into the island than I did because they knew about it in advance. You know, they they saw it, they learned about it, and they decided to go there and spent a whole day there and then returned to Melaka. So, they went there as a day trip. So, in fact, they knew a lot more about the history and the culture. And there’s that giant abandoned resort on the island. I knew about it, but when I went out there, I took the I took I left my bike on shore. I locked it up and I hopped on the boat, went out to the island for the afternoon and then I took the last boat, public boat back to shore and then it was so late in the day and I was only like 12 km from Melaka. You know, I barely covered any distance at all. So I just rode back into Melaka, checked back into my hotel and I stayed for another few months. But anyway, they went there as a day trip from Melaka and I was I only I didn’t have enough time to go to see this abandoned resort. It’s like a huge five-star resort that was built and then never opened. Not even one day. They built it, they finished it, and then because of conflict with local people and a whole bunch of reasons, it never opened its doors. But it’s still there like an abandoned complex. And they went to look at it, snuck by the gate. You know, you’re not supposed to go in there, but they snuck around the gate, bit of an adventure, and then shot video in there. And his intro to this video is very highly detailed, talking about what makes Pulau Besar special, the traditions, the spirituality of this island, the the tombs on the island. So, they knew a lot more about it than I did. But again, we approached a funny thing is they tried to take the local boat like there’s a public boat that is relatively inexpensive and their goal was to go there. So in the video again they show the logistics which I absolutely love because most vloggers don’t. But he talks about how, well, yeah, our alarm went off at 6:00 in the morning because we were going to get out there and they found the schedule online for the boats going out to the island. So, we want to get out there, get on the 8:00 a.m. boat, get out there, da da da da da. And then they woke up at 6:00 in the morning, but it was pouring rain, so they thought, “Ah, maybe we should wait for a bit.” So, they went out, had a nice breakfast instead. They went to a really nice cafe, coffee, breakfast place on, you know, in in the tourist near Jonker Walk where their hotel was. And then the weather cleared up and they hired a Grab. So they a Grab came to their hotel a lot easier than my bicycle ride to get out there. And then I talked about how I had to fight through the gate cuz I couldn’t get past the gate at Pulau Besar. I couldn’t figure out how to pay. And they had to cut a man had to come out and and help me to get through and you know all that kind of stuff. But they just hired a Grab to take them right to the dock. So the driver he knew how to get through the gate and drop them off. But turns out the online schedule was not correct. So now they got there and the real schedule was on display and they’d missed the morning boat. The next boat wasn’t until like 2:30 in the afternoon. So now they had a choice between waiting until 2:30, cancelling the trip or hiring a private boat. Like you can you can charter a boat for 12 people for 150 ringgit, but they were only two of them. And in the end, you know, they they they’re shooting a video. They they’d already scheduled it. They have their production schedule. They don’t really have a choice. So they they paid 150 ringgit and and hired a complete boat for 12 people, but it was only the two of them. Took them out to the island and they did their whole day on the island and then shot the five-star abandoned resort and then came back again and then again had to take a Grab back from the dock, you know, all the way back to Melaka. So that was their next video that that they just posted. Yeah, it’s kind of funny. Their original title for this video, this is the title, exploring an abandoned five-star resort on Asia’s most mysterious island. And you can almost feel the technique in that title, like most mysterious island, abandoned five-star resort. But I do wonder if Asians in general, they don’t relate to abandoned buildings the way we do. I’ve noticed that YouTube vloggers, me, myself included, we love abandoned everything in Melaka. I I visited an abandoned boat. I thought it was like one of the most amazing things I’d ever, you know, I I thought you post a video about, “Wow, I explored this abandoned shipwreck and I thought millions of people are going to watch that video.” But the Malaysian reaction to something like that is generally, why would you go there? Like, if they’re going to get on a boat, they want to get on a new boat for a nice tour. Like, why? What’s this Western fascination with abandoned boats that are falling apart? Probably dangerous and risky to climb on. We love that. I mean, every city I go to, every abandoned building, I want to go in. I want to explore. I want to climb to the top. And we think that’s the most amazing thing ever. But I think Asians in general, they find abandoned buildings dangerous, unpleasant, and probably spooky. Like ghosts and things are there. They they avoid anything that’s abandoned. So you often see YouTubers making videos about, oh, we explored this abandoned hotel in the middle of the jungle. And then the local people in Indonesia later, that other guy I talked about, Later Rider, he made a video about going to this abandoned and exactly like this one, a luxury resort built in the mountains that never opened its doors. And he was fascinated with it. But again, I think Indonesians are like, “Why did you go there? Why don’t you go to the five-star resort that’s open? Show us your room and your jacuzzi and the swimming pool and the amazing food. Why are you clamoring around a dangerous haunted abandoned resort that nothing but ghosts and bad luck and danger, right? So anyway, I’m wondering whether this video did not get the big reception they were hoping for. Let me go to their channel right now. I’m curious how many views it got because right out of the gate, it looked like it was not getting much in the way of views. It didn’t seem to be very popular. And then I noticed later in the day they changed the title. Okay. Yeah, it’s not a very popular video, which is interesting. I mean, compared to my they’re more popular than my videos, don’t get me wrong, but I mean their their video crossing from Singapore to Johor 72,000 views. They went to this small island on Singapore and 230,000 views. The video that they shot about Parit Jawa and going up the coast 50 thou no 70,000 views. And then this video about the abandoned, you know, the unknown island in the abandoned resort. So far, 12,000 views, which is very low for them. So, I think they saw that went, “Ooh, this video isn’t being successful.” And they started playing around and they took out the the title. It said five-star hotel, abandoned five-star hotel. They took that out of the title. Now, it’s called tourists completely abandoned Asia’s most mysterious island. So, it’s got nothing to it doesn’t mention Malaysia, doesn’t mention five-star resort, like an abandoned building. It’s kind of a weird title in English though. It’s confusing. But then they have on the thumbnail, they changed the thumbnail because the original thumbnail showed Sarah, I think, looking at this abandoned resort. Like it was like a drone shot of this abandoned five-star resort. And then I think if I remember right, it was like a big close-up of her face and she was looking worried. You oo what a scary place. And because that thumbnail didn’t work, now it’s a picture of her on the beach because they found one beach on this island that looks like a beautiful beach. And now she’s got a big smile on her face. Beautiful beach thumbnail and it says untouched tropical paradise. So, I can see Ryan in the background like he’s like the mad scientist of YouTube trying to dial in the exact right video title, thumbnail, and like text on the thumbnail. And I think he realized abandoned five-star resort. Malaysians don’t care about that. They don’t even like that. But untouched tropical paradise, a pretty girl posing on a beautiful white sandy beach. Okay, that’s, you know, thumbnail gold. So, they’re trying a new thumbnail and a new title. But I think obviously I’m no expert in this because I don’t know how to make good thumbnails, good video titles. I just record my whole day and then I write a title that just lists everything I did that day. I’m the worst at that kind of thing. But even me, this title doesn’t seem right. Tourists completely abandoned Asia’s most mysterious island. They just sort of like what the gota I don’t know. It doesn’t hook me. For me, the most interesting thing about their story is they tried to take the local boat, which is quite cheap, but they ended up having to pay for a private boat for 150 ringgit. I like I love that part of the story. So I think that would that would be a better title a better title something like you know we had no choice we paid 150 ringgit for a private boat and was like oh really what happened you know I to me that’s the most interesting part of their story and but what do what do I know I’m no I’m no YouTube expert give me a minute here to think about Sarah and Ryan and see if there’s anything else I want to mention about them. Uh, this has been one of the more interesting deep dives into a YouTube channel that I’ve done in a while and I have a lot of notes to read through. Just a few details, little notes that I forgot to mention. They have a really nice website as well. I think the overall brand is called Across Every Border. So, the YouTube channel is now labeled Sarah and Ryan, but I think sort of behind the scenes, their sort of brand is called Across Every Border, and they’ve got a nice website there. Yeah, they did a pretty good job with that. And while they were preparing for the the final packing, apparently they were planning this trip like for years, but the last seven days was like a whirlwind of getting ready. And I noticed during their, you know, packing and preparing video that Ryan has a Osprey Farpoint 70 L backpack. Yeah, it’s like a $300 backpack. Very expensive piece of gear. And then Sarah needed a backpack and they just went to Decathlon and then she just sort of picked one out almost at random. And she has her much much less expensive Decathlon gear. Terms of a camera gear, I think Ryan had to make a very difficult sacrifice. Like he loved his big camera and the video quality, but for this trip trying to, you know, keep their gear light enough that they can carry around. He had to agonize over whether to take the big camera or not. And eventually he decided to leave behind all his his big camera and lenses and replaced it basically with a DJI Pocket 3. And I think that’s by far the the best choice. I noticed the Lav and Ali, they also have this DJI Pocket 3, the new one that came out. I don’t know if they have the 3, but yeah, the video quality from that thing is amazing. It seems to basically replace a full It can never replace a full-size camera. But in terms of the the size, the bulk and the weight, yeah, it’s a no-brainer. You can either carry around a giant camera and lenses and batteries and chargers and filters and on and on. Or you can have this tiny DJI Pocket 3. It’s an absolute no-brainer. So, they have a lot of camera gear. He has a GoPro Hero 12, the same one I have, an Insta360 X5, a DJI Action 4, a DJI Pocket 3, and then the DJI Mini Pro 5 drone. So, that’s the basic camera gear that they have. And then all kinds of tripods and grips and mounts. I noticed that he had something similar like to my favorite grip. I’m always amazed that more people don’t use this because I find it so incredibly versatile. I couldn’t live without it and nobody else seems to use it. But he did. It doesn’t have the go. This is the GoPro Jaws. He had some sort of a like a competitor company but basically the same the same piece of gear but a different a different brand. The next video we quit our jobs to backpack Asia for 20 months. But as I mentioned, they didn’t really have jobs to quit. They were actually freelance video editors, which kind of explains why their videos are so polished and so well edited because that’s what he does professionally. He honed he honed his editing skills and developed his ideas of how to put together a video from doing it as a professional. I’d be very curious to know how that works, though. People have said to me like, “Why don’t you hire someone else to edit your videos to shoot the video? Let somebody else do the editing.” But I don’t even know how you do that. Like, if at the end of the day I have a 100 gigabytes of video and I’ve hired someone in Vietnam to edit the video for me, it’s impossible. How in the world can I transfer a 100 gigabytes of raw video from like four different cameras including separate audio tracks that go with different I mean it’s way too much data. How am I going to send it to them? And it’s way too complicated because I have got video coming from so many different cameras, so many different sources, audio from different it’s so complex. There’s no way I can just hand it over to somebody else and say, “Here, do something with all this, right? I I don’t So, I don’t know how you work. I mean, I don’t I’m not skilled as a video editor and I’m not that interested in it. I just like raw video. Just put it in order. There’s your video. I don’t do fancy B-roll and transitions and L cuts and J cuts and that kind of thing. Establishing shots. Maybe I should do all of that, but I don’t.” And but I don’t know how they do it. Like how did they work as freelance video editors? How do these other people send them the raw video to work with? I don’t I don’t know how that works. Yeah. And they he lays it all out in their video like channel description. After years of traveling as digital nomads while working full-time for freelance clients, we’ve traded reliable monthly incomes for two 60 L backpacks and a slightly terrifying attempt to become full-time YouTubers. And they were living in Bali for a long time. That’s actually where they met. Ryan moved to Bali while he was a freelance video editor. And he based himself in Bali doing this work which makes a lot of sense and that’s where he met Sarah and then they started traveling around all of central Europe posting their own travel videos while working as video editors and yeah then they started on this particular project. Yeah, it looks like there was a real drop in views when they hit Melaka, which is interesting when they were traveling by bus up the coast. The video is called Unexpected Rural Malaysian Adventure using only local buses. Oddly enough though, even that isn’t true. It’s a little bit of a clickbait because they got themselves in trouble as I said over and over because they would take the bus to somewhere, get off the bus midway to visit a local place, but then they were stuck there and the only way they were able to travel up the coast was because of Grab over and over again. They had to get a Grab to take them to the next place. So, it’s it’s kind of kind of an odd irony there that they tried really hard to do the local thing, you know, travel by only local buses and yet it was impossible for them to do it because of their schedule. Like, if you’re going to travel, like really travel by local buses, that means you have to wait. That’s what local people have done throughout history. Like I remember back in the days of backpacking back in the you know 80s and 90s and and decades like that as you traveled around on local buses people would just set up camp at the side of the road like way out in the villages the farming districts of Sumatra and Java. I remember that clearly where I’m on this rickety old bus that takes you 18 hours to get to the next town and it’s filled with goats and chickens and all that kind of stuff and then you pick people up at the side of the road and they’ve been waiting there all night and the full next day like they don’t know when the next bus is going to come by and they basically sit at the side of the road and they can wait 24 hours just sitting there at the side of the road waiting for the next local bus. That’s local bus back in the day. And even today, I mean, if I wanted to go to Melaka by local bus from here, tomorrow, it would probably take me the entire day to do it because I got to figure out how to get the bus. And there like there’s no bus station here anyway. In fact, the only way they were able to complete their journey was over and over and over again, they summoned a Grab. And sometimes they couldn’t even summon a Grab because a Grab wouldn’t even go to where they were. And they had to get a local person to help them get a Grab from like a nearby city, come here, pick them up, get them to here, and get the next Grab to get them here. So this whole idea of using only local buses. Yeah. They they didn’t even do that. It was Yeah. The only way they could complete the journey was because of Grab. Yeah. But anyway, that video 70,000 views, but now their Melaka video, they only shot one video in Melaka, 21,000 views. So, a third less than a third of their previous one, which is kind of interesting. But yeah, yeah, the Melaka video doesn’t appeal to me because of my interest in the history. The the title of their Melaka video is also odd for me. We spent 24 hours in Malaysia’s oldest colonial city. It just mixes up too many things to me because back when the Portuguese arrived, you know, back in 1511, Malaysia didn’t exist yet. Malaysia wouldn’t exist for another 500 years, right? So talking about Malaysia’s oldest colonial city kind of tells me that you just don’t get it at all. Yeah, just doesn’t really work. And on the thumbnail they put the text Malaysia’s strangest city. And that I don’t get at all what is so strange about Melaka. I would call it Malaysia’s most amazing city. Incredible city. Fascinating city, but why is it the strangest city? I I even from watching their video, they did a whole bunch of things like they went to the mommy monster place where you can I guess it’s part of a you can sign up for a class where you take a mommy monster instant cup noodle thing and you paint it and you decorate it and then they fill it with mommy noodles. All the classic mommy noodle stuff and then you take it home and then pour hot water into it and make mommy noodles. So, it’s like a a course you can sign up for fun to make your own mommy noodles or something. So, that’s the sort of thing they did and they signed up for another cooking class or they made a local delicacy. And so why did that experience lead them to see Melaka as Malaysia’s strangest city? Yeah, I I don’t see the connection there at all.

I’ve also been following the Moto Vloggers, the moto vlogging YouTubers, Two Up and Overloaded. It’s an American couple. They’ve been riding a motorcycle like around the world for I think in their intro they say 9 years or something like that. But they were in Malaysia about 2 to 3 years ago and they did a motorcycle trip around Malaysia, but they’re actually posting the videos from that trip now. And the last video that I watched they were in Melaka. So, of course, my ears perked up. I was really interested to to get their take on Melaka. And of course, I was hoping they were going to spend, you know, two or three days, spend a week in Melaka, really sink their teeth into that city, get to know it. And I thought it would be a lot of fun to relive Melaka. But through their eyes, unfortunately, they spent one brief morning in Melaka and that’s it. They’d actually ridden their motorbike all around Malaysia. Then they popped over the border into Singapore. They didn’t take their motorcycle though. They went to Johor Bahru and then they did one day in Singapore. Basically a visa run. They hopped across by bus, toured Singapore for a day, made a video about that and then came over back over the border by bus at like 1:00 in the morning. And then they got on their motorcycle out of Johor Bahru and they drove to Melaka. They let they arrived in Melaka like late in the day the next day and they stayed at the Mill Road Hotel which I pointed out it was actually very near the the youth hostel where the Discovery Hostel where I was staying. Right on the corner there was like a a nicer hotel called the Mill Road Hotel. Yeah, I think that was the name of it. So they arrived, they checked in at Mill Road, but then I don’t think they did anything in Melaka that night. So the video ended with them arriving in Melaka. That’s it. And then this video is about the morning. They woke up very early. It’s pretty clear from the light and how empty the streets are that everything is closed around them. They woke up as early as possible because their plan for that day, which I didn’t realize at the time when I was watching the video, was to hit a couple of sites and then hit the road. So they had like just I don’t know 3 hours in the morning to do things in Melaka and then their plan was to check out of their hotel by noon, get on the road and drive all the way to KL which would I guess would be the end of their Malaysian journey. So my my hopes and dreams to relive Melaka were dashed. And so they they basically woke up, walked down some empty streets, and I think the first place they went to was the Samudera Museum, which is the Flor de la Mar, you know, the Portuguese ship that has been turned into a museum. They went there. Then they went to the the tower, the observation tower, Menara Taming Sari. The name of that tower. It’s like a revolving platform. You buy a ticket. It’s like a seven minute trip where this platform revolves that goes up to the top of the tower. You can see the city from the air and then it revolves and then comes back down again. And then they went to Jonker Street and they had a snack and that was that was it for Melaka. You know, they were done with Melaka. There was some B-roll. They shot some B-roll of a monitor lizard, a big one, in the Melaka River and some B-roll of some of the buildings, you know, in Dutch Square, things like that. But that was the entirety of their time in Melaka. And I’ve seen a lot of like surface level travel videos about Melaka that aren’t very satisfying to me, but this one I think is probably the most surface level. A funny thing I keep thinking about is like when I was in Melaka, I I got hooked on this idea of really coming to terms with that city and its history, everything about it. So, I spent a lot of time there. It’s a great place to hang out and I found it really fascinating. And there was a local man, an expat, a French historian. I forget his full I keep trying to come up with his full name. I know is Serge I don’t know why I can never remember his last name, but he took an interest in my videos. So whenever I posted a new video about something to do with the history of Melaka, he was pretty active in the comments and he has a deep knowledge of the history of Melaka and he has actually had a long-running campaign where he has been correcting the local tourism authorities like all the museums, all of the signs, all the maps, all the brochures. It’s his it’s kind of a hobby he has where he’s correcting everyone and everything about every mistake that they make. Some quite large. So anyway, he ended up putting his sights on me and my videos and then after I would post a video, he would post like a 10-point essay, bulleted point list of everything that I just checking to make sure my microphone is working. Everything that I got wrong from his point of view. And when I got his very first list, I I was kind of shocked because I worked so hard to get everything right. I mean, I I spent a lot of time and I really dove into it and here was this expert and he was telling me all of this was wrong. But then I I kind of went over all of his points and from my perspective I don’t think I was wrong. I I would I would debate with him about everything. I mean there were some little things where for example if you visit the the mosque the Masjid Kampung Kling it gives you a date for when the mosque was built when it was founded. And that date is everywhere. It’s all over the internet. It’s you go to the mosque they have a sign on the outside. This is the year it was founded. You go inside, there’s a big historical plaque. This is the year. You go to Wikipedia, this is the year. So I said that year in my video and then Serge says, “No, you are wrong. That is not.” And then he pointed out a map. There was like a a Portuguese I think a Portuguese cartographer from hundreds of years ago who drew a map that predated by like 50 years that official founding date and on his map he has a mosque marked at that spot. So he uses that as proof that no that wrong that that date you said the mosque was founded that is incorrect according to this map from 3 400 years ago this is the the founding date or 200 years ago whatever it was I don’t have the dates in my mind right now so his authority for saying I was wrong was this map and he could very well be correct it could be that everyone is wrong and the guy who drew this map is correct. Could be, but I like I don’t know. I never heard of the guy. I never came across this map. And as I said, I did a lot of reading, a lot of research. And everybody on the internet says this year is the year it was founded. So that’s the year I went with. And then he’s telling me no, you are wrong. So anyway, there was like little he would say, “Okay, your your year is wrong. This is the correct year.” Things like that. But other things are more general. And again, I I don’t think I was wrong in in the vast majority of things that I said. And then some of the things that he objected to, again, I don’t have a problem with my latest video again about this mosque. I mentioned in my video that this street is known in the tourism industry as Harmony Street because it has you know Hindu temples, Chinese temples and mosques close together on the same street and it is not part of history like they were not put there for anything to do with religious harmony. In fact, it’s the exact opposite is the reality. However, if you look at all of the tourism maps, tourism guides, you talk to a if you hire a guide to take you around Melaka, he’s going to say, “Okay, at 10:00 we’re going to go to Harmony Street.” So, like everybody in the tourism industry, you calls that street Harmony Street. And then he really had a problem with me saying it. I even pointed out in my video, “This isn’t the real name. It is not called Harmony Street, but that is what everybody calls it in the tourism industry. People talk about visiting Harmony Street.” So, I even made that point very specifically, but in his comment, he came at me and he said, “I do not understand why you indiscriminately keep repeating Harmony Street when that is not the name of the street.” So, you know, he came at me with both guns blazing, you know, both barrels loaded. And then I was thinking, “Oh, come on. I mean, that’s being way too that’s taking it way too seriously.” If you can’t use the tourism name for Harmony Street, well, what can you say? Because Dutch Square is also a tourism name. It was never called Dutch Square by anybody until the tourism industry took off in Melaka. And then because there were many Dutch buildings there, they said, “Well, okay, come visit Dutch Square.” So everybody calls it, but according to his approach, you can’t say Dutch Square either because that was never the real name. And if you take that argument to its fullest extent, you could never call New York City the Big Apple because no, that’s not accurate. That is not the historical name. So if a YouTuber goes to New York and says, “Here I am in the Big Apple.” He would accuse them of being wrong. It’s not the Big Apple. That’s not the, you know, how far do you go with this? You cannot use names that are created by the local tourism board. You know, you can’t call Paris the city of love or the city of lights, you know, whatever the tourism slogan is. Anyway, I’m just basically saying that even though he came at me with long lists of everything he said that I got wrong, I I would still stand up for myself and say, “No, I’m still comfortable with what I said. I think that is okay.” And my videos are actually far more in-depth in terms of the history than any other, you know, YouTube travel videos that I’ve seen anywhere. Anyway, all of that brings me around to this idea. I keep thinking about what would Serge say about this video by Two Up and Overloaded because from that point of view, this is probably the worst Melaka video I’ve ever seen. I mean, the absolute worst in terms of accuracy in every single way. Like a surface level approach. And I keep wondering, I I want to I want to contact Serge, send him a link to this video and say, “Sir, go after these guys. I want to see what you’re going to say about this video because I think that would be a lot of fun.” So, like to start off, like I said, they spent one quick morning in Melaka and that’s it. And when they arrived the day before, checked into their hotel and then they woke up early and they already had they already knew they were going to ride to Kuala Lumpur and they had to check out at noon. So their idea was okay, let’s go out and we’ll just go to a couple of places and shoot a quick video and then we got to hit the road. That was their entire approach to Melaka. But even though they spent like zero time and zero effort on learning about Melaka and exploring the city, this is what Marissa the the vlogger, this is what she says about Malaysia. This is a quote from the video. So talking about Melaka, it’s a side of Malaysia that is stranger than fiction, more epic than fantasy, more bizarre than dreams. It’s simply beyond your wildest imaginations. And I’m thinking, what in the world are you basing this judgment on? Calling Melaka stranger than fiction, more epic than fantasy, more bizarre than dreams, beyond your wildest imaginings. How in the world do you come to that conclusion based on like 2 hours of just zipping around a couple of tourist attractions is a very strange way to view the city. Anyway, that that quote really jumped out at me, so I wanted to read it. As you can see, I’ve got a lot of notes here. I have to scroll through. Here we are. So, that was their their summary of of Melaka. And then she kept talking about the canals. And I know that bothered me and it would really bother Serge because she spotted the the Dutch windmill which is just like a tourist attraction, right? They built this kitschy little fake windmill to make as a nod to the Dutch heritage of the city. And I guess that made her think about canals. And then every time they were at the Melaka River, she kept calling it a canal. And that really bothered me because it ignores everything about the city. The reason the city exists, its founding, its growth as a trading empire in the Melaka Strait was entirely based on the river, the Melaka River. Everything was based on the fact that there was a river there. So calling it a canal shows me you just don’t get it at all. You know, you’ve got everything completely backwards in your head. It is not a canal. It’s not some inland water, you know, artificial waterway that somebody dug from here to here and that never existed until you dug the canal. No, it is a river. And the river is why the city existed, why the Melaka Sultanate was founded there. It was because of this the strategic nature of this river and how it could be used as a safe harbor for the ships. So calling it a canal just really jumped out at me and I think Serge would have a field day with that. And then they were talking about the city and she said again quoting built by the Dutch as old as in the 1600s. And that jumped out at me like built by the Dutch and so old like it’s as old as the 1600s. Well, I don’t even know where she came up with that because the city was not built by the Dutch. It was built by the local people themselves. Parameswara founded the city around 1400 and he built the city with his followers and the local people, the Orang Laut. But yeah, you date Melaka from the year 1400. And the 1400s was the rise of Melaka as a world trading center and the rise of the Melaka Sultanate. That’s when the city was built. And then of course the Portuguese came along in 1511 and they burned and burned it down and then rebuilt some stone Portuguese things. And then the Dutch came along. So this whole idea of she was waxing wonderful about how old the city was as old as the 1600s. I’m like, well, what happened to the 1300s, the 1400s, the 1500s? The city is much much older than the 1600s. So again, I think Serge would have a field day. She’s like totally ignoring the fact that the city was actually founded in 1400, not the 1600s. And then when they were in Dutch Square, she pointed to the Stadthuys. The Dutch government, the the governor’s residence and the Dutch administration buildings were in the Stadthuys, and it was built in 1650, but she called it the oldest building in Southeast Asia. She said that a couple of different times, I think, and that’s wrong on two levels. For one, it’s the wrong building. Like when people talk about the oldest building in Southeast Asia, they’re talking about St. Paul’s Church. Like it’s the the still standing stone structure on the top of Melaka Hill, the church there. And there’s a debate about what it’s called, whether it’s St. Paul’s Church. It has a different name. But anyway, it’s commonly called St. Paul’s Church built by the Portuguese on top of Melaka Hill. People refer to that as the oldest standing building in Southeast Asia. But even that’s wrong. So she mixed up the Stadthuys with the ruins of St. Paul’s Church. That’s the one that’s the oldest. But even saying that is wrong because it’s not the oldest building in Southeast Asia. You could argue it’s the oldest still standing European building in Southeast Asia, but of course there are structures all over Southeast Asia. You know, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, right, is the first one that comes to mind. Those are much much older buildings in Southeast Asia than anything, you know, built by the Portuguese or the Dutch or even the Melaka Sultanate. So, she was wrong on two levels. The oldest building in Southeast Asia. She got the she got two buildings mixed up and it needs the qualifier the oldest European structure that’s still standing today. So that was wrong. The pronunciation really got to me. I’ve noticed a lot of people have said that lately where Lav and Ali they also said Malacha. And I know you’re being, you know, it’s being pretty pedantic to say your pronunciation is wrong. I mean, you can’t expect foreigners from countries all around the world to say the names of local places with a perfect local accent, but somehow Malacha really jumps out at me. Where where does that come from? I was thinking maybe it’s a European thing because Lav and Ali kept saying, “We’re going to Malacha. It’s always called Melaka.” And I thought, “That’s weird. I’ve never heard that before. Isn’t it Melaka?” But then Two Up and Overloaded, Marissa, yeah, she calls it Malacha as well. And every time she says Malacha, I’m thinking, “Oh, have I been wrong all this time? Is that the real pronunciation? It’s not Melaka, but anyway, I don’t know where Malacha comes from.” Then they went to they went the first place they went to was Flor de la Mar which is this Portuguese ship but it was pretty clear and I don’t know if I can really blame them for this. They knew nothing about it. So they went there and talked about how Marissa had always dreamed about climbing around on one of these ships, but her reference point was Pirates of the Caribbean that oh this is you know the the Black Pearl and that so that that was their connection but they didn’t know anything about the history of the ship cuz it it has such important such significance for the history of Melaka. It was Afonso de Albuquerque’s flagship as far as I know. So the Flor de la Mar was a key ship in the Portuguese conquest of Melaka. So that alone makes it such an important ship. It’s not just a random ship made to look cool and look like the Pirates of the Caribbean. No, it’s a very important part of the history of Melaka. And of course, it is one of the most famous treasure ships of history where the Portuguese looted Melaka, filled that ship with all the treasures, and then on the way back to Europe, it sank in a storm, ran ground on a reef on the coast of Sumatra, and then sank, and the treasure was lost, and it’s never been found. So those are the two very important things about this ship and they missed that completely. They they didn’t know that history in any way. For them it was just a fun thing that looked like the Black Pearl from a Hollywood movie which I found kind of odd. And then there was all kinds of little things all the way through. There was a section where they were going to Jonker Street and I think they were on Heren Street as well and they were talking about the Peranakan culture. But while she was talking about this, you know, the culture of the Peranakan people, the video showed as B-roll a giant mural of Hang Tuah. So she says, you know, the pe the Peranakan people and their their unusual dress and culture. Meanwhile, the video is showing Hang Tuah and Hang Tuah is like this giant mural covering the side of a building and he’s reaching for the famous kris, the Taming Sari, you know, the magical powerful weapon, the legendary weapon. But Hang Tuah is a legendary figure, a fighter, an admiral of the classic Melaka Sultanate era, right? He’s got nothing to do with Peranakan culture at all. So, it just really jumped out at me, you know, okay, you know, we have this amazing culture here, the Peranakan, and look, here’s and then and they they thought they were showing somebody dressed in traditional Peranakan clothing, you know, but in fact, it was Hang Tuah. You know, he’s like the ultimate symbol of classical Malay martial heritage, you know, seat, royal loyalty to the Malay sultanate. You know, he’s a part of legendary 15th century court history. So, if you’re talking about the Peranakan, he is absolutely the wrong person to focus on for your video, which again, I would love it if Serge would come at them, you know, with both barrels of his shotguns like that’s what are you doing showing Hang Tuah as an example of Peranakan culture? I mean, you’re so wrong. You couldn’t possibly be even any more wrong than you were in that moment. So, I thought that was kind of interesting. And then maybe you can get a little bit pedantic as well, but they made the classic mistake where they showed on video the Middelburg Bastion and they called it the Portuguese fortress. They didn’t say A Famosa, I don’t think. So Serge is not going to come after them for calling it A Famosa. But even I kind of went, you know, because the Middelburg Bastion, for one thing, it isn’t even the remains of any fortress. It’s a modern recreation of the fortress because that part of the fortress had been completely blown up by the British. And then of course there’s that amazing story about how when they were building they were going to build the observation tower the Menara Taming Sari there and then they dug the foundations and their excavators hit the rock the laterite of the foundations of the fortress and they uncovered it and then they decided to preserve it and then they reconstructed the Middelburg Bastion. So, she was wrong on two levels. One is it wasn’t really a part of the fortress at all. It’s a recreation of the original fortress and it had nothing to do with the Portuguese. The Middelburg Bastion was built by the Dutch, not the Portuguese. It was not part of the original fortress built by the Portuguese when the Dutch took over and they they added the Middelburg Bastion. So the one thing that they pointed to as an example of the Portuguese fortress, it wasn’t part of any fortress and it had nothing to do with the Portuguese fortress. It was an addition, something built by the Dutch. So they got everything wrong when it came to that. And I mean, you can kind of forgive them for that because a casual tourist, they’ve heard that there was a big fortress there. They’ve been told it was built by the Portuguese in 1511, which is like a a terrible oversimplification of how the fortress was built, all the different stages of it and going, you know, so it’s wrong from that level. But I mean, you can kind of forgive them because every tourist is told there was a big fortress here built by the Portuguese and look here is some of the fortress. Wow, isn’t it cool? So you can kind of forgive them. But at the same time, if you’re going to give me that quote at the beginning about how Melaka is, you know, stranger than fiction, more epic than fantasy, more bizarre than dreams, that’s telling me you really know something about Melaka. If you can say that, man, you must have really gotten to know this city quite well. But if you’re looking at the Middelburg Bastion and you’re telling me it’s part of the original Portuguese fortress, that tells me no, you don’t really know anything. You you didn’t really sink your teeth into the history of Melaka if you’re going to make that kind of a basic error. Not not just that, but then showing Hang Tuah as an example of Peranakan culture, you know, it just Yeah. So, this video from Two Up and Overloaded, it’s called Don’t Be Fooled. This isn’t Europe, it’s Malaysia. And again even that bothers me because that whole idea that Melaka, its origin, its history, the buildings left there by the Dutch, the remnants of the fortress by the Portuguese, all of that predates Malaysia by centuries. It’s got nothing to do with the country of Malaysia technically. You know, it was a city. Melaka, the city and then its empire. Oh, just a second. Yep. Just a second. Hi. Hello. Oh, hello. Morning, sir. How are you? Fine. Hey.

Yeah. Okay. Just Oh, you have a question for me? No, no, no, no, no. Don’t have a head. You’re wondering why I talking? Ah, yeah. I’m recording a YouTube YouTube video. You come from Canada. Canada. Yeah. So, I make videos about Malaysia history. Oh, okay. Melaka history and Johor history. All right. Okay. Okay. No problem. Thank you.

That was kind of fun. Yeah, there was a knock on my door and I, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I assumed it was the owner of the hotel. I’ve paid for another night, so I’m going to stay here tonight. And I opened the door and it was the police, the the the local police were there. And yeah, my I the door was open, so he was like looking in and h like, “What’s what’s going on in there?” And I don’t know I don’t know why, but then I just assumed they could hear my voice. I’m talking pretty loudly. And then he I guess he was talking to the owner of the hotel and it’s like, “Oh, there’s a foreigner staying here.” And I got the for some reason the police were wondering what is a foreigner doing here. So and I explained yeah I’m I’m a YouTuber and I’m recording a video talking about the history of Malaysia, the history of Melaka Johor. Yeah, I’m I’m shooting a video. So I asked him like, “Oh, like you just heard my voice and you’re wondering like what’s going on?” And he said, “Yeah, oh, I’m just a YouTuber.” And he says, “Oh, okay.” And he patted me. He says, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Now I get it. Now I get it. No problem. No problem.” But yeah, that’s kind of an unusual thing. Yeah, I I’m being pretty hard on this video, but I guess I’m using it as kind of an example of how if you go to a place like Melaka, just as a a tourist, you go there to enjoy yourself and you see the buildings and this and that, you you’re not really going to understand the place. It really takes work, I discovered, at least for me. You know, it really takes a bit of work to understand Melaka and get the history straight in your head. And that really became apparent when they went to Jonker Street because Marissa and Tim they were talking about how oh Dutch Square now we are going we all you know Melaka is so amazing like right over here we’re in Holland we’re standing in the middle of Holland and then we just walk a few feet over the bridge and now we’re in China. So their whole mental approach to the city was thinking of it almost like Epcot Center or Disneyland. Here’s the Holland district and now right beside it is the China district, you know, Jonker Street. And that completely misses the point of Melaka because all of that was one organic city growing up, evolving, developing together, right? Like thinking of it as, oh, here’s the Dutch quarter, there’s the Chinese quarter, now we’re going from Holland to China. It it really misses the point. And viewing the city through that lens, which most foreigners do. All the moto vloggers I’ve talked about lately, Lav and Ali and Sarah and Ryan and now Two Up and Overloaded, they all did the same thing. They completely ignored the Melaka Sultanate. And that really is, you know, you’re you’re not understanding the city if you’re just skipping ahead to the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British. You’re forgetting about the Melaka Sultanate because they established the city for what it was. They came up with the rules. There’s the Undang-Undang Melaka, the maritime laws of Melaka. So they established the legal sort of the linguistic the trade frameworks that made Melaka what it was. It made Melaka wealthy and a prize and it was because the Melaka Sultanate created this lucrative prize. That’s why the Europeans came and you know the Portuguese attacked because it was such a valuable place created by the Melaka Sultanate and then they came and fought them and took the place over but all the value though what made it significant came way before the Portuguese and if you skip the Melaka Sultanate part of the history you you’re you’re just not understanding Melaka at all. So anyway, I just wanted to talk about that video from Two Up and Overloaded.

And I think their journey is over. I think after they drove their motorcycle from Melaka to KL, I think that’s the end of this particular set of videos. I don’t think there’s going to be any more coming from Malaysia. So I think that is the end of my thoughts about the travel vloggers currently in Malaysia or who were recently in Malaysia. You know the Later Rider and Lav and Ali both of them of course they left Malaysia long ago. They’re no longer in the country. And like Two Up and Overloaded as well you know they left Malaysia years ago but they’re finally posting their videos now. I love Sarah and Ryan because they’re in Malaysia right now. They’re they’re, you know, they’re just two weeks behind in terms of their videos, which is really really cool. I’m enjoying that a lot.

Just a couple of quick pop culture notes. I in my last BTS video, I talked about some TV shows and movies that I had been watching and some people gave me suggestions. Oh, you should check out this movie, this movie, this movie or this show. I made notes about all of those. I’ve downloaded some of them, so they’re in my queue to watch. Unfortunately, I never got to them yet. So, if you are one of these people that made a suggestion about like really good movies, interesting movies, like high-quality films, and high-quality shows that I should watch, I haven’t I apologize. I haven’t watched them yet, and I’m not going to be talking about them now. The ones I have watched, I’m sort of in the middle I was in the middle of them already. So, for example, I’ve been watching the second season of Dark Matter, and I’m not going to do a deep dive into it here. I just want to say in general that I’ve been disappointed by the second season and it kind of makes sense. The first season of Dark Matter, as far as I understand, it was based on a book. So, it was a complete story with a beginning and an end and it’s an very well-shot, very exciting story, great characters. You know, it’s the full package. Science fiction to deal with alternate realities, a multiverse, that kind of thing. Lots of food for thought, really dramatic, very suspenseful, very exciting show. So, season one was great. Season two, they seemed to have decided to go a bit artistic, like a whole bunch of bottle episodes. It opened really strongly. I remember the first episode, I was really excited because they drove right into the mechanics of of the story line, the the the actual consequences of having a multiverse and people from other realities coming into our reality. That sort of idea like what are the ramifications of this in the real world to me that is the strength of Dark Matter. The story. It’s an exciting story. The characters are great. The characters having amazing adventures. To me, that’s what worked about Dark Matter. But then when they got to season two, there was no longer a book to work from. And then for some reason the producers, directors, writers, whoever it was that came up with this idea, they shifted focus from the story to the psychological ramifications. Like if you realize that your world is one of an infinite number of worlds and there are infinite copies of you living slightly different lives in all these other worlds. You know, it’s the classic timeline thing where you make a decision in your life and because of that decision you made, you create a new timeline like tomorrow I decide to ride my bicycle to the next city down the coast or I decide to stay here another day. And depending on which one I choose, now there’s two different realities. There’s one reality where I stay here another day, another reality where I cycle down the coast, right? And every decision you make creates a new universe. And then if you create a technology that links all those universes, man, what happens? I think the story is what’s exciting to me. But in season two, they decided to focus on all the psychological trauma, exploring the backstory of all the characters, and they do all these bottle episodes where some character you’ve you don’t even haven’t even met before, and they spend the entire episode delving into one moment in their life. And I I’m I’m just kind of bored silly. I keep wanting them to get back to the story, the excitement of the story. And occasionally they do tell they go back to some of the characters what they’re doing. They’re traveling between realities having all kinds of adventures because they’re living not living but they’ve invented this box that in certain conditions turns into a long and infinite hallway of doorways. And they can open any doorway they want and that door leads to a new universe. But they have no idea what’s going on in that universe. So they can find themselves in the most horrific, the most dangerous places imaginable with horrors we can’t even contemplate right now. And as they travel from world to world, now there’s the risk of taking like a virus from one universe and introducing it into another one and wiping out entire worlds. You know, we’re talking about that level of danger and and drama, and I find all of that very exciting. And you have a this web this invention where you can travel between universes can be a scientific tool, but it can be the ultimate weapon as well. There’s so many fascinating ways of coming at it from a science fiction, hardcore science fiction point of view. But in season two, they’re doing more of a deep dive into psychology. Everybody is, in my mind, anyway, if I’m being unkind, I would say, they’re just sitting around moaning and groaning about their lives and the choices they made and the realities of their I don’t know. I’m like I I’m h I just want to get back to the story. I want to have fun. To me, the best thing about Dark Matter is it it is such a fun story with so much scope for imagination, but rather than following through on that, they’re kind of doing this deep rabbit hole into trauma and psychological burdens and h I don’t know. It’s good, but it’s not the show I was hoping for. The other major show I’ve been watching which is only interesting to me when you think about it from a writing point of view and the choices they made as writers like the structure of the story what works and what doesn’t and that is the show the Fall of the House of Usher and pull back from the show from a distance it is very well done the characters are incredible distinct powerful like characters that really resonate with you. The acting is great, the cinematography, everything about it is really well done, but they made certain choices in the story line that for me caused the whole thing to be somewhat flat. Like a really good show. Like when I was watching season one of Dark Matter, season 1 and season two of Silo, at the end of every episode, I’m so eager to watch the next one. I can stay up the whole night because I cannot go to sleep. I need to know what happens next. The Fall of the House of Usher, I can watch the episode and I can admire it for the skill of the production, but at the end of it, I don’t care what happens next. It’s just like, ah, I can keep watching the show or not. It’s something that I’m I admire, but it’s not something that I was emotionally engaged with. I didn’t really care. I knew where it was going. Like they the ending is in the beginning, and all you’re doing is watching it play out. The interesting thing about it, when I when I first heard about it, I heard it was good. And I thought it was all about the one story by Edgar Allan Poe, the Fall of the House of Usher. And that is the basic idea. But what they did was in telling that story, they included elements of as many Edgar Allan Poe stories as they could. They just jammed in elements from every famous Edgar Allan Poe story. And there’s a lot of scenes where the characters are quoting famous Edgar Allan Poe lines and it’s all very poetic and very dramatic and very literary. So that’s that’s a lot of fun. You know, you could play a spot the meme like spot the story. Spot the Edgar Allan Poe theme. Oh, that’s from that story. Oh, that’s from that one. Oh, I remember that one. I remember that one. And that’s kind of fun. But and now I’m going to go into spoiler territory. So in order to talk about this show, I have to basically spoil the show. So if you don’t want to know anything about it, stop listening. This is your spoiler warning. I’m going to talk about it in detail. So the basic idea in this story is that we start with a brother and sister and they make essentially a deal with the devil. So in this deal, you know, the devil says to them, the devil is actually called Verna. It’s this creature with, you know, supernatural powers. And Verna says to them, I will give you immense wealth and power for your entire lifetime. And you will never suffer any consequences. You can break any law you want to attain this wealth and power. And you will never be convicted of a crime and you will live a wealth of immense luxury. However, in exchange that when you die, your entire bloodline dies with you. Everybody in your family dies no matter who they are, how old they are. And that’s the bargain they made. And they kind of made the bargain because at the time it didn’t seem real. It was almost like they were sitting in a bar joking. This woman offered them and they’re like, “Are you for real? Okay, we’ll we’ll take that bargain.” And they talked themselves into it, saying that, “Okay, if we take this deal, we will be mega mega billionaires. So our children their lives will be shorter because they will die when we die. But during their lifetime they will live a perfect life because of all the money and the power. They will have no pain, no suffering. They will live a life of wealth and privilege. So is it better to live an ordinary life for 80 years or live a life of extreme luxury for 40 years?” And they decided to make that decision for their children. So, okay, we’ll take the deal. So, that is the setup to the story and then they become the uber wealthy owners of a pharmaceutical company that made all their money from opioids. And of course, that ties in with the modern American story of opioids leading to addiction and drug overdoses. So many thousands and thousands of people dying every day in the US because of opioid addiction. So they basically include that story as well. But the problem for me is twofold at least. One is this bargain. They don’t tell you about the bargain until the very end. Like you know that they made some sort of bargain with Verna, but you they don’t tell you what it is. You don’t hear it. You don’t see it. You don’t know what the details are. So, they don’t show you that scene until the middle of the finale. So, it’s like I don’t know. It just I can see why maybe it’s like a slow burn. They’re unraveling the mystery. But I think the show would have been much much stronger if at the beginning we see the make the bargain with the devil and now we get it. Plus when the way the show is structured, they jump ahead in time. So, the show opens and then it jumps ahead 40 years later and now we’re at the end when all of their children start dying. So, it’s like a trilogy, right? There’s the opening, the middle, and the conclusion. They showed us the opening, but without the bargain. Then, they skipped the middle and jumped all the way to the end. So, it’s like it’s like watching the Godfather trilogy, but there’s no Godfather 2. You miss the rise to power. You see them promised wealth and power and suddenly the next episode they have wealth and power and all the children start dying. It’s like, well, it feels unsatisfying because for two reasons. I want to see them grow. Like I we never see them living a life of luxury. We never see the wealth. We never see the power. We never see like in the Godfather the rise to becoming the Godfather and then the downfall. All we see is the beginning and the ending with none of the middle part. Plus the bargain when they lay it out at the end, it makes you understand the children better because the way the show goes, every episode is based on the death of one of the children and you’re supposed to feel like the death of this, it’s an adult now, you know, they’re they’re 40 years old, whatever, but you’re supposed to feel like this is some sort of a terrible thing that happened. But all of these children are the most repugnant people on the planet. They’re awful. They’re horrible. They’re evil. They’re nasty. They’re corrupt. They are the worst people you’ve ever imagined in your life. You want them to die. So when the devil when Verna pulls together this crazy elaborate torture sequence that kills them, you’re glad they’re dead. It’s like, “Oh, thank goodness. What a horrible person. They deserved to die.” So you don’t feel anything. Episode after episode after episode, one of their adult children dies in a horrific way, but you don’t feel anything cuz they’re awful, awful people. But if you knew about the bargain, if they laid it out at the beginning, then you would see the tragedy because the idea they they when they made the bargain with the devil, they said, “Oh, our children will live in luxury. They will be billionaires from birth. That will make them happy.” But it turns out that being rich from birth turned them into repugnant people. They didn’t live an ordinary life because they were wealthy their entire lives. They turned into horrible people. So they made this deal with the devil thinking they were going to give their children happiness by, you know, they don’t have to live an ordinary life. They can live a life of luxury. But by making that bargain, they condemned them to a tragic life where they become horrible people because they were rich their whole life. If you see what I mean? So it turns the children into tragedies, we know what happened to them and we feel some empathy for them. But because we don’t we’re not aware of the bargain, we don’t feel any empathy. So, I think it would have been so much better if they put the bargain, laid it out from the beginning and just said, “This is the bargain.” Now, if they showed like four or five episodes of them becoming wealthy and powerful and we see the money corrupting them, corrupting the children, and then we see the downfall when the devil comes back and says, “Okay, now it’s time to pay the price. Everybody in your family is going to die one by one by one.” Now we would feel something because we saw the tragedy in the story. But the way the story played out, the time jump 40 years, not knowing what the bargain was, to me it just made the show kind of empty and I didn’t really enjoy it. I mean, I enjoyed the mood, the characters. It felt a little bit cheap to be honest where every time one of the adult children was killed, they did it in such a gruesome way. It felt like torture porn, like a Saw movie. Like, let’s come up with the most vicious, evil, gruesome, horrifying ways to kill all these people. So, every episode of the show, you’re basically waiting to see how does this person die and what unbelievably horrifying death are they going to endure? And it feels a little bit cheap. Like, oh, come on. Like, the true horror of Edgar Allan Poe is deeper than that. It’s more psychological. And this turned into more of a slasher film, like a Saw movie or something like that. So overall, The Fall of the House of Usher, you know, if you’re into Poe and you got time on your hands, you could enjoy it. But I I think the show could be a lot better than it was. And I’d be very curious to talk to the writers and ask them like, okay, why did you make the choices you made moving the bargain from the beginning to the end? That time jump of 40 years, you know, do you think it worked? Because in the show itself, we have long sequences, long scenes where the characters sit and give exposition, just talking and talking and talking, telling you everything that happened. Because they skipped, you know, the 40 years of story. They still had to tell you that story, but instead of showing it to you, they just had some guy in a chair telling his life story, just talking and talking and talking and talking. So, I think the show could have been a whole lot better than it turned out to be, but still, yeah, it was okay.

I haven’t come to the end of my notes. I have a lot more I could talk about, but I’ve come to the end of my throat. So, that is the end of today’s behind-the-scenes podcast. I hope I brought you up to date. And at the beginning, I was talking about a bit of a struggle in terms of timing these behind-the-scenes podcasts where I’m telling stories about Planet Doug videos that haven’t been posted to my channel yet. And is that a good idea or bad idea? I have experimented in the past where I would record one of these and then I would wait until all the Planet Doug videos were posted and then post this one. But I I’m not I think that’s overthinking it. So, I think I’ll just edit this video and I’ll post it right away so you can see this and I’ll be talking about some of the experiences I’ve had videos that I’ve shot, but they’re not live on Planet Doug yet, but I’m not I’m not really giving away the story anyway. I think that’ll work out okay. I think if you’re going to shoot behind the scenes, it’s almost like a a video that is live almost telling live stories, then you might as well post it right away, right? That that makes the most sense to me. So, that’s what I’m going to do. And of course, I’m going to carve out the audio from this and then post it as a podcast as well. So, look for the Planet Doug podcast. You will hear this exact same video, but only the audio. So, that’s it. Shutting down. See you next time.