VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Welcome back to Planet Doug! In this episode, the real Malaysia bike tour begins… and it gets off to an interesting start.
After my first night camping in the Malaysian heat, I wake up to some issues. The tent is soaking wet from condensation, leeches are crawling on the fly looking for me, and my clothes are still drenched in sweat from the day before. To make things more challenging, I’m being driven crazy by biting ants, forcing me to skip my morning coffee and hit the road early.
I start the day by packing up the soaking wet gear and cycling from my campsite towards Rembau. I navigate through the chaotic traffic of Rantau, explore the endless oil palm plantations of SD Guthrie, and dodge some skittish cows. Along the way, I get a thumbs up from locals, discover a massive poultry farm, and finally find refuge at the Hotel Rembau.
I’m learning that filming a bike tour is just as hard as the cycling itself. After two days on the road, I’m taking a rest day in this eclectic hotel room to dry out my gear and catch up on editing.
Thanks for watching! If you made it to the end, drop a CC in the comments for Crunch Club!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to Planet Doug. I don’t think you can see me that well. It’s after 6:00 in the morning and as far as I know, the sky is going to start to lighten around 7. You start to get a little bit of the horizon lighting up. 7:30 is going to be sunrise. And of course, since I slept in the tent last night, I went to bed pretty early, so I’m up early. That’s one of the advantages of bike touring trips I’ve gone on in the past. Anyway, you adjust your schedule to match the sun rather than the clock, which takes some getting used to, but once you make the adjustment, it feels nice actually. You go to bed when the sun goes down and you wake up and start the day before the sun even comes up. That’s assuming you can sleep. And I have to say, I had a lot of trouble last night sleeping. Again, it takes an adjustment to try to figure out how to sleep in a tent. And I’m such a light sleeper that yeah, anything weird, anything unusual and I just can’t sleep at all. So I was in that tent for many, many hours just lying there and sweating. It stayed so hot last night. After the sun went down, the temperature never dropped. It just stayed boiling hot. And then I could feel a little bit of cool temperatures arrive. And then when the cool temperatures arrived, condensation, I mean, it didn’t rain at all, which is good because I don’t know if this tent is even waterproof at all, but everything is soaked. Everything. The outside of the tent is drenched. All of my bags, my trailer right here. You probably can’t see it either, but it’s a trailer right here. And it was underneath the tent material underneath the fly. And it was soaked. Everything you pick up, water just drips off it. Even the bags that were inside the tent are wet. They’re all moist on the outside. And all the clothing that I was wearing yesterday was so drenched in sweat and none of it dried at all. So all the clothing I’m going to be putting on is already cold and clammy and soaked through. So yeah, it was quite the night. Quite the night. And there’s even on the inside of the tent fly there’s a whole bunch of leeches. So leeches came looking for me. They could sense my body heat. But then they couldn’t get into the tent thankfully. And they’re all on the inside of the fly. So, again, I don’t know how much you can see. There’s the tent. You probably can’t see very much, but anyway, I’m just taking everything out of the tent and organizing my bike for the day. So, that’s it. Bike is all packed up and ready to go. It’s 20 after 7 now and the sun should be just coming over the horizon over there. The sky has been bright for a while. It was a little bit too dark to film breaking down the tent and everything like that. So, I didn’t take any video of breaking camp. Yeah, as I said earlier, the tent and everything is just soaking wet. The fly of the tent was soaked on the outside, of course, but also on the inside. And it would be nice to have everything set up for an hour once the sun comes out to dry everything off, but I don’t know, you don’t really have a choice. Sometimes I want to get on the road, so I don’t really want to hang around here for very long. So, even though everything was soaking wet, I packed it up anyway. Just stuffed it all into my trailer and bags. And at some point during the day, if I stay in a hotel tonight, of course, everything comes out of the bags and then the air conditioning can dry everything off. Yeah, that was a bit of a surprise. I was not expecting that much moisture in the air, the condensation. But hey, yeah, Malaysia, right? Tropical jungle kind of place. That’s what you get like a rainforest. Anyway, time to hit the road. The direction that I want to go, I actually have a choice. I could actually swing through a big city called Seremban and it would mean a lot easier in terms of gradient but a lot of traffic. Or I can go through some smaller roads, less traffic, but fair amount of climbing up and down. And so I think I’m going to go for the smaller roads. The whole point of doing the interior route. Like going alongside the Titiwangsa mountains was to stay away from traffic, stay away from big cities. I just wanted a break from that. So and if you go down smaller roads, of course, they tend to go up and down more than major roads. So that’s yeah, it’s just the way it goes. So, and I don’t know how far I’m going to go today. I’ve got two different options. A very short day and then a much more bit of a longer day. I’ll just play the day as it comes. See what happens. Anyway, time to hit the road. Just need to roll my bike out of this park. Got a few barriers to overcome like this.
Yeah, electricity or battery life is certainly an issue when you’re spending a night, even one night in a tent, unless you’ve got a massive power bank of some kind. You’re going to run out of power. And in my case, I struggled a lot yesterday. I don’t know what was going on, but it was such a hot day that my phone kept overheating and shutting down. Well, not shutting down. It would just go into dark mode and things like that. So, you couldn’t even read Google Maps at all because it was too dark. It goes into power saving mode. The camera wouldn’t work. And one thing is I was running a couple of tracking apps, two of them. I had Relive running and Strava both. And now I’m wondering whether those take up way too much power in the background. Today I’m running only Relive. I’m not going to run Strava. See if that makes a difference. But I spend most of the day using my power bank to recharge my phone cuz it kept running out of well was getting very close to running out of power. So by the time nighttime came my power bank was not charged anymore. Very little power left. Yeah, the sun is just above the horizon now.
I would have fired up my kettle and made a cup of coffee at the campsite there, but there was just too much too many hassles. Mainly the ants. No matter where I went there, whether I was standing, sitting, walking around, it didn’t make any difference. The ants somehow managed to climb up onto my body. And then once they settled in, they started biting and it was just so annoying. I could not relax. It would have been nice to sit there and make a cup of coffee, but I just couldn’t deal with it.
It’s kind of interesting when you think about it, how huge we are compared to those tiny ants, but they drove me out. There’s nothing I could do. I guess they saw me as an invader and then they kicked me out.
So, I don’t have very many GoPro batteries fully charged right now. So, I think I’m only going to run one camera today.
And that means I’ll just switch it back and forth from this view, which is over my handlebars in super view. And then occasionally I’ll pop it up onto the broomstick and have the camera aimed back at me in the road behind me. But I’ll just use the one camera to switch back and forth instead of having two running at the same time.
We just passed by a poultry farm. That’s interesting because yesterday I was looking for a camping site and I went down a country road that looked like it was just heading out into the countryside, but then I ran into a security gate. Well, it wasn’t really clear whether it was a security gate or not. It was like a weird kind of overhanging structure. And I saw some men in uniforms with guns and dogs and things and I thought, “Huh, not really sure.” Anyway, I just kept riding. But then one of the men shouted something at me and came up and told me, “No, you can’t go there. This is a private farm.” And couldn’t talk to him. He didn’t speak English.
But as I was trying to communicate with him using Google Translate and all of that, a car parked beside us and the driver of the car, a young woman, she rolled down her window and she spoke English quite well and she said, “Yeah, this is all a big farm.” And I just assumed she meant like an oil palm plantation or something, but she says, “No, it’s a chicken farm.” So, I guess this whole area is all about the chickens. Looking off to my left, I can see huge long warehouses. All of them must be chicken coops in there. No free range for these chickens. I was reading an article the other day which surprised me. I can’t remember the percentages but in North America like in the United States there was some sort of a number about a huge increase in the percentage of chickens and poultry that were raised free range like the eggs that you buy in a store are now coming from free range chickens rather than chickens cooped up in big warehouses. Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. So, I’m going to pull over here and aim my camera over the fence. You can see what I’m talking about. I think I can hear the chickens.
I think you can see it here. Even though it’s on a super view, you can make it out. Yeah. I can’t even count them. There’s so many.
Each one. Yeah. It’s quite large. And they have a fence going all the way around with a privacy curtain here where you can’t really see through the fence. This is a different company, the one that I saw yesterday. I assume it looked similar to this, but they had a different name, a different company.
This is where your chickens and chicken eggs come from in Malaysia. I’m guessing that they have to be full of chickens cuz the sign over there said poultry farm. And this is the other camera mount that I have aiming towards me and behind me, but it’s still in a super view. I don’t normally use super view for this perspective, but that is what super view looks like.
It’s a lot wider and you see a lot more, but of course it’s quite distorted in this road. I think it’s I don’t really know how they divide up their highways in Malaysia, but it’s number eight, maybe N8. I don’t know. Does that make it national highway 8 or national route 8? I don’t really know. But yeah, this road goes into Seremban, which is a large city. So you get quite a bit of traffic here. People heading to work in Seremban for the day and leaving Seremban to work somewhere else.
Feels really nice to be moving through the cool morning air. Yesterday when I left from Port Dickson took a long time, longer than I thought to get ready in the morning and then I decided to go very slowly, zoom around Port Dickson and just really take my time. So I ended up being on the road pretty much the entire day during the hottest part of the day when the sun was beating down. So I didn’t have the chance to experience any of this cool early morning temperature. So, this is really nice. Maybe it’ll even dry off my shirt a little bit. Like I said, it’s still soaked with sweat from yesterday. Yeah, it’s quite something to wake up in the morning and put on your damp clothing from the day before while the ants are biting you.
I’m just arriving at the small town of Rantau. And here we are in Rantau. Suddenly feel like I’ve rejoined civilization.
It’s pretty amazing how big that oil palm company was. SD Guthrie. Like for all of yesterday and so far all of this morning, I’ve been riding alongside oil palm belonging to SD Guthrie. It just goes on for kilometer after kilometer after kilometer. It’s huge. The amount of land that they own.
I was just glancing at Google Maps and I guess this is kind of a intersection town, so it has a lot of convenience businesses. There’s a 7-Eleven here and Zeus Coffee. I’m surprised. I didn’t think this town would be quite as happening as it is.
I just thought it’d be a little bit of a sleepy farmer village,
but it looks more like a small city. All these businesses here all lined up. There’s even a Mr. DIY
and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Huh. Bustling place, I’m surprised.
I’m out in the quiet countryside now on the other side of Rantau. Rantau. That town turned out to be quite a bustling place. I imagined it would be like a quiet farming village, but it was really more of a small city. Had all of the things you’d expect a city to have. 7-Elevens, Zeus coffee, all kinds of shops and stores, and busy traffic. Everybody heading to Seremban. And I did record some video inside the town. Had some interesting buildings and things like that. And I stopped for a classic Planet Doug liter of milk at 7-Eleven, but I misjudged my microphones. I thought I had charged them up in my tent during the night, but apparently I didn’t. So all the time that I was babbling away, no audio was being recorded because my microphones didn’t have any power. I didn’t realize it. So, I had to jump ahead in time.
Yeah, it’s really beautiful back here in this rural area. I was going to say that there isn’t much traffic, so it’s nice and quiet, but of course, suddenly all these trucks are passing me. But there’s a lot less traffic than on the road in and out of Rantau. So yeah, very nice up ahead.
A lot of beautiful houses, traditional Malay architecture all through here.
And there’s the road ahead of me. Gives you an idea of what the scenery is like here.
And we’re still passing through a lot of oil palm plantations. These trees are a bit older, much taller than the others that I’ve seen. I just stopped here because of that interesting sign, an animal crossing. I forget the name of that animal. Maybe it’s in the sign there. I’m not sure.
And these trucks like the one coming up here now, I think are traditionally used for carrying oil palm.
Yeah. Like agricultural heavy duty trucks.
I have all kinds of mounting points for the GoPro all over the bicycle.
This is another one that’s basically sitting right on the handlebars. So,
it’s pointing us straight ahead. Doesn’t have the handlebars in the shot at all. All you see, I guess, is the road up ahead.
Yeah. Still oil palm plantations on the left and on the right. This whole route has been mainly oil palm and chicken farms basically. Surprised about that. I didn’t think there’d be so much oil palm here. I thought it was all more down along the coast. Yeah, I’m going up a very steep grade here. So, I go so slow it’s hard to keep my handlebars steady.
Keep wobbling on the bike because I’m going so slowly.
I reached the top of the incline. Could be going downhill from here or it looks like down and then back up again.
Yeah, gradual downhill and then a little bit of a climbing back up again. Hey there, cows.
I startled them.
Didn’t mean to, guys.
Huh. That’s interesting. You think they would be They’re certainly accustomed to motorcycles going by and scooters and cars and trucks, but bicycles freak them out apparently.
Yeah, it’s the same thing with dogs. And dogs will sit there happily with motorcycles racing past. But something about a slow-moving bicycle kind of yeah, this guy’s looking a little bit startled as well. As long as he doesn’t run at me. You don’t have to charge me, buddy.
Yeah, this is the first time and I’ve never had bullocks and cows, water buffalo be that skittish around me. Beautiful animal though. Beautiful coat. Just have to keep my distance so I don’t have them charge straight at me.
Going down the other side of the hill. Obviously,
beautiful day today. Weather is incredible.
Right up ahead there is a I don’t know the number of it, but it’s a major highway in Malaysia. This road that I’m on, smaller road, somehow goes over or under that big highway up there.
It’s like the hills right here. They cut down all the palm trees. Yeah. I don’t know what sort of a lifespan these trees have. I remember reading up on it at one point how old the trees have to be before they start producing fruit and then how long they produce until they get cut down and replanted. Looks like these ones were all cut down
and right up ahead you can see the highway again. So, somehow or other, I hope there’s a way to cross that highway on this road without doing a huge detour. And on the other side, you can see that range of hills. And that is my destination. Actually, I should be going over some part of that tomorrow morning. Those are the edges of the Titiwangsa mountain range right there.
So, I’ll be climbing up a little bit into those tomorrow, crossing over, and then turning north to head to the border of Thailand, like following the edges of that mountain range, basically.
Oh, yeah. Looking up ahead there, I can see an overpass. So that this road goes underneath the overpass of that main highway. Man, can you imagine being on that highway up there? Look at all that traffic. Yeah. Well, obviously on a bicycle. That must be an expressway, like a toll road. A bicycle wouldn’t be allowed up there anyway. But it just drives home the contrast between this lovely road and that major highway up there. Just endless traffic.
It’s funny. It’s one of the things I associate the most with Malaysia is traffic. There’s so many vehicles on the road, so many highway systems.
And here we go under the highway.
I was glad to see there is this access instead of having to do a 10 km detour to get around the highway or something like that.
There you have it. We’re on the other side.
And I think I’m arriving in Rembau. I think that’s how it’s pronounced. Something like that. Yeah. This road into this city was incredibly busy with trucks. I don’t really know why. A lot of heavy duty like large transport trucks, cargo trucks of all kinds, oil and gas trucks. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.
And I’m spending the night here. My hotel is 2 or 3 kilometers to the right, but there’s a 7-Eleven in this shopping plaza, I think. And I’m just going to pop in there and get a cold drink. And then cycle from here to my hotel and settle in.
I guess it’s a good thing that the rain has taken a break, but man, with this sun out like this all the time, it is crazy hot. I’ve actually taken a number of macaque naps at the side of the road whenever I see a good piece of shade. I pull into the shade and even lie down on the ground. Close my eyes for a couple of minutes. Then I get up and ride the next few kilometers when I see a bunch of macaques and more shade. Now time for a macaque nap.
I’m lying there at the side of the road on the grass beside my bicycle, but I try to arrange my body so that it looks like I’m sleeping. Otherwise, I was thinking drivers would go by, they see my body lying down to the side of the road, they think I’ve had a heart attack or an accident. So, I try to arrange my knee, my legs, and my arms to make it look like I’m okay and I’m just taking a rest. That’s pretty funny.
And I guess I did a good job. Nobody pulled over to the side of the road to make sure to check up on me.
All right. So, somewhere in here there’s supposed to be a 7-Eleven. Get a cold iced coffee, I think, is what I’m thinking about. And I just saw a hotel here as well.
Don’t know if I noticed it on Google Maps or not.
Oh, yeah. There’s a 7-Eleven right there. Yeah. And there’s a hotel here. Says 24 hours. Wonder if it’s a low-budget operation.
Yeah. Time for another macaque nap, but this time at 7-Eleven,
Yours Family Hotel, it says.
Well, I had a delicious iced coffee at 7-Eleven. Really nice. And I did find that hotel on Google Maps.
One thing about hotels listed on Google Maps, even if there’s like hundreds of reviews, nobody ever mentions how much it costs. Like they might say, you know, two-star hotel or three star or whatever, but that’s as close as they get to saying, you know, how much it costs to stay there. In this particular hotel, I couldn’t find on any online apps or anything like that. But most of the comments you have to read between the lines. I find low-budget hotels are often like that. Everybody’s opinion seems to be based on their expectations. So like most normal people, like here’s the hotel right here. I’ll aim my GoPro in the direction of the hotel. So there it is. Yours Family Hotel. And in my world, that looks like a perfect hotel. Basic, low-budget, nothing fancy, nothing special. And if I get a room there and it’s inexpensive, but say the towels are dirty or the pillow covers are stained, the sheets are stained or the bathroom is dirty. Well, that’s normal. I don’t care at all about any of that stuff. Even if I see cockroaches, anything like that, you know, that’s just how it goes. But somebody might get a room there and they’re used to real hotels, so they will leave like a one-star review and say, “It’s a horrible place. The towels are dirty, everything is dusty, etc., etc.” But that doesn’t mean anything to someone like me. What does mean something to me is the price. And one person in the comments said a room there cost 148 ringgit, saying that the room wasn’t nice enough to justify 148 ringgit. And yeah, I have to agree. So that would be the deal breaker for me. If you’re paying 150 ringgit a night, you certainly don’t want to stay at a hotel like that. So anyway, that was my only hint that that place might be too expensive. But I do find that is relatively common in Malaysia. Hotel prices, even in Indonesia, I found hotel prices were very erratic.
There wasn’t much of a pattern to it where you got used to, you know, low-budget hotels cost this much, nicer hotels cost this much. The prices were just all over the place. You come across a very simple family-run hotel in a village and it looks like it’s the perfect place that should cost I don’t know 40 ringgit a night or something like that and there they charge 150 ringgit and it just doesn’t make any sense.
So anyway, I’m heading towards my home for the night.
Yeah, this city also seems to be surprisingly busy. Yeah. I guess we’re still pretty close. We’re close to Seremban and Seremban is kind of like a satellite city of Kuala Lumpur. So, we’re still feeling the urban gravitational pull of KL. Even way out here, you can see just how much traffic there is.
And I think I’m heading in the right direction. Again, beautiful countryside. There are some of the Titiwangsa mountains ahead of me.
And if I leave from here tomorrow morning, the very first thing I need to do is climb up into those hills. And there’s a very famous hill there. It’s like 1.4 kilometers long, but a very steep climb. It has a special name and I guess it’s very popular with local cyclists.
Ah, Rembau Waterfront. So, we’re crossing over a river and they’ve developed it as a nice waterfront park.
Couple of guys on a motorcycle giving me a thumbs up for riding a bicycle.
And this part of the road, very steep climb right here. And I’m pretty sure we’re going up and over a river and a railroad tracks. That’s often a combination because you got a river and then ages ago when they’re building railroad tracks, a railroad line, they might follow rivers with the railroad and then you get a bridge going over both of them. So I think that’s what’s happening up here.
I’m guessing that it’s a little bit of a jumping off point for tourism because it’s an entryway into the mountains.
So, it’s probably a tourism town. People come here and then use this as a base for heading into the mountains.
All right, let’s see. What are we going over? Oh, yeah. There’s railroad tracks.
Whoa. Yeah, big railroad station. That’s cool. Right there you can see the train station.
Train moving in. So, I guess if you wanted to come here from KL, you could probably come here by train, get dropped off right here, and then the downtown core is right up to the right of McDonald’s over here. So, yeah, this Rembau connected to the world by train. That’s kind of cool.
And I think we’ve arrived
24-hour hotel Rembau
and just over here in this strip mall. Yeah, it’s exactly the kind of hotel that I was talking about. Just your basic no frills place. Just looking at it from the outside though, it does look like a place that should be a lot cheaper than it is. Feels like it should be about 50 ringgit, 45 ringgit per night or something like that. But online they charge 59 and then there’s a 10 ringgit tourism tax. So it ends up being a relatively expensive room. But we shall see.
Yeah. One thing about even going anywhere in Malaysia, I find you often have this impulse like you see something on the other side of the road and you just want to zip over there and check it out, but it turns into a major adventure because you just can’t get through the traffic.
It takes forever to cross the road
and then you cross the road. You know, you maybe you saw a nice little coffee shop over here. So, you come over to check it out and now you have to get back across the road the other direction. I could take another adventure to finish that.
As I said, Malaysia is a land of traffic. Impenetrable sometimes if you’re walking or on a bicycle.
And there it is. Not looking very friendly. We’ll see how it turns out. Hotel Rembau. Rembau. Rembau. I just say not friendly because of the gate. Like there’s bars over the front desk.
Only one person, huh? Yeah, just one person. Okay. I made a reservation on Agoda. You have booked? Yeah, I did. Yeah, just this morning I did it. I didn’t know if I needed to or not. Okay. I asked the Douglas Nienhuis don’t pay didn’t pay. No, don’t pay. It says pay at hotel. Which one? Your name? Uh this one. Douglas Nienhuis. Uh here like two person. One person. I’m just one person. One person. Okay. Yeah. Remember mine. Is it cheaper for one person? That’s good. You we we this fly for you. Okay. But you foreigners you must pay the duty tourist duty. Yeah. The tourist tax more than ling Malaysia. Mhm. So I give you know
this your okay this duty. Huh? Okay. this uh this uh deposit m when you out we return. Huh? Okay. You pay this one. When you check out we return this 30. Okay. If I check out very early in the morning though, remember you put the bill because our family dip in inside cuz I’m on a bicycle. Maybe I will leave early in the morning. I don’t know. I know. I know. I have a lot of PL uh customer like you. Oh yeah. Okay.
I take you to your room. I saw on Agoda it said you have downstairs room. Do you have one on ground floor? Down. Okay. I get you try. Which one you Okay. Uh uh I give you to try just because I have heavy bags to carry your cycle also you can try
1 minute. No here. No here. Okay. 1 minute. Okay. Your cycle you can put in here or over there. Okay.
Okay. also can off also can I see the room
you see this room? Okay. Yeah, it looks fine. Yeah, looks good. Okay. Yeah, no problem. This room you try this by nice. Okay, it’s good. Ah, this Yeah. Yeah. Looks very nice. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.
Huh? Uh, this the key. Huh? Okay. Okay.
Yeah. This 202. Huh? Memory. Respond. You like we see the D. Uh you have to see if your foot here. Mhm. Okay.
See. Mhm.
This. Oh, I see. Remember you try which one better. Huh? Okay. Okay. All right. I think so to have the light 202. Okay. I think that’s a better one. It’s okay to walk up the stairs. Never mind. No, no problem. Okay. So, the bicycle can go here. Put here or put near the office. And then this is to go to my 202 is up here. Okay. 202. Okay. Yeah. I think to bring my bicycle here is more convenient. Okay. Okay. Okay. Roll it here. Is okay. Okay. All right. So, there you go. It’s actually a good lesson, I suppose, in don’t judge a book by its cover. Like I said, when I showed up at the hotel, looks pretty rough and tumble from the outside. And then because the front desk has bars over it, it doesn’t feel very welcoming. But as soon as that man, the owner, noticed me, very friendly, very helpful. And depending on which room you get, I was going to get the room on the bottom floor
because being on the bottom floor is more convenient when you have a bicycle. But, yeah, the room up on the second floor is so much nicer. So, I’ll just
Yeah, it’s funny how he anticipates because he has some experience with foreign cyclists. He even said, “If I want to bring my bicycle to my room, no problem.” Like, a lot of hotels don’t like you to do that, right? They don’t want you to bring your bicycle into the room because that can, you know, if you’re riding in the rain and your bike is soaking wet and you clean it in your room and you get grease everywhere, you know, I can see some cyclists leaving a mess and once one cyclist leaves a mess, then the hotel suddenly has a new policy, no bicycles.
But I used to be that way where I was so worried about my bicycle being stolen or somebody messing with it. I always tried to bring it into my room. It would stay nice and dry, safe, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, in recent days I’ve become much more relaxed about that mainly because I haven’t had a choice and I needed to leave my bike outside in all kinds of weird places and it gets rained on all the time, gets dirty and I don’t know, it seems to survive. So now I’m much more casual about that sort of stuff.
Yeah. Like leaving my bike down here. I mean, this is to me perfectly safe. And I suppose I’m accustomed to the low-budget life, but when I find myself handing over, you know, 70 ringgit, it kind of feels like I should be in elevator territory. Like once you’re paying that much, you’d think the hotel would have an elevator, right?
But yeah, Malaysia is different that way. Location has a lot to do with prices.
And now my punishment for getting the nicer room continues. If I took the room that was on the ground floor, I wouldn’t have to carry all my bags up these flights of steps. But yeah, that room down on the ground floor was pretty nasty looking. Just glancing in it really felt more like a prison cell, which I’m accustomed to, but I don’t want to pay 70 ringgit for a room that looks that awful.
If you’re going to pay that much, you might as well get the nicer room. Even if it means you have to carry heavy things upstairs.
Yeah, little design issues bother me a lot. Like this trailer is very high tech. It’s very expensive, very highly engineered. And yet they have a problem that when you put the cover on it and then you try to move the wheel to the back position, the cover covers up the hub. So you see there’s no way to put it in. So when I had older rain covers, I had to cut a hole myself, but I haven’t done that yet. So, I have to remove the cover and then I can, you know, change the wheel position. But it’s a very poor design. I mean, this rain cover should have a special hole here where you can put the wheels in through that hole, but they didn’t do that.
There. Again, I have to move the cover.
And when you move the wheels to the back, that turns it into like luggage like this.
Air conditioner is already running up there. That’s the most important thing. And check that out. I have a balcony.
Very nice.
Yeah. Nine times out of 10, people are going to choose the room with the balcony, right? Unless they’re a cyclist, then they may pick the room. I was going to ask him about the walk-in price because they have all these signs out here. Hotel Rembau 50 ringgit. This one 50 ringgit. It’s advertising 50 ringgit everywhere. But on Agoda it was 59. So, but I forgot to ask him what the if you have a walk-in price, what would it be?
All right. Well, now I need to settle in and unpack all my electronics, plug everything in to charge everything up, and take out all my camping gear, which is all still soaking wet, and somehow string it up in this room to dry out.
See if I can rig up a laundry line of some kind.
All right, that is it. Unpacked and sort of settled in. I’m already thinking I’ll probably stay here an extra day just because I need time to copy all the video files from day one and today and edit those videos and yeah be nice to sort of take a day cycling for 2 days easing into the cycling life and then relax here for tonight and tomorrow and just work on the videos and get organized. But anyway, yeah, sort of unpacked. This room is quite eclectic. These older hotels, they’re all kind of improvised in many different ways. And for this room, it kind of works out okay because they put electrical outlets all over the place. So over there on command central, there’s even two electrical outlets over there. USB C charging ports or USB A charging ports over there. And I guess that controls the air conditioner. I don’t know. I just turned on the power and it’s been running. And so yeah, I plugged in my extension cord and so I can recharge all my phones and tablet and then I can plug in my laptop and work here. I’ve got my little bedside coffee table stand here all ready for my first cup of instant coffee. And I strung up a clothing line. I was doing a time lapse of all of this and of course the battery ran out in the middle of the time lapse so I didn’t record the ending of all of my activity like stringing up this laundry line. And yeah, it’s amazing. This thing was soaking wet, my tent fly, but it’s drying like so fast. I guess it’s because it’s such thin material. It’s soaking wet and then a minute later it’s perfectly dry. It just needs a little bit of dry air, a little bit of sunshine, and my tent is kind of flopped over here. When this is fully dry, I’ll remove it and put the tent body over there. Funny thing is when I took the tent out of its bag, a grasshopper emerged cuz yeah, that happens, right? You’re breaking camp in the dark and just rolling up your tent. Who knows what kind of creatures are in there? My tent body and fly were covered with leeches last night. So, in the dark, I was like shaking the material trying to shake all the leeches off. And as far as I can tell, I didn’t carry any leeches here. But I did happen to trap a grasshopper. So, the poor guy, you know, he’s hopping around the room here. I feel bad because who knows maybe he has a grasshopper family back where I was camping and I’ve moved him far far away from his family, you know, and insects are just so frustrating because I want him to go outside, right? And he’s hopping around this room. So, I open the door and I’m like, “There’s the opening. Go out the door. Freedom.” But of course, no matter what you do, that grasshopper is never going to find that open door. He jumps this way. He jumps that way. He jumps that way. But he never jumps towards the open door that leads to freedom. I eventually had to catch him with my hands and then just sort of let him go outside. So, he is free out there somewhere. And I hope he’s going to do well in his new home. Yeah. Tons of electrical stuff going on over here. They had the television plugged in here and I just unplugged everything. That’s my kettle, my own light. It’s really dark over here. There’s hardly any light in this corner. So, I like to have my own light bulb. And then all these USB chargers for powering up, recharging my microphones, all of my GoPro batteries. So, I think I’ve got nine of them, 10 of them in total. Four. These are new ones. A Planet Doug subscriber gave me these four batteries. So, those are my main batteries. But then I still have all my old ones that are all swollen. So, that’s four, nine, and then I have one in this GoPro right now. So, it’s 10 batteries total. And even with 10 batteries, I still ran out. I ran out of power just in one day or basically a day and a half. It’s crazy. And I could plug in my kettle here and make a cup of coffee. And bathroom is very eclectic. You know, it’s all kind of jammed in. I’ve got my clothing here soaking. So, I’m slowly getting all the sweat out of it. Pants and t-shirt. And I probably won’t wash it. I just need to rinse it basically. So, that’s what’s going on here. And yeah, it’s one of these bathrooms where you kind of to get in, you got to take a shower, then you got to close the door behind you. And I love these electrical water heaters. It’s like he’s got zip ties here to prevent people from fiddling with this because foreigners like cyclists like me from other countries, we don’t know how to work these things. So, I can see so many foreigners coming in here. We don’t know what to do. Do we do this? Do we do this? Do we do this? Like is there this like there’s so many buttons we have no idea what we’re supposed to do have I know of course because I’ve lived in this part of the world but to prevent people from getting confused he has it zip tied so this they can’t fiddle with that just turns on the water right and that turns on the heater but you also have to turn on the fuse outside but yeah it’s very tiny bathroom and then of The mirror was never ever tall enough. And it’s very very dark in here. Yeah, you can hardly see. There isn’t enough light. But hey, it all works out in the end. One funny thing is that the last night the little town that I was in for dinner, I bought a roti John, which is a kind of Malaysian sandwich. And I ended up buying two of them, thinking I could have one for breakfast. But there were so many ants at my campsite this morning. I just left as soon as I was packed up. I couldn’t sit there and eat anything in comfort. So I this roti John has come with me all the way from last night all the way until today in my pannier bag. So it’s kind of a gooey mess in there. But unless the whole bunch of insects got in, I’m sure it’s still edible. So that is going to be my snack in a minute. My roti John and a cup of coffee. Yeah. And I guess that’s it for today. I’m going to boil some water, have a cup of coffee, sit down over there on the bed in Planet Doug Studios, and then copy all the video files from today. Yeah, my experience yesterday and today reminded me, and I knew this already, but I guess I always need to be reminded of it, at least for me, that cycling and shooting video, it doesn’t mix. It really doesn’t. I keep thinking it should, but it’s so much hard work to cycle and occasionally to camp and it’s so much hard work just to shoot video and then edit on cycling and then youtubing that’s tough. There are some YouTubers out there that make it work, but the ones that I see that like there’s a cyclist from Morocco, Usvan, that’s kind of a popular channel. Cycled around Malaysia, but he only posts a video like every once in a while and his video will cover five or 6 days and he doesn’t go into detail in anything. It’s very very bare bones. So, he does the minimum amount of filming. He doesn’t care about audio at all. Most of the time I can’t even hear him, but most people who watch his videos don’t seem to care. So, his people love his videos. Even though his audio is terrible, he never explains anything. You have no idea where he is and where he’s going, how long he’s been there. It’s all just kind of a jumble. But the final video that he puts together has a bunch of interesting little moments. He strings it together. It’s 20 minutes long, 30 minutes long, and people watch them. So, if you do it that way, it works. But the way I always end up shooting video, it’s just way too in-depth. I shoot way too much video from too many different angles and perspectives, and it’s just exhausting. And then, to be honest, if you’re cycling all day, not a whole lot of amazing visual interest is happening. You might come across like a pretty valley, some nice mountains, and you get out your GoPro, go, “Oh, look at the beautiful scenery.” And you put your camera away. But other than that, I mean, hour after hour, you’re just turning the pedals. So, it’s not exactly amazing video content out of the gate. So, it’s really not a real good mix shooting video for YouTube and cycling, I don’t think. But, who knows? That’s what I did over the last couple of days. Anyway, with that, I think that is the end of my stories. And as I said, I think I’m going to stay here an extra day just to ease into the cycling life and get some video editing done. Yeah. In my eclectic room. So that’s it. Thanks for hanging out with me. If you watch this video all the way to the end, Crunch Club, shout out to all the Crunch Club members. Put CC in the comments to let me know you made it this far. I always love to see that. Makes me feel good that somebody watched one of my videos or maybe you skipped ahead all the way to the end. I don’t care how you get there, but get to the end of the video. I’m very impressed if you do that. And of course, Patreon, the Planet Doug Patreon is still going along there. It’s yeah, go check it out. So, that’s it. Shutting down and I’ll see you in the next video.