VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Join me on Day 3 of my bicycle ride through central Malaysia—where everything goes wrong in the most spectacular way!
I’m riding north alongside the Titiwangsa mountain range, aiming for the Thai border about 500km away. But when you’re on Planet Doug, even the simplest plans can take a wild turn.
In this episode:
🚲 5:30 AM start with a mysterious windstorm howling through the mountains
🏔️ Attempting a famous 10% grade climb that cyclists come from all over Malaysia to conquer
💥 My rear tire EXPLODES—and I wasn’t even on the bike!
🔧 Emergency repairs on the side of a steep mountain road
🌪️ My bike gets knocked over by wind, bending the derailleur and breaking my mirror
🚶♀️ Forced to walk back to town with a crippled bicycle
🍔 A surprise McDonald’s delivery from a mystery benefactor
🛠️ My plan to get new tires and repair the damage
The Bicycle: An old workhorse that’s served me since Ethiopia in 1998—but maybe I got too casual about maintenance…
The Route: Starting in Rembau, attempting the climb toward Kuala Pilah through Malaysia’s ancient Titiwangsa mountains (250+ million years old!)
Tech Stuff: Filmed on GoPro Hero 12 + Hero 9 | Tracking with Strava (figured out how to get Relive maps without running the app!)
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
It’s about 5:30 in the morning here in Rembau in Malaysia and as another day begins here. Of all the things like if you had a bingo card for everything that you might expect to face when riding a bicycle in Malaysia, like your bingo card, all the things you might encounter. The last thing on my list would have been windstorms. Who knew Malaysia had windstorms? But here it is, 5:30 in the morning, and the wind out here is just howling.
And oddly enough, I don’t think it’s a rainstorm or a thunderstorm. I think the sky is clear. And yet, there’s this powerful wind. I have no idea what’s going on. Maybe this is normal behavior because of the mountains, because of the monsoon on the east coast. Does it blow air over from the east to the west like this over the mountains? I have no idea. It’s a crazy thing.
Here’s the scene inside my hotel room. You hear the wind out there whistling.
It’s been like that all night long. I’ve just been lying in bed listening to the wind out there just howling and whistling.
Quite a bit brighter now. It’s 7:30 in the morning and I’m just about to hit the road. I was trying to be on the road like half an hour ago, something like that. But, you know, little little tasks, little errands I had to take care of in terms of getting ready at the time. So, it’s 7:30 now. I just have to get my deposit back from the hotel. And then I cycle in that direction and then I’m turning east up into those hills. I don’t know. It’s one of those saddles like probably the lowest saddle, but I’m not really sure how far away it is. There’s actually a little bit of a the day is starting with a climb supposed to be a quite a steep grade on a road there for about 2 km. Cyclists and cycling clubs actually come here from all over Malaysia just to challenge themselves on this climb. And there’s a little not a little, there’s a big boulder at the top of the climb to mark that you’ve reached the top. But of course, I’m not I’m not challenging myself like an athlete or anything like that. I’m just going to put it down into the lowest gear and just slowly slowly slowly grind up to the top. And I’m heading to a town called Kuala Pilah. And I haven’t booked any accommodation there yet. I did notice one very one inexpensive hotel there, but I haven’t booked it yet cuz I wasn’t sure whether I was going today. So anyway, we’ll we’ll see what happens when I get to Kuala Pilah, whether I end up staying there or not.
All right, off we go. Leaving from my hotel here. And in case you missed the first video or any of my other videos, I can remind you that why I’m in Malaysia and why I’m on a bicycle right now basically is that I’m riding north through Malaysia like through the center of Malaysia along the Titiwangsa mountain range and I’m heading for the the right now anyway the first part of the journey. I’m heading towards the border with Thailand and that’s about 500 kilometers away, something like that. And I haven’t been on a bicycle for quite a while. The first two days that I’ve been cycling, I started in the town of Port Dickson, which is actually not very far away. If you were in a car, you could zip up here and have a morning coffee with me, you know. But the world is a very different place when you’re on a bicycle as opposed to on a car or in a car. So even though it’s very close by car, to me it felt very far away by bicycle and I’ve been off my bike for a long time. And I think I approached this cycling trip with too much of a casual attitude because in my lifetime I’ve gone on some relatively long bicycle tours in the past. So I guess in my mind I’m thinking 500 kilometers up to the border with Thailand. What’s the big deal? I’ll just hop on my bike and go.
But it doesn’t really work out that way once you start riding
and then you’re dealing with the tropical sun of Malaysia. Oh, wow. That’s a nice view.
just had to stop and capture that view because that’s where I’m going some somewhere in here. Maybe in that direction, but these are the Titiwangsa mountains of Malaysia. They’re some of the oldest mountains in the world. I think they’re like 250 million years old. So they’re not like the Alps. Like if you think of the Alps or the Himalayas, they’re very jagged mountains, right? They have very jagged rocky peaks. But when you see mountains like this that are rounded, that usually means they’re much much older. So I think these go back 250, 300 million years that they were formed. Two giant tectonic plates collided here. I forget the names of them, but anyway, they’re very old mountains. The Titiwangsa stretches quite a distance through the center of Malaysia. So that’s basically where I’m going to be crossing over them and then turning north and then riding beside the mountains for 500 km basically. Not in the mountains really, but sort of beside them heading towards Thailand. Anyway, that’s where I’m going.
Whoa.
And I was just saying that I approached this bike trip a little bit too casually. And I figured that out on the very first day where after two hours of sitting on the bike pedaling, you’re already kind of sore and exhausted and then you’ve got the sun beating down and then you’ve got this the traffic of Malaysia. This is the land of drivers. So that’s one of the reasons I decided to go inland. I didn’t want to be on busy roads, so I’m heading more for the remote interior to try and get on some smaller, quieter roads.
I feel like I was shouting there just to be heard over the roar of traffic.
And then when the traffic dies down and you get a little bit of silence, feels very strange.
Yeah, the sun just came up over the top of the mountain range. So, time for some sunglasses, I think.
Yeah. When I left from Port Dickson, I was doing some very simple math, thinking, well, 500 km, 50 km per day. I could get there in 10 days. 10 days of cycling. Like a real cyclist can get there in like 5 days, right? 100 kilometers a day. If you’re traveling with a lightweight bicycle and you’re in really good shape and you’re just staying in nice hotels, I mean, you could do 150 kilometers a day. Real athletes could hit 200, but in and amongst that crowd, you could just call me grandpa. I’m not doing anything like that. Grandpa Doug on the bicycle here. I’m actually doing 5 km an hour right now going up this slope.
call me the snail,
but my usual pattern is to go very, very slowly. I like to slow down,
take my time, especially at the beginning of a bicycle journey. For me, it takes about I would say two weeks of cycling before I start to feel comfortable.
So the first few days I would only try to ride 20 km 30 40 at the most.
And in fact, I would want to build up to 40. Like do 15 km the first day, 20 the second, 25 the third, and then you can slowly build up to whatever you’d like to do in a normal day. But it takes me about 2 weeks to get to that point. My arms have to get stronger to hold up my upper body on the handlebars. My legs have to get stronger, but more than anything, my butt. That’s the killer for me. I get a really sore butt from sitting on the saddle for so many hours. Yeah, I just stopped here because the other day I was talking about here I’m in the state of Negeri Sembilan and Negeri Sembilan is quite special in Malaysia because it has a Minangkabau society and I’m familiar with the Minangkabau because I spent a lot of months over in Sumatra in the Minangkabau area which is a matrilineal society and they have a very special roof architecture. And right up ahead of me, you can see a government building of some kind. And it has the classic Minangkabau. They’re meant to look like the horns of a water buffalo. And I was talking about that the other day, and I never saw a building. After I said we’re going to see buildings like this, I never did see one. So this is my first one. So, I thought I better stop and get it on camera. All right.
Maybe a little bit of a technology summary for anybody that’s new to my channel, doesn’t know about Planet Doug. It’s not really an official catchphrase, but when I talk about Planet Doug, I think on my bio I call I think of Planet Doug as the world that I live on. It’s not the same world as everybody else because on planet Doug, weird things happen all the time. I seem to have very good luck when it comes to big things. You know, in my life, for example, I’m 62 years old and even though I’m 62, I’ve never really been ill. I’ve never had any physical problems whatsoever that, you know, like big things like that. I’ve never had an accident, never broken a leg, never been in a hospital, basically.
So, when it comes to the big things, I seem to do okay. But then all the tiny little details of life, weird things happen on planet Doug. And I think I wrote somewhere that on planet Doug it never stops raining and there are technology disasters every day because I end up talking about technology quite a bit. So, in terms of technology for my YouTube channel, I use GoPro cameras. And for this trip, I actually have three GoPro cameras, but I only have two of them running right now. So, I’ve got this GoPro, it’s a GoPro Hero 12 aiming backwards at me. And then probably below me, you can see a second GoPro down here. And that is the GoPro Hero 9. And I have it set up right now anyway, pointing forwards over the handlebars. I also keep track I was keeping track of my trips using two tracking apps. I was using Relive and I was using Strava
for various reasons because one has features the other one doesn’t have. So, I sort of combined them. But on my first two cycling days on this trip, I had a lot of trouble. My phone battery just kept running out of power and it kept overheating. So, I looked into things and now what I’ve decided to try to do today, I’m only running Strava because I figured out that if you have a laptop and you run Strava on a smartphone, on your laptop, you can download a GPX file which contains all the data of your trip and then you can upload that GPX to Relive and then Relive will create the flyover map. So in order to get a flyover map on Relive, you don’t actually have to run relive. You can just run Strava and then upload the GPX file.
So today what I’m doing is I’m just running Strava and I’m not running relive at all. And I put my phone into airplane mode. I think Strava can still work. Like GPS still works even if you’re in airplane mode. All right. So, here’s a major
a major point for me. The road I’m on goes on to Tampin. And Tampin is an interesting city because as far as I can tell, Tampin marks the beginning of the Titiwangsa mountain range mountain. The mountains come down to a point like a triangle and they start right at that town. But I’m turning left here heading towards Kuala Pilah. So here we are finally after a couple of days
on the edge of the mountains. For the first time on this trip, I’m actually heading into the Titiwangsa mountain range. So, there should be an intersection up here.
This wind is absolutely crazy.
Never really encountered a windstorm in Malaysia before the last couple of days. We’ve had wind storms up here.
So hopefully once I turn left up here, the volume of heavy traffic should die down and I don’t have to shout as much if I’m trying to talk to you.
Oh yeah, I just realized today is a Saturday. And since it’s a Saturday, I might actually see some other cyclists on this road. And I’m very very careful about intersections and turning. I
Okay. I was I said that I wanted to
Oh, someone in a car wants to say hello.
Hello. How are you?
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Speak I can’t no Where are you from, sir? I’m from Canada. Canada. Which part of Canada? Ottawa. Toronto. Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. A small town, but near Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. So, how long have you been in Malaysia? Well, on this Well, in terms of cycling, Yeah. Yeah. only 4 days. But I’ve been to Malaysia before. Yeah. Yeah. So, I’ve come here. It was I’ve been using Malaysia as kind of a traveling base for a few years. Kuala Lumpur, then I go to Indonesia, then Thailand, then Bangladesh, then Myanmar, and always coming back here. But in terms of this trip, 4 days only. You’re heading where? I’m heading I have 30, right? Oh, today just Kuala Pilah. Kuala Pilah. Oh, Pilah. Yeah. About 40 km. Yeah, that’s all. A bit steep, you know. Yeah, I know. It’s okay. Yo, I have a very powerful gear. Yeah, I just go slow, slow slow, slow slow. YouTube channel, of course. Yeah. Can you please YouTube channel? I have my card here. Oh, Planet. Planet Doug. I always follow the the traveler Itchy Boots, you know, Noraly. Of course, I know Itchy Boots. Yeah, Itchy Boots. The the the woman from from Holland, Netherlands. Now, she is in Mongolia, I think. Yeah, she’s very adventurous. And then one of the cyclist like a tricycle two two two in front. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think he’s from the United States. No no France. Oh yeah. And then in Australia catman. Yeah. He always he only use like a trolley you walking. Yeah. Walking for the cancer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What is your name? Okay. Yeah. My name is Doug. Doug from Canada. From Canada. Yeah. How old are you? 62. 62. I’m 61. 61. So, but you look very strong, you know. Well, I’m not really, but yeah, if you’re riding a bikes like me, you just go slowly every every day. Just a little bit, you know. I’m not an athlete. I’m not strong. No. Are you married? No, not married. Yeah. So, single man. I can travel. No commitment with your family and son or your children. Okay. Right. Sorry, my English is not very good as well. It’s very good. This is your your your English is your mother tongue, right? My mother tongue. Yeah. You’re in Malay. Yeah. This is my mother house. Oh, right here. I see. I see. She was passed away about 10 years ago. Ah. And then I want to visit my sister. She has a small store. Yeah. I see. Oh, okay. Yeah. But today is a Ramadan, so I can’t invite to to eat. I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how it is today. Yeah. Ramadan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know about Ramadan. Yeah. Anyway, very nice to meet you. Yeah. Yeah. Very much. Thanks for a conversation. Was a pleasure. Teacher, you know. Oh, teacher. Ex-teacher teaching. I’m teaching geography. Oh, okay. Especially Southeast Asia geography and a little about geography of Canada and USA and Europe. Okay. My dream is to come to your country to see the Great Lakes, you know. Yeah. They’re very superior Erie the five great lakes. Yeah. Okay. And the Rocky Mountains would be interesting for you if you’re like geography. Northern Ontario is really fascinating. That’s the area like thousands of lakes like small lakes just thousands and thousands cuz the glaciers came down and then they scraped the land and they made so many lakes up there. Thousands and thousands so beautiful up there. Yeah. Just this morning on video, I was talking about these mountains in Malaysia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m video now. Oh, yeah. They’re actually recording. Oh, no. No problem. This one and that. Yeah. I have two of them. You don’t mind being in my video a little bit? I’m proud of you. Okay. Because I popular, you know, follow you know. Yeah, of course. She is a very superb woman, you know. two weeks twice a week she will upload the video in her YouTube. I very enjoy it. She’s very she’s very she works really hard on her videos. Has a nice schedule. Yeah, I I’m for my YouTube more like an amateur compared to her. No problem. No problem. Okay. Nice to meet you. You too. Have a nice day. Safe riding. Yeah again. Bless your video. You too. Okay. All right. Yep. I’ll do my best.
Oh, that was very nice. Yeah, it’s interesting. Itchy Boots, Noraly. She’s like this presence in my life, over my life, just as a, you know, a YouTuber basically. Of course, I know all about Itchy Boots and follow her journey most of the time. Very professional. Yeah. Just before my conversation with that man, I was saying that today is a Saturday, I think, and that means there could be other cyclists on this road because they come here on the weekend to yeah, to test themselves against this hill. But they will all be going much faster than me. Yeah. Here’s some beautiful a beautiful example of traditional architecture here.
Isn’t that amazing? So nice.
Reminds me of a cabin. I love the idea of a house being up on stilts like that. And it gives you that workspace underneath. Every guy, every father I know in Canada would kill to have a space like that to work in. Keep all of their lawnmowers and other gear and equipment, you know, a place like that. Kind of like a man cave underneath their house. But yeah, there’s the main house over there. Yeah. Both very beautiful.
a big warning sign here and it says there’s a accident like a strong accident risk for heavy vehicles and it has a 10% grade for listed for the road. So yeah, 10% yeah, that’s challenging. And you can see the mountains ahead of me. The wind has picked up so much. Maybe the wind is coming through this gap between the mountains, which is pretty crazy. Where in the world did all this wind come from? I guess that that is that might fit into a planet Doug sort of feeling like the day that I decide to go up and over this climb
is the day that like this crazy windstorm comes out of nowhere. Just little things like that tend to happen.
That is a, as I said, I’ve never I don’t think I’ve ever seen wind in Malaysia before. I’ve seen ton of sunshine, hot tropical sun. I’ve seen heavy tropical rains. I’ve seen thunderstorms, lightning. I’ve seen everything. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a windstorm like this.
When I learned that that man was a retired geography teacher, I’d mentioned the mountains here. He said he was interested in going to Canada to see the geography of Canada. And then I just sort of mentioned, oh, these mountains here in Malaysia. And I was going to ask him like, oh, can you tell me about these mountains, like their history and their geology, but I didn’t I forgot to ask him. As a geography teacher, he’d probably know all about them.
I’m just entering the base of the hills and the climb has started. I can see it up ahead. Yeah. very steep right up there. You can tell though on camera things always look a little bit weird,
especially a wide angle camera like a GoPro, it doesn’t really capture the gradient of a steep road. But sometimes I’ve noticed if you’re coming down a hill on one side and then it flattens and goes up the other side. If you see that whole thing ahead of you, there is like an optical illusion where your downward grade combines with the upgrade to make it look far far steeper than it actually is. So, you can’t rely on your eyes.
All I can rely on is how it feels and my speedometer. Once I’m down in four or 5 kilometers an hour, I know we’re at the bottom of a very steep climb. So, here we go. slow and steady. According to what I read online, the steep portion is like 1.8 km long.
But since this is very early in the trip, one thing I’m lacking is the leg power. I’m not actually in very good physical condition. So, this will likely be a bit of a challenge getting to the top. And I’ll rest a little bit now and then.
Riding up this slope with my bike as it is now. It’s really heavily loaded. I have a lot of gear with me once you factor in all the water I’m carrying, the laptop, all the camera gear, camping gear, everything. It’s a And my bicycle itself is heavy duty. Everything here is overbuilt and too heavy. So, this is a lot to power up these hills. And what I’m worried about, to be honest, is breaking the chain. So, I’m going to see for this part anyway.
Oh, what the heck?
Flat tire. I was down there. Actually, I filmed myself riding my bike.
And while I was that while I was walking back to get the camera, I heard an explosion, like a loud bang. And I just assumed it was from the bamboo. But I have a flat tire. That is so rare. Let’s see. I want to get to a convenient spot where I can fix this.
But yeah, I mean it was a Well, let me take the bags off to lighten the load. Yeah, look at that. Huh. Cuz that I don’t think it was like a puncture. It was It sound It was an explosion.
I haven’t had a flat tire for so long.
I cannot remember.
I have no idea what’s going on. It’ll be quite interesting to see
what this flat looks like.
Yeah, it looks like It looks like I blew out the entire tire. I might have to turn around and go back and get a new tire. Let’s
let’s push this to the top of the hill.
That is wild. I never expected that
cuz I don’t think it’s a flat tire. Not the tube. I think it’s the the actual sidewall of the tire blew out and
well adventures, you know, right out of the gate.
I think I have to go back to town and see if I can buy a new tire.
Okay.
Well, I think this situation calls more for that zen state of mind because again one thing I’ve learned over the years is that if you have a flat tire, which again is so rare for me, like I said, this is not really a flat tire. I don’t think I think I blew out the whole the sidewall of the tire. It must have gotten Yeah, I keep talking about how in the tropics the heat and humidity wears out rubber and plastic. So, I guess these tires just became brittle. I didn’t over I didn’t over pump them or anything, but yeah, they blew. Anyway, I was just saying that if you get a flat tire and it feels like, oh, my day is ruined and you rush to fix it because you’re trying to get somewhere, you got to dump all that to the side. It’s just like let everything go and just you’re in a new situation now and I probably have to go back to town anyway. So, maybe I can put in a new tube if the tube blew as well and just walk the bike back into town. I guess I have to buy new tires, but we don’t know for sure yet. I still have to dismantle it. And one thing I just realized is my broomstick is a little bit of a problem now because normally I turn my bicycle over onto the ground so I can remove the wheel, but now the broomstick doesn’t really allow that. better, huh? Maybe I can do something here. Anyway, deep breath. Relax. The day has changed. Just have to make the best out of the day that you now are dealing with. So, let’s get to work. Yeah, it just occurred to me that I wasn’t even riding the bike when the tire blew. So, it’s not like I was putting pressure on anything. The I wasn’t even sitting on the bike. So, my weight wasn’t on the bike at all. Yeah, I was walking towards the bike or no, I was walking away from the bike to retrieve the camera and then I heard that bang. So, I wasn’t even on it. But anyway,
let us Well, let’s take a look at it before I take anything apart.
oh, maybe not. Oh, no. Yeah, right here. Yeah, the sidewall blew out here.
Yeah, it looks like the whole sidewall is just Oh, it blew out here, too.
I guess the whole tire is just turned to brittle rubber. Has no strength anymore. Perfect time to try to ride your bike to Thailand
is when your tires can’t even make it up a hill, the very first hill. So, this is going to be a little bit complicated. I have to remove my broomstick. I never thought about that, but as I said, I never get flat tires, so I wasn’t really concerned about that at all.
I definitely found the blowout. It’s definitely It’s an explosion. It blew. My tire actually blew. And I think that’s because the the sidewall of my tire is just is just gone. I never even noticed. I never even looked into it to be honest. And it’s not It wasn’t that the tube was pumped up too much. It didn’t have too much pressure. It’s just that the tire couldn’t hold in the pressure of the tube. And
yeah, if you go around the tire the the sidewall like right here, there’s like nothing left there. It’s just And here it actually you can I can stick my finger all the way through there and then all the way through here. So another another gash here. Look at that. Oh yeah. I don’t know why. I just I just thought the tires were fine. Never even occurred to me to check them over to be honest cuz I’ve been riding these I guess I’ve been riding on these tires for a while. It never occurred to me that they were in such bad shape. So yeah, my fault. And
I guess I’m really out of practice with these things because I had my bike set up here. I parked it and it’s on a hill. Everything is kind of on weird angles and this big gust of wind came out of nowhere like just like a little typhoon wind blew my bike over and I think it landed on the derailleur and just bent the whole derailleur and now I couldn’t even get my wheels out. It was like my wheel was jammed in and I think the derailleur is completely bent as well. And derailleurs for me are really hard to maintain.
They’re such precision instruments for placing your chain and if your bike falls over and lands on the derailleur and bends one of the parts, my brain can’t handle the geometry to figure out, okay, what exactly is wrong? How do I fix it? So, right now, I can’t even get it into first gear anymore because the whole derailleur mechanism is screwed up. Anyway, I think the day is over as far as cycling up this hill is concerned. There’s just no way I can’t continue on these wheels. So, I’m going to have to I’ll put in another tube, pump it up a little bit, and maybe walk back to town. To be honest, I’ll probably spend the night back in Rembau just to sort of reset, figure out where I can buy new tires. I probably have to go to Seremban or all the way back to Kuala Lumpur. Just Yeah, the the journey has halted before it even began. I have two new tubes. This one is for the the trailer tire and I have one extra tube for my bicycle tires. But yeah, I guess I was talking as I started today’s ride, how casually I approached this bicycle ride because, you know, I’ve gone on long trips before and I’ve used this bike many, many times. This bike goes all the way back to a trip to Ethiopia back in 1998. I was there for almost a year, you know.
Yeah, I mean I I’m just so casual about it, I guess. And I’m so accustomed to relying on this bicycle, it never ever lets me down that I kind of lost track of things. And it never occurred to me cycling through Malaysia that maybe I should bring the bike in and have it overhauled in a shop here, like have some professionals look it over and go, “Oh yeah, you need new tires. you need. Your hubs are worn out, your You know, I just Yeah, I kind of I kind of eased into this trip thinking I could just hop on the bike and go, and now I’m paying the price.
Yeah, these tires shouldn’t they shouldn’t even get on the rim so easily.
You should you’d have to fight with them normally.
Ah, all my gear is blowing away now. My clothing is blowing. Man, this wind.
Just about lost my shorts to the wind. I left my trailer open and the wind was blowing everything out of my trailer.
Oh yeah, any minute now I’m expecting to hear the theme song from Wizard of Oz and have a tornado come and just pick me up and carry me away cuz yeah, this wind is crazy. Where does weather like this come from? All right. tube. Let’s hope 26 in by 2.2. two 2.5. Let’s
and I don’t think I can ride the bike because I can’t pump up the tire properly. It’ll just blow out the sidewall again. So,
this is so crazy. Like I said, I can’t even remember the last time I had a flat tire. Of course, this is an unusual one. It was not really a flat. It was a explosion,
but I haven’t had to replace a tube or repair a tube in literally years. I just don’t get flat tires. Mainly because of the trailer, I think. cuz my trailer carries most of the weight. So I it’s harder for a puncture. Like if I run over a nail or something, it it doesn’t. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.
Yeah. And I guess if you’re trying to keep that zen mindset going, you can add a few other things to the mix. One is that in terms of this explosion happening, it’s not a bad spot. Can you imagine if I’d gone all the way up to the top, all the way down the other side, and then this happened? That would be a bit worse cuz then I’ve got a lot farther to come back. Plus
rain, right? It’s not raining. The wind has been a bit of a problem and it may have screwed up my bike somehow, but
at least it’s not pouring rain. So, you always need to look on the bright side.
Yeah. When I tried to take the the wheel out of the frame, it wouldn’t come because this side of the hub was jammed into the stays. So, I think when the bike fell over, I think I bent the frame of the bike as well. Or maybe it was bent in the past. But yeah, I really had to work hard to get this out of there.
All right, that’s nothing else I can do there. Just pump this up a little bit.
Just enough to walk it back into town, I guess.
Yeah, that’s
that’s as much as I dare put in.
Wonder how much tire pressure that is. 4 1/2 lb. 4.5 PSI.
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a big scrape here on this side. brand new. Yeah, that’s what that’s the sort of thing I hate more than anything. Okay, I overlooked the wear and tear on my tires. That’s on me. That was a dumb thing to do. But if your bike falls over because it’s unsteady and there’s a wind blowing, that’s really it’s such a small thing. But because I didn’t put my bike in the proper spot and because of this stupid kickstand, I’m going to blame the kickstand.
I’m going to end up with a huge amount of trouble because I bent my derailleur. And the derailleur is the most important thing on the bike. And all of this derailleur problem could have been avoided if I just paid more attention to the wind and and whether my bike was steady or not. Yeah, it hit hard.
Who knows? So, I might have to just try the hammer approach, you know, just slam it from the one’s other side and see if I can bend it back into position cuz I tried fiddled around with it before. I couldn’t I couldn’t get down into first gear. It actually pushes way too far over. So, the whole thing is out of alignment because it’s bent. Yeah.
And as I said, I think I even bent the frame of the bike because
it had a lot of trouble
coming loose.
Something’s scraping. Where where is it scraping?
Yeah, the the wheel doesn’t want to slip into position properly. Oh, there it is. Just took a lot more force because And it could be like when I was in Sumatra, there were at least two times I remember other people, wasn’t me, but other people knocked over my bicycle.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mention it when my bike fell over just now. It also broke my mirror.
Luckily, as far as I can tell, it didn’t break the GoPro. The GoPro also hit the ground.
And the GoPro has a big scrape on the side now. But as far as I can tell, it’s still still working.
That’s the trailer hitch. I’m going to have to get it angled right
before I tighten that up. Yeah, it’s a heavy bicycle. It really is.
Oh,
I didn’t even notice my bike fell over again.
Luckily, I don’t know who knows what broke this time. I’m telling you this, it’s the little things in life. This kickstand business. Trying to get my kickstand repaired in Malaysia, buying a cheap local one has led to so many problems. You know what’s that old story, the legend or the fable for the lack of a nail, a kingdom was lost. I forget the whole story now, but some sort of classic fable of knights and kingdoms and to save the kingdom, the guy had to ride his horse somewhere, but the horse shoe fell off cuz he didn’t have a nail to fix it. So, we ended up losing the whole kingdom all because of a nail. And my entire bike is being destroyed because I have such a crappy kickstand and I’m not paying attention and it’s so windy and this weird hill. I can’t seems to balance my bike.
This time when it fell over, it landed on the pannier bag. So it cushioned everything and the derailleur is on this side. So
So there’s the latest position of my bike. And you can see how the the kickstand is actually parallel to the wheel. The entire kickstand just bent just completely bent out of the way. It has no strength at all. It’s just a complete piece of junk. I hate that kickstand so much. Ah, it’s caused me so much trouble. All this problem because of that dumb cheap kickstand.
Do you hear that crackling sound? Banging and cracking? That’s the bamboo up there.
And I’m accustomed to bamboo in the wind making like loud banging because they’ll actually stick together as they grow and then when the wind a strong wind comes they’ll break apart and they kind of crack. So when I heard that loud bang I thought it was the bamboo but it was my tire blowing up. Anyway, I’m just trying to make sure I didn’t leave any tools on the ground.
No cameras. Everything’s okay. All right. So, now we have a little bit of a walk ahead of us. Walking back to Rembau.
I could ride the bike, you know, now that I have the weight on the front wheel. I could pump up the tire, take a chance, but if I blow my second tube, then I’m done. So here again
now that everybody knows this hill as a cycling hill and then if they see me you know rolling my bike along they’ll think ah what the heck was that? Oh good grief
glass bottle. I hope that didn’t puncture my front tire. Um,
they’re all going to be thinking, “Ha, our Malaysian hill, it’s too much for that foreign cyclist. He even has to walk his bike going downhill.” But in a way, they would be right because going up this Malaysian hill, it did defeat me. Yeah, now that I’m going down, I can really feel how steep it is. So they the sign said 10% grade. So 10% is probably the maximum. So I don’t know. 10% doesn’t feel like very much as a number. But I can really feel it right now.
This is kind of interesting. I’ve been seeing signs like this quite a bit. So I did a Google translate on it and I had a rough idea of course of what it meant. But what’s interesting is the first word on the bottom line k u r a n g k a n lu. It basically means reduce your speed like go slow because there’s a village ahead. But the interesting thing is when you start typing that word into Google Translate, you get a few words along the way. So I was typing in Kur A and that means turtle or tortoise. And then you add an N but add a G and it means less. So kura is turtle, kurang is less and kurang means reduce. So it all goes from the root word to do with a turtle. So turtle less reduce all based on how slow a turtle is. So yeah, I just thought that was kind of interesting. And so on we go. Yeah, we’re very much like a turtle today. Ah, there’s another bang. Luckily, that’s not my bicycle, not my other tire.
Yeah, the town. Going back to my hotel. I guess I’ll just book that hotel room for another night tonight and figure something out what to do. Maybe I can buy a couple of tires in the city like right here in Rembau. Maybe I could buy tires here and then I can get everything done today and depart tomorrow. Assuming my derailleur, I can get it aligned again or I have to tomorrow head into Seremban or Kuala Lumpur. Could go by train which is interesting. I noticed when I rode into the city that they have a train station here. So, I could hop on the KTM to go into the big city if I can’t find good tires here.
I made it back to the main road. Not a very pleasant experience
having to push push my bike along the edge with all this traffic.
It’s stressful enough riding your bicycle, pushing it for some reason even more so.
Yeah. Malaysia, the land of cars, the land of traffic.
It’ll be funny going back to the same hotel.
And hopefully they have a room available cuz it is Saturday now. They could be fully booked in advance, but we’ll see. Yeah, I suppose this afternoon, like once I settle back into my room, I’ll
I keep getting sticks caught in my wheels and pedals. Yeah, this afternoon I’ll probably see if I can find a bicycle shop here in Rembau.
I suppose I’ll just have to make do with the with whatever tires I can find. Can’t be choosy.
But I don’t need I don’t need the best tires on the market that are going to last years and years and years.
I just need any any 26-in tire that’ll get me down the road.
I keep thinking, yeah, there’s so many ways that you can look on the bright side. What I mean is these tires were clearly at the end of their lifespan. They could have blown up at any point. And
if you had to be somewhere where your tires blew up, you could do a lot worse than being here in Malaysia. I was just thinking if this had happened in somewhere far away in Sumatra or somewhere
wouldn’t be quite so easy to get to a nearby town and buy a couple of tires and maybe get your derailleur banged back into position.
I was talking the other day about the American hobo who is a cyclist, long-distance cyclist and a YouTuber currently going through Indonesia and yeah he rode all the way through Sumatra through Java, Bali, Lombok, Flores and the conditions just got tougher and tougher and tougher. And he’s a hardcore cyclist. He rides almost every day. Just day after day after day, he’s back on the bike. He doesn’t take that many days off. And then when he was in Indonesia, he started experiencing quite a few breakdowns.
I’m in touch with the American hobo privately through like direct messages. So, I know everything that he’s been going through, everything he’s had to overcome. And it’s just it’s pretty wild. I won’t talk about it here because
he hasn’t quite posted all the videos from those days yet. So, I don’t want to give away the story. You don’t want to spoil his videos, but wow, he has had so much to deal with. My little my little problem here with a an exploding tire. That’s yeah, nothing at all compared to what he had to deal with. And the conditions he was riding through were so tough, far tougher than these little hills.
I don’t think I could have done what he did in Indonesia.
I wouldn’t I don’t have the I don’t have the physical or emotional stamina to live through all of that. Camping out every night, camping in the rain night after night after night. Yeah, he had to deal with a lot.
back in town just across the road from the hotel where I was staying last night.
So yeah, as far as I know, it’s the only reasonable reasonably priced hotel in town for someone on a low budget. A poor fellow like myself who keeps blowing up his tires.
I need to spend my money on new tires, not fancy hotel rooms.
Now it’s time to play the Malaysian version of Frogger. Trying to get across the road here.
Well, luck was on my side. They do have a room. There was a lot of discussion about it. There seemed to be some sort of problem, but I could be that the room that I checked out of hasn’t been cleaned yet. So, it’s like it’s still quarter to 12:00 in the morning, so it’s like 2 hours plus early check-in. And they were probably saying, oh, the room isn’t clean yet. And I would have I would have told them, well, I was staying in that room. You don’t have to clean it, right? But
then I don’t know, there was a woman there this time and she had to go find the man that I was dealing with and then the two of them put their heads together. They eventually came up and with a solution and gave me the key to room 2011. So I yeah, I get a early check-in which helps out a lot.
So, I’m going to unpack, move into my new room, and then figure out where I’m going to go shopping for bike parts. Well, I’m still in the middle of figuring out how and where to get my new tires for my bicycle, but a Planet Doug mystery benefactor has ordered a snack for me. And yeah, it’s been taking quite a while for the delivery to get here, but then I suddenly saw a notice just kind of popped up. You know, it’s like, we’re here, we’re here. And we’re on the way anyway. And I think this must be my guy. Hello. Yeah. Roy. Roy. Yes, please. Yeah, they have Remo here and there. Yeah, two different places. Ah, okay. Excellent. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I didn’t get much warning about the delivery. It was like not coming, not coming, not coming. And then the next notification I got was here. But yeah, all worked out in the end.
And look at that. McDonald’s. We deliver when you’re too lazy to go out. a spicy deluxe burger, large fries, large coke, and GF processing fee. So, a large Coke, large fries, and I wasn’t too lazy to go out, but I’m very hop Yeah, this is where the bike is stored if you haven’t seen this. So, there’s my my poor bicycle with its blown out rear tire. I keep going through the wrong door cuz this isn’t the door to the actual rooms. You have to go through this door to get to my room.
Yeah. When I stayed here last night, I was in room 2011, no, 202. And I thought I might get the same room, but a family has moved in there. And yeah, most of the time when I see Malaysians in hotels, which is pretty rare, most of the time the hallways are open, I mean empty, and I never see anybody. But this time, I just happened to see who moved in to 202, so I had to get to 2011. That’s
okay.
Come on. There we go.
And yeah, here it is. My my new room. Very I mean in terms of the furnishings and the style, it’s identical to the other room, just different shape, laid out differently.
So, it actually has a table over here with a chair, which is nice. So, you can sit down there and enjoy a meal. And it has a balcony just like the other room. Basically, yeah, looking out in the same direction.
I don’t know that I have to do a blowby-blow account of McDonald’s food. I think we are all pretty familiar with it. But nice and hot. So there you go. That’s Ooh, ketchup. You get ketchup or spicy sauce? Yeah, chili sauce. I’ve grown to prefer the chili sauce now because that’s what you normally get in a place like Malaysia, you know, McDonald’s in United States or Canada, you’re going to get ketchup. They maybe modern times they might serve ketchup and like a chili sauce in a in an American or Canadian McDonald’s. I don’t know. But anyway, they normally use ketchup in Canada. And but now since I’ve been here for a long time, I’ve tried the chili many many times and now I prefer it. If I sometime sometimes when they see a foreigner, they’ll bring ketchup instead and I’ll just have the ketchup. But now it tastes too sweet to me and I miss the chili. And this is a spicy chicken Mc Deluxe. I’m so I’m so excited. I didn’t have breakfast this morning. Didn’t have lunch either, as it turned out, cuz I was so busy with the bicycle. And yeah, it’s 4:00, so I’ve had nothing to eat all day. So, this is my first little bit of food for today. And as I said in a maybe earlier in the video or yesterday’s video, I have some reserves going right now. So, it doesn’t really matter if I miss a meal or two cuz I need to get rid of all this stuff around the middle if I can. Anyway, yeah, let’s bite into this.
Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.
Spicy.
Very good.
and fries of course.
Also nice and warm
and a large Coke.
Before I finish this off, quick story about the bicycle. I’ve been looking into my options and I think Seremban, the big city, it’s about 30 kilometers away. Had I been thinking about it and if I had more energy, well, no, it wouldn’t have worked out. Scratch that. Anyway, in Seremban, they have bicycle shops and it sounds I was looking at all of them online and a couple of them look like they can do repairs and you can get tires. They’re going to be expensive. I think I thought maybe they would sell only generic local brands, but I think most people just buy a bicycle with tires and they never go back to buy new tires. that bicycle just turns into rust at the same time as the tires fall apart. So, the the only photo I saw online of a bicycle shop that had tires on display, they were Maxxis brand, Maxxis, and they’re high-end, high quality, like mountain bike, dirt bike tires. So, they might be the only ones I can buy that fit my wheels. And yeah, so they could be quite pricey, but we’ll see when I get there. So I can go to Seremban. Unfortunately, tomorrow is Sunday and the two best bike stores that I found that might have the gear that I need. they’re both closed on Sunday. So going there tomorrow, I could go there tomorrow, spend the night in a hotel there. So in order to do that, I was thinking I could ride my bike to Seremban. I could take a chance. What I would do is take the tire off the front wheel, remove the rubber tire and put it on the back rim and take the tire the the one that blew up, take it from the rear rim, move it to the front. And I would do that because if I’m sitting on the bike and riding, all of my weight is on the rear wheel. So if I move the blown tire to the front wheel, I should be able to get away with riding to Seremban. Put in low PSI. There’s no weight on the front wheel. And I always travel with these. These are Park Tool emergency tire boots, TB2. And these are basically designed for emergencies where if you go over a sharp piece of metal or glass and it like a really cuts open your tire, you can apply one of these heavy duty patches. It has a powerful adhesive and then you can actually repair a blown sidewall temporarily. Anyway, it’s an emergency repair, not permanent. But if I take the tire off and then
put these patches on like there’s at least three holes like actual I can put my finger through the holes and there’s other areas that are about to burst. But I can take this, cut them in half, and I can cover up all of the holes so that the tube pressing against the hole isn’t going to like come out the other side and explode like a balloon. So I’m going to I can use these to fix the tire, move the tire to the front wheel and then I can ride to Seremban 30 kilometers, stay in a hotel there overnight and then on Monday morning go to a bike shop or several bike shops. I think this is what I have to do. The alternative is to go by train which wouldn’t be a bad option. There’s a KTM KTMB train station right here and it’s like 20 minutes to get by train from here to Seremban and I can bring my bicycle. So that might even be the better option. I can keep this room, just pack up like for a day trip on Monday, just spend Sunday here and then on Monday take the train to Seremban with my bicycle. That’s probably a better option. And then I can ride my bike around Seremban to all the bike shops all day Monday, get it repaired, get new tires, and then I can take the train back here. Yeah, same day, you know, a day trip. Go as early as possible. I think that’s what I’ll end up doing. So, anyway, that’s what’s going on with my my bicycle.