VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
First morning in Dumai, Sumatra! Ferry stories, immigration quizzes, mosquito hunting, no towels, and a trip to Telkomsel to get my phones working again. Plus: the mystery of where all the milk went. Adventure awaits on Planet Doug. 🌏☕🦟
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning. Welcome back to Planet Doug. First morning here in Dumai, Sumatra at my local low-budget hotel. I just woke up, just got out of bed. You can hear my voice is still froggy. I haven’t fully woken up yet.
As you can see, I have a new bottle of drinking water. Turns out there’s an Indomaret, the local one of the types of convenience store just about 300 meters up the road. So I went there last night. A little bit of a rough night though. I think part of it was the journey itself was pretty simple. Things went smoothly taking the ferry. Yesterday I took the ferry, the Indomal fast ferry from Melaka in Malaysia across the Malacca Strait into Sumatra. I mean everything went smoothly. I didn’t have any trouble at all. But still, there’s a lot going on. You know, packing up and getting ready and getting organized the day before, the night before in the morning, getting to the terminal, checking in for the ferry, waiting, the crowds. There’s a little bit of stress involved. Turns out I had the wrong boarding pass. I got my ticket a few days in advance and they gave me my boarding pass in advance. But in the meantime, I guess they decided to change the boat and when they change the boat for whatever reason, your boarding pass is now invalid. And I didn’t know that. And I was thinking that I got two phone calls that I never heard because I don’t have the ringer turned on on my phone because I don’t have phone calls. I don’t make phone calls. I don’t receive phone calls. The only phone calls I ever get are spam callers. So I just ignore phone calls. But it turned out there were two phone calls from a Malaysian number I didn’t recognize. And I started wondering afterwards, I wonder if that was Indomal trying to call me to tell me about the change of boat. I still don’t know because I didn’t answer the phone. And I didn’t even notice the phone was ringing. But that’s a possibility, which is kind of annoying though when you think about it ’cause they had my email address. I figured don’t call me. Send me an email. That’s how you get my attention. Text message or an email, something like that. Anyway, maybe they tried to contact me and tell me this. I just didn’t know. So even when I at the very end of my waiting period and everybody jumps up and rushes to the lineup, there’s one lineup for the economy passengers, one for the VIP passengers. Normally I would try to be at the very front of the line. If I can, I’ll time things, but in this case it didn’t work out that way. So I came in late and then there was a huge crowd and I got in the line and there was a lot of difficult passengers in terms of luggage. I mentioned that there were a lot of medical passengers. So I think a lot of people come from Indonesia to Malaysia when they’re elderly, when they have medical problems to get treatment that they can’t get say here in Dumai or Riau province and they just hop on the boat go across to Malaysia and then they go to a hospital in Malaysia on medical tourism basically. So there were lots and lots of these elderly people in wheelchairs and then all their family members were with them. It was kind of interesting because I saw so many people on the boat carrying the same piece of luggage. A number of them had these big cardboard white flat envelopes with a handle. It’s almost like a cardboard suitcase and they all said radiography on them. So they’re all walking around carrying these radiography things. So I’m assuming they were X-rays that they got in Malaysia and now they’re bringing them back with them. A lot of people had these things. So anyway, getting in the lineup and there was kids with parents, young families with huge strollers and the baby bags full of all the toys and the diapers and everybody’s crowding. So it was not an easy line to navigate. And of course 50% of the people got in the wrong line. I saw economy here, VIP here. So I know I go in this way, but most of the people in my line, in my VIP line, were economy passengers. So they would get up towards the front and then they had Malaysian staff there. So can we see your ticket? Can we see your ticket? And oh, you know, you next other line, other line, other line. So all these people then have to fight out of the lineup, get all the way back out, go to the end. Long discussions about all this. So it’s not an easy lineup to navigate. I finally get to the front and the guy is scanning everybody’s QR code on their boarding pass with his phone and it’s just like go. I get there he goes go and then he’s like oh no don’t go don’t go. He’s like mine didn’t work. And he’s looking at his phone. He says oh your boarding pass is invalid sir. I’m like what do you mean? So this is when I’m thinking the Planet Doug Luck is starting to kick in that, okay, what does this mean? I don’t have a seat. I don’t have a ticket. I’m not going to get out today. My visa is going to expire. I’m going to overstay. This is when the snowball starts to roll downhill. The disaster on its way. And he didn’t tell me what was wrong. He just says, “Oh, you know, your boarding pass. Sorry. Out. No good. You can’t get on this boat. You’re gone.” I’m like, so I had to get out of line. He wasn’t going to let me go through. But then I went back to the Indomal ticket counter. Luckily, Indomal ticketing was there. Can you imagine if their office was in town somewhere and I had to somehow figure this out. But then when I went up to the counter, they kind of looked up at me, the people that were there, and they were waiting for me. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, come come come.” And I looked on the desk and they had one boarding pass, just one boarding pass sitting there on the counter and they were waiting for me to come exchange my boarding pass. So they knew I had the wrong one and maybe everybody did and everybody knew and everybody had already exchanged but mine was the very last one that hadn’t been exchanged. But luckily they had done it automatically and I wasn’t denied a seat or anything. They just gave me the new boarding pass because they had a new boat. I was on the Indomal Kingdom. So anyway, that happened and then you got the boat ride and you’re going through customs, going through immigration. I mentioned on the video yesterday that the immigration officer in Malaysia, they always ask me a lot of questions. And I think it’s unusual for someone like me to cross by boat. So they want to make sure everything’s okay, that you are who you say you are. And in this case, I think they wanted to make sure that I wasn’t traveling under a false identity because I guess he saw I was wearing my Canada shirt. I don’t know whether he saw that. And then I had my passport from Canada, my brand new passport. And maybe he thought I was overdoing it. It’s like, come on, dude. Canada shirt. Who are you trying to fool? We know you’re from Serbia or wherever, traveling under a false passport. And he started quizzing me about Canada. But I couldn’t really understand his accent. So I thought I was going to fail the test. But I thought he asked me, “What is the most famous lake in Canada?” And to be honest, there is no most famous lake. There are the Great Lakes as a group. They are the most famous lakes. Maybe Lake Louise is quite famous as a tourist destination in the Rocky Mountains. So I didn’t really know the answer to his question. And there is no single everybody says this is the most famous lake in Canada. We have thousands of lakes, tens of thousands, but then I said well Lake Huron ’cause I was born in a city on the shore of Lake Huron. I grew up on Lake Huron and then I said it’s part of the Great Lakes if that’s what you mean. Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, you know, so I’m trying to prove I’m Canadian, but I was thinking later on that I was kind of lucky he didn’t get into current events. Like everybody always asks time travelers, who is the president of the United States? But if you’re not political, you may not know. Like if somebody said to me out of the blue, well, who’s the prime minister of Canada? You say you’re Canadian. Who’s the prime minister? Or who’s the premier of Alberta? I may or may not be able to answer yesterday. If he’d asked me about the prime minister of Canada, I wouldn’t have been able to think of it. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s a guy named Carney. And the only reason I know about Carney is because of President Trump of the United States who picked a fight with Canada over and over and then Carney kept having to respond. So in an unusual twist, Canada has been in the pop culture news, in the YouTube news where Carney keeps talking about the US wanting to make Canada the 51st state and all the tariffs and all the Trump stuff going on. So actually, I kind of knew the name Carney, but yesterday, I wouldn’t have been able to think of it. So if he’d asked me that question, I would have failed. But anyway, I’m only telling those little stories to get across the fact that by the time I got to Indonesia, I was already pretty tired. The boat ride, then going through immigration and customs going to my hotel and my brain was spinning. So that’s why I had a rough night. My brain wouldn’t turn off yesterday and I just could not fall asleep. I got very little sleep last night. So I’m not feeling that great today. Easygoing day yesterday, but it was still pretty rough. And then when I moved into this room, this is low-budget hotel in Dumai. I commented on how many mosquitoes there were. This place was filled with mosquitoes. And I’m guessing what they did was leave the door open most of the day because in an odd twist, the lobby and the hallway is air conditioned, which is unusual for a hotel like this, but everything out there is air conditioned. And I think they left the door open so that the air conditioning could keep this room cool for my arrival, which I appreciate. But the open door meant mosquitoes just poured in. It was filled with mosquitoes. And I tracked down and killed as many as I could, but I got bitten last night all night long. Just bitten over and over and over. And I don’t know where they are. Quite often in one of these low-budget hotel rooms, if a mosquito comes in and bites me, they get so bloated, they don’t fly very far. They’ll actually fly away and then they’ll land on the wall. And you can actually see on the wall all these mosquitoes that are just sitting there, these big red mosquitoes. Like, okay, there’s all the ones that bit me. But they’re expert camouflage artists, these ones. I don’t know where they’re hiding, so I don’t know where they are, but they bit me on the neck. I got all kinds of bites on the neck, on my cheek, on my forehead, on my ears, ’cause I had this sheet up to my shoulder. I sleep under a sheet, but my head was exposed. And they just went to town. I never felt them. But then I would keep waking up and I would wake up and okay, I’m very allergic to mosquito bites, so my skin just gets inflamed and so itchy. So I got bit all night long from the mosquitoes.
Let me get organized here while I chat. I have to set up Planet Doug Studios, which means I have to set up my backboard. The pillows are not the greatest, so it was kind of hard to sleep. I couldn’t get comfortable with this pillow. Also a funny thing, they didn’t supply or they don’t supply towels apparently. And when I packed for this trip, I talked about how I tried to take only the minimum, like only the stuff I absolutely needed. And I guess I went a bit too far with that. So I didn’t even bring my own towel. And then I got in the room and oh yeah, they don’t supply towels. So took a shower and I’m drying myself off with an old t-shirt sort of thing. The bed, the mattress is pretty hard. I guess I’ve been spoiled because of my time in Malaysia. Even in a low-budget hotel in Malaysia, it’s several steps above a low-budget hotel here in terms of the comfort level and the facilities. Of course, there’s no hot water. There’s barely water in the bathroom. You turn it on, it just kind of like fizzes a little bit and it’s cold water. So it’s sort of like, oh yeah, I forgot about all that in Sumatra. It’s all coming back to me now.
Most important thing I need my laptop. And another reason I couldn’t get much sleep last night. I’m having laptop troubles. Making sure the screws didn’t fall out. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe this Asus TUF is not as tough as advertised. Like bouncing on my bicycle in my pannier bag or in the trailer. Maybe it’s starting to exhibit some problems because it just keeps freezing. Whatever it is I’m trying to do, it’s like the CPU disappears. Like it has no processing power and whatever it is I’m trying to do just stops happening. Like the laptop just doesn’t respond. And then it sits there for a while and then it just kind of kicks back in again. And I really noticed it when I was copying video files. I’ve actually had this problem for a few days now. I just haven’t talked about it where if I put in a memory card in a card reader and I’m copying 50 gigabytes of video files, the copying usually goes very, very fast and now it goes at its normal rate and then it just stops because the computer just stops working. Goes down to zero. So in terms of megabytes per second transfer speed, it just goes down to zero and just sits there. And it says the job is going to take 15 minutes or 10 minutes, whatever it is, but it’ll take 30 to 40 minutes just to copy the video files now because it goes and then it just stops. And you can see the progress bar like it shows you how fast and then the bar goes down to zero and just stays at zero and it won’t start again. And I wait and I wait and I wait and then it goes starts copying and then down to zero. And then if I try to do something else it will actually freeze the whole laptop. So hopefully this is just a glitch, a ghost in the machine and it’s going to disappear. But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel good. Something’s wrong. Anyway, I haven’t showered yet, so I’m going to plug in my kettle for a morning cup of coffee. Oh, the other big problem. I forgot about that too. Wi-Fi. They do have Wi-Fi here, but it doesn’t reach this room. So inside this room, I essentially have no Wi-Fi. I can’t go on the internet. I can’t do anything. There’s no way. So if I want to do anything internet related while I’m here, I’m going to have to deal with my nemesis, Indonesian customs. I actually have two Indonesian SIM cards. Both of them are valid. Both of them are good. They both have credit. So ’cause I have two phones and each one has a valid Indonesian SIM card, but both of them have been blocked again by Indonesian customs because of the IMEI number. You have to register the IMEI number. And so I have had no access to the internet at all. So the first thing I’m going to do this morning after I get organized is head to Telkomsel GraPARI again and just throw myself on their mercy. Say I got two phones here. Can you turn one of them on? Can you convince customs to lift the blockade of my internet access? So that’s going to be the first thing I do every time I come to Sumatra. Normally I arrive on the weekend and then I have to wait for Saturday or Sunday until the GraPARI office opens on Monday and it takes me days just to get on the internet. So anyway, turn that on while I’m taking a shower. Let the water boil. But they did give me a couple of packages of instant coffee. I don’t usually like this because it has sugar in it and I don’t add sugar to my coffee. But since it’s there, I will indulge.
I don’t know if there’s any other overnight adventures. I think that’s about it. And that’s enough adventures to start my first day on my visa run to Sumatra.
Shower done. And I like to re-boil my kettle. The kettle comes to a boil and turns off, but then I hold the button down for a few seconds just to get a rolling boil. I want it to be as hot as possible. The other trick in one of these low-budget hotels, at least in Sumatra, in these small towns, there’s no mirror at all in the bathroom. So I shave every morning as a rule. So I end up putting soap. I use a bar of soap instead of shaving cream ’cause you can’t carry around a bottle of actual shaving cream. That’s too heavy even for me. So I use a bar of soap to lather up my face, but I need a mirror in order to shave properly. I have to come out here. So I come out into the room and I’m shaving looking in this mirror ’cause there’s no mirror in the bathroom. My toiletries kit does have a little handheld mirror, but it’s so old that you can’t see anything in it anymore.
So coffee and these three-in-one coffee mixes usually don’t have enough cream powder, so I add a little bit of my own cream powder. I like it nice and white and creamy.
Don’t need the sugar, but I do like the cream. Oh, yeah. Here in Sumatra, they have this brand Max creamer instead of Coffee Mate. It’s exactly the same thing as Coffee Mate. So this is what I use in my coffee in Indonesia. When I went to the Indomaret yesterday to buy water, I picked up a box of that as well. Oh, the other funny thing, the main reason I went into Indomaret was not to get water because I had my own bottles of water. I made sure I had these on the bicycle. So I brought liters and liters of water from Malaysia ’cause I just like to have water with me. And when you pay for the bicycle on the ferry, you’re not paying by weight. So if you have like six kilograms of water on your bike, it doesn’t matter. It’s 20 ringgit to bring your bicycle, no matter how much it weighs. So I brought all this water. I didn’t need to buy any water, but I went in ’cause I wanted to get milk. I didn’t have any dinner yesterday. Actually, I didn’t eat at all yesterday other than the little cookies that they gave us. And I wasn’t gonna have dinner or anything. I just didn’t have the energy to eat basically. But I thought I could get some milk, which I love. So I made the walk down to Indomaret to get some milk. And all over Asia, for whatever reason, they like their milk flavored. Like basic milk is not really that popular. So this Indomaret didn’t have any at all. There was no milk. You could get strawberry milk, banana flavored milk, chocolate milk, pineapple, all kinds of fruit flavors, but no natural normal milk. So even though I went all the way there, I was not able to get any milk at all.
8:00 right now. So I’m going to be on my computer for a minute or two. I have to do a couple of things. I cannot reply. I posted a new video yesterday from Malaysia, and I’d love to get on, spend a couple of hours replying to comments, but I have no internet, so I can’t do any of that right now. All right, let’s see if my Asus powers up. It’s really slow booting up as well, but I guess that happens to all laptops when they’re brand new. They boot really quickly and then just over time they get slower and slower and slower. Okay, it’s booting up. Asus in search of incredible. And what am I looking for?
This is what I’m looking for. My GoPro Hero 9 ’cause I have some videos on this that I want to copy to my laptop. I just want to get that job done. It’s a job I need to do, but I also want to see what’s going on with my laptop. And I spent so long yesterday troubleshooting. You have a problem and you have to isolate what the problem is and there’s so many factors you have to do all kinds of experiments testing and testing because my laptop has two high-speed USB-C ports. So maybe if when it comes to copying the video files and it’s not working, the problem could be the USB-C port. So you have to test all of the ports. I tested all of my USB-C, USB-A ports one by one by one. It could be my memory card reader. I bought this high-speed and as far as I’m concerned, high quality Lexar card reader. I think I bought that. I finally tracked one down. Might have been in Malaysia that I got it. But it could be that the card reader is a problem. Maybe the memory card. You don’t know. So basically you have to do a series of tests, do the test over and over again and then you do a test on every USB-C port, USB-A port and if the same problem is at every single port, you know it’s probably not the port. And then I have another card reader. It’s not a high-speed one, but I do have I usually have a bunch of them, but I cleaned out my gear recently. Got rid of a bunch of old gear, but I still have this low-speed card reader. So I did a whole bunch. I tested all of my ports with this card reader, and it was the same problem. So the video copying wouldn’t work, and with this one, it wouldn’t work. So it’s probably not the card reader. It’s not the port. It’s not the card reader. And I did a test with all of my memory cards. I’ve got 128 gigabyte like SanDisk Extreme. I’ve got SanDisk Extreme Pro. I’ve got 256 gigabyte cards. I’ve got 512 gigabyte cards. I tested a range of all these different memory cards. They all exhibited the same problem. So that’s pretty clear. It is not that this memory card is the problem. So it is the laptop, something internal. And my guess, I’ve had a lot of trouble with this laptop because I believe it’s because of power management. It’s a high-powered laptop that draws a lot of power and creates a lot of heat because of that power. But I’m told that in order to manage it, it has to be very aggressive with power management. So it will just turn things on and off randomly. It will throttle you and you have no control over it. It has these built-in Asus controller programs that are designed for gamers, I guess, that I don’t understand at all. And I’ve gone through all the settings multiple times and I’m thinking it is a power management problem that there’s something wrong with how the laptop is operating and then it just disables certain functions, throttles it, slows it down in order to reduce the power draw or heat production. I don’t know. This laptop has a lot of settings that are out of your control. There’s like all these weird Asus pro programs that it comes with. And I guess a gamer would understand them, but I don’t. It’s like oh, there’s AMD Software Adrenaline Edition ’cause it’s all AMD components. And then there’s crate. Asus crate. Armoury Crate. There it is. Armoury Crate controls this laptop in ways that I don’t understand. Anyway, we’re all booted up and I’m going to do a little bit of a video file copying test. Okay. This is a lot of video here to copy. Copy and paste. And let’s see what happens.
122 gigabytes of video and it’s a high-speed system. So it’s telling me it’s going to take 13 minutes to complete the job, which is one of the amazing things about this laptop. I mean, it’s so powerful and fast. So it should complete even it’s 122 gigabytes, but it’ll copy it. It’s copying at 155 megabytes per second. Oh, there it goes. Already down to zero.
It copied 4% of the video files. And then now it just stopped. The copying just stopped. Zero bytes per second. This is a big problem.
Something is wrong with the laptop. And I don’t know what it is. It’s not the memory card. It’s not the card reader. It’s not any individual USB port. So it’s something internal is happening. But I was trying to troubleshoot, but of course I don’t have access to the internet, so I can’t get help online. Oh, now it went back up again. Now it’s copying at normal speed, which is in this case 150 megabytes per second. Now it went down to 80. And there’s nothing else running. I’m not connected to the internet. The browser isn’t open. No other programs are open. Down to zero again. So it copied 1% more before it went down to zero. Oh, it’s going back up again. Back up to 155. So it’s at high speed again. And it’s just going to do this probably for an hour, hour and a half. Just go up and down. And when it gets to zero, it can stay at zero for a long, long time.
Anyway, so there is still a problem, but I don’t know what it is. This hotel, by the way, is kind of fun because it is such a local hotel and being here as a foreigner can be quite amusing ’cause you’re going to be the only foreigner here. And I noticed when I arrived a lot of the doors were open like mosquitoes. Oh, I got that one. Sorry, buddy.
I’m like the karate kid master. I actually got him in my fist. That’s why I got the idea that the door to this room was open all day long and that’s how all the mosquitoes got in because so many of the doors were open. And I think what’s going on there is that I could see through the door and there were like four, five, probably four people in each room. So they had a big double bed like this or queen I guess it is. But they had two more mattresses on the floor. So there was like four people at least sleeping in each room. So they’re living there long term. It’s operating as a residence for people. So they give them a lower monthly rate, but I guess part of that monthly rate is no air conditioning, but the lobby is air conditioned. So they leave the door open so that cold air goes into the room. So they’re not paying for air conditioning, but they’re still getting a little bit. So I think that anyway, it just makes the hotel kind of fun because you’re basically living amongst a group of people here who are very friendly. If I could speak Bahasa Indonesia or they could speak English, I could learn a lot about these people but there is a pretty strong language barrier. So most of what I learn about them will be I learn it very slowly and it takes a long time. Just have to read between the lines who these guys are, why they’re living in a hotel. They probably have a job here, but what kind of job? And I’ll probably chat with a few of them while I’m here, figure some of this stuff out. But it’s kind of fun hanging out at a hotel like this. I was going to bring my bicycle inside because it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of security here, but the hallway is really narrow. It’s hard to roll a bicycle through that hallway and I just left it outside last night. I kind of got used to doing that in Malaysia recently. I’m usually a stickler for bringing my bicycle inside because I’m worried about it getting wet if it rains at night and dust and dirt and people messing around with it. That would happen a lot in different countries where I leave my bike if I left my bike outside or even in the hotel lobby. I’d wake up in the morning to find that people have been fiddling with the gear shifters and everything was the chain was jammed and everything was out of sync. People just like to fiddle around with your bike during the night or of course somebody could steal it. Anyway, the problem is continuing and I wouldn’t be that worried about it if it was just copying because copying big video files can be problematic. But as I said, this symptom is spread across the rest of the laptop. Like when I’m editing and doing things like that, it will just become unresponsive. So I think it’s a deeper problem related to the SSD drives maybe inside the laptop, the CPU. I don’t know. Anyway,
this is the type of thing you have to deal with.
It’s not looking good. The laptop is completely frozen. Originally, this laptop could handle anything you could throw at it. Like if I sat down at the end of a day and I had a whole bunch of video files I wanted to copy, I just open up Windows Explorer and I start the copy job and it’s going to take 15 minutes and then I just fire up DaVinci Resolve and while it’s copying the video files, I’m just editing video ’cause it can do both at the same time. I can surf the internet. I can do like 10 things at the same time and this laptop could just handle it without any issues at all. But whatever this problem is, it can’t do that anymore and it just freezes. So now, I tried to open up DaVinci Resolve because I’m waiting for the files to finish copying and I just can’t sit here for an hour wasting my time. So I want to edit video while I’m waiting. But then the whole laptop just froze. And it’s not just that of course. I’m still trying to figure out my mobile internet situation.
And got to power up this smartphone.
So there’s so many complicated angles to that. Like I said, I have two smartphones. Each one has a valid Indonesian SIM card. This one and this one. This one has credit. And I’m trying to figure out whether I’m blocked by customs or not. ‘Cause you never quite know what they’re going to do. So I’m trying to figure that out. And the only way to do that is to try to access a mobile cellular network. And if you try to access mobile and then you get an error message, oh, you’re blocked by customs. But even though you’re blocked from mobile, you can still connect to wireless like Wi-Fi in the hotel. And so what I’ve been doing is going out into the lobby where they have a stronger Wi-Fi and then trying to get things up and running using the Wi-Fi and then I turn off Wi-Fi. Well, I’m using the Wi-Fi because I want to buy a data package. Stick with me here. The only way I can test whether I have a mobile connection, I have to have mobile data. Otherwise, the test will just fail anyway. So I’ve been busy trying to buy a data package because I thought I had 44,000 rupiah balance, but it just disappeared. Oh, okay. Because when I first turned it on and I wasn’t connected to the internet, it said I had 44,000 rupiah ’cause I left a balance in it when I left last time. But now that I connected to Wi-Fi, it communicated, updated, and now it says I have a balance of zero because mobile internet companies are not very nice. Put it that way. And if you leave money in your account and you don’t spend it, they just take it from you. Like, you can’t leave money in your account after 1 month, it expires. Your money has an expiry date on it and they just took my money. So now I have a balance of zero and I can’t buy anything though. This is weird. On one page it says balance zero but on the other page it says I still have 44,000 rupiah. So maybe this second page just hasn’t finished loading yet. Anyway, I’m trying to do all this with the very, very weak Wi-Fi connection. I get a little bit of a trickle into this room from time to time. So I’ll click on a button and then I just put the phone down on the bed. I just let it sit there for 20 minutes and maybe after 20 minutes it’ll do something. Anyway, this is my life. It’s just endless. Every morning I wake up and I’ve got 2 to 3 hours of technology troubleshooting, things I have to fix, things I have to figure out. I don’t know how other people do it. I honestly have no clue how other people survive because it’s just endless. I don’t know why everything goes wrong all the time. Anyway, I’m turning off the laptop. Nothing’s happening. I’m going to have to just force a shutdown. Come back to it later. And I can go try I’m going to head down to Telkomsel GraPARI. See if I can get one of these phones. I was sitting here and then I realized, hey, you know what? I still have a Malaysian SIM card, of course, and everything there is working fine. And I just remembered roaming. Maybe I can buy a roaming package and that will allow me to get on the internet through a roaming package. So I went into my CelcomDigi app and I bought a roaming package, a very inexpensive one just for one gigabyte of data because I wanted to test it to see if it would work. But it won’t work. They took my money, of course. I bought the 1 gigabyte of roaming for Indonesia. And it says it uses Telkomsel, which is the same SIM card that I have. But as far as I can tell, I have no access to the internet. The roaming package doesn’t show up anywhere. It does. They took my money, but I didn’t get anything in return. Maybe I have to turn on roaming somewhere that I’m not aware of. I’ve went all through all the menus everywhere I could go and there’s nowhere where I turn on roaming. I looked everywhere that I could think of. I’ve basically been working for 2 hours and accomplished nothing. Welcome to life on Planet Doug.
And we’re off on the first stage of getting my technology ducks back in a row. That’s my hotel that you just saw behind me. And the Telkomsel GraPARI offices tend to be a little bit outside of town. And that kind of works in my favor here because my hotel is also a little bit outside of town. So it’s not that far away. These places can get really busy. I’m not quite sure what the local people need to do at these offices, but they seem to need to do a lot of things. So when you go there, there can be quite a long lineup. So I wanted to go there early, but because of all my laptop problems and all my testing this morning,
kind of running behind time. So Dumai is in full swing today.
And I’ve got to do a dipsy doodle up here. Got to do a U-turn
to head back in the other direction,
which means heading out here to the middle of traffic.
And this is where I do my U-turn.
And then a roundabout.
It’s always fun riding a bike here in Sumatra. Lot of activity out on the roads. A lot of people hello. A lot of people shouting hello.
It’s funny. I was in Malaysia yesterday and I can really feel the shock of the difference, the change in everything.
Takes a couple of days to get used to your new country. The atmosphere, the tone. Hello
Okay. Here’s the roundabout. They have it controlled with traffic lights, oddly enough. So it’s not a true roundabout. I see that a lot. In Malaysia, too. They take a roundabout and basically just turn it into an intersection. I don’t know why they do that. Seems to defeat the purpose of having a roundabout. But
I love these old trucks that you get on the road here.
Basically dinosaur trucks.
Oh boy.
So easy to go in the wrong direction. I think I’m still heading in the right direction. Going around a roundabout is pretty easy to exit on the wrong road.
This morning I was talking endlessly about all of my laptop smartphone problems, technology problems, memory card readers, but that’s really only half the equation for me. There’s always bicycle problems too, things I have to work on.
And it really does come down to availability of appropriate stuff sometimes. I’m talking about my kickstand adventures.
The new kickstand that I got installed in Melaka. I mean, it’s better than my old one, but it’s still not a good kickstand. No matter how much you tighten that bolt, it just will not stay in place. The bolt, the way the mechanism that attaches it to the bike, it turns so it’s constantly going out of alignment and then my pedal starts hitting it as it goes around. Click, click, click and you try to push it back in. But you can’t go too far ’cause then it goes right into the spokes. It’s a piece of junk kickstand at least from a touring perspective, but it’s the best I could do when I was in Melaka.
Time to throw myself on the mercy of Telkomsel. It’s kind of embarrassing how many times I’ve done this. Off to Telkomsel to get my phone unblocked. When I was filling out the all Indonesia arrival card, you go to the all Indonesia website and you fill out all your details. And then it has customs, health, immigration, and customs all in one now, which is good. And the website works well. It’s a rare thing in Indonesia. It’s a government website that actually seems well designed, put together.
And then when you get to the customs one way down at the bottom,
another traffic light, there’s a box you have to tick. It’s like, are you bringing any smartphones? Hello. Laptops, any electronic devices that you will connect to a mobile cellular network? Seems like a really dumb question in a way ’cause who doesn’t? Can you imagine someone coming to Indonesia and like nah don’t even have a smartphone. That would be a rarity today. But you have to check a box saying yes, I have smartphones and then it’s all because of the IMEI registration.
But underneath that check box it says
that if you’re staying in Indonesia for less than 90 days you don’t have to do it. So it’s very clear now if you’re staying longer than 90 days then you have to register your phone. But if you’re not, then you don’t. Which in a way makes no sense because every tourist visa is either 30 days or 60 days. There’s no such thing as a longer visa. So you can’t get a tourist visa for 90 days to begin with. But the problem I ran into, as I’ve explained multiple times,
is that I got my SIM card from Telkomsel when I arrived. And at Telkomsel, they don’t give you a choice.
They automatically register your smartphone with customs. They just do it automatically. And if you tell them, “Oh, no. The rule is I’m only going to be here for 30 days, so I don’t have to,” they won’t listen to you. They’ll just do it anyway. So once your phone is registered, customs just keeps blocking it, blocking it, blocking it, and you have to go back to Telkomsel every time and get them to unblock it. So
if you haven’t heard that story before, that’s the story. That’s what I’m dealing with. And I think Telkomsel is up ahead. Actually now I think I remember where it is.
This is starting to feel familiar.
It’s a big Telkomsel office. Should be right up here. I think
there we are. GraPARI Dumai. So far so good. I think these are the people that started all my trouble actually. I think the first time I came here and registered a smartphone in Sumatra, it was this office I came to in Dumai. So they registered my smartphone IMEI
and every Telkomsel office does it. So it’s not just them.
Hello. You can buy SIM card. No, I already have a SIM card, but because I got it before, now the customs block, so I have to unblock. I did it before.
Okay.
This is your number. G021. Thank you. But I don’t need a SIM card. I already have one. Okay.
Good morning. Thank you. Can I help you? I hope so. So, you want to use our card? I have a SIM card already because I came to Indonesia last year. Oh, last year. And then Telkomsel you registered maybe. Uh-huh. But now it is blocked. Okay. So, you want to register again? If that’s possible. The card is already in your phone. Yep. It’s already there. I borrow. Yep. It’s all yours. I actually have two of them. But I think that one will be the best one. Okay. So I will ask him first because the card can use for 3 months. I think you must buy a new card and then I will register with the SIM in your phone. I’ve done this before and it’s got nothing to do with the SIM card. I mean the SIM card is fine. You can use it for years. It’s the IMEI of the phone. I think you can just extend the IMEI registration for 90 days. And I can keep using the same number. You can keep using the same number. I’ve done it before.
All done. I’m back online, which I’m happy about. There’s the Telkomsel GraPARI office behind me. As always, they offer the best customer service I’ve ever encountered anywhere in the world. They’re absolutely amazing. The staff that they hire and they train are pretty much perfect at their jobs.
And I think they have instructions to be personal. So they’re giving good customer service in terms of doing their job well and efficiently, but I think it’s also part of their job description just to be friendly like small talk, ask the customer about their life and what they’re doing and who they are and just have friendly chit-chat. And it’s just such a wonderful experience to go there. Always have a good experience. Having said that, when it comes to the actual policies, I have no idea what they’re talking about most of the time because every office I go to, every person I go to in the same office, they tell me something different every single time. Like it’s a completely new set of rules, new set of policies every time I go in. So once you end up on this IMEI treadmill, it can be so confusing ’cause this time she brought up something that I’ve never ever heard before. For the first time because the whole point of IMEI is registering your phone.
The IMEI is the serial number of your phone and that’s what customs blocks and then they have all these rules that the IMEI registration lasts for 90 days and every time I’ve gone into Telkomsel they’ve told me something different. They told me at the beginning that 90 days is the maximum you can ever get and then your phone is blocked for all eternity. Other times they tell me, “Oh, you can get one extension and then it’s blocked for all eternity.” Other places is, “Oh, no, you can get one extension per 180 days.” The story changes every time I go in, but it’s always about the IMEI. The SIM card is irrelevant because the SIM card has nothing to do with customs, nothing to do with IMEI. This time she kept asking me about the SIM card. How long have you had the SIM card? How many times have you extended it? And I’m like, well, I’ve never extended the SIM card. You buy a SIM card and you have a SIM card. It’s got nothing to do with IMEI. But she insisted that, “Oh no, no, you can only extend the SIM card two times.” And she’s asking me, “Oh, how long have you been in Indonesia? How many times have you come to Indonesia? Where did you go? When did you go to other countries?” The grilling you get is far more detailed than anything you would get from immigration. And I have no idea why they need all that information. And she’s asking me, so okay, your last trip to Indonesia, what day did you arrive? And I’m like, I have no idea. And like before that, when did you come to Indonesia? I’m like, then which phone did you use? And I’m explaining to her that because of this IMEI problem, I’ve been using three different phones and multiple SIM cards. Like I don’t remember which phone I used on which trip ’cause every time I go in to Telkomsel, I hand over one phone and they’ll say, “Oh, this one is blocked.” And I hand over a second phone. Oh, we can’t do anything. And I give them the third phone. And I just keep handing them phones until they figure something out. So she keeps asking me, when was the last time you used this SIM card in Indonesia? And I’m like, if you can’t see it on your computers, I honestly don’t know. And then she needs my address in Canada. She’s got to enter that into the computer. Anyway, she insisted that this time I had already extended my SIM card twice and I’m not allowed to do it a third time. And I’m talking with her and I say, “Well, I’ve never heard anything like this before. It’s got nothing to do with the SIM card. The SIM card is irrelevant as far as I know. The IMEI registration, that’s what expires. The SIM card is good for another 2 years.” But she kept saying, “No, no, no, sir. We cannot do it on this phone unless you buy a new SIM card. If you buy a new SIM card, then we can do it.” And I’m like, well, this is brand new news to me. I’ve never heard of this before. So then I just says, “Well, I have another phone. Here’s my second phone, and I have a Telkomsel SIM card. It’s perfectly valid and ready to go. Why don’t you check on this one?” She says, “Okay, I’ll check, sir.” And she has all the same questions. How many times have you used this phone in Indonesia for how many months? And then what countries did you go to in between your trips in and out? And I’m like, I’m sorry. I have no idea. I can’t answer any of those questions. So but anyway, she on both phones, she had to open up the phone, take out the SIM card, and examine it, like take pictures of it with a magnifying setting and zoom in like it’s a microscope or something. And she had to do a detailed analysis of the physical SIM card. And I’ve never ever seen anybody do that before. I’m not going anywhere, by the way. I’m just babbling as I’m just riding my bike around for no particular reason. I guess I’ll go this way. Turn left. So anyway, she took the SIM card out of my second phone, examined it physically, took pictures of it, and then she says, “Oh, this SIM card has not been extended, so you can extend it one more time.” And I just says, “Well, whatever you need to do, you just go ahead and do it. I don’t care what happens. I mean, if I need to get a new SIM card, that’s fine, too. They only cost like 10,000 rupiah or 20,000 rupiah. They’re not expensive. I’m just like, well, at this point, I really don’t know what’s going on, what’s happening. So sure. But if you say I have to extend the SIM card, you’re the expert. Then extend it. Whatever you need to do to get me onto the internet, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. So in the end, it all worked out
and I’m connected to the internet on that phone. It’s not the phone I wanted to use, but then I have it set up as a hotspot and I have my other phones connected to it via hotspot. So what an adventure that was. Amazing customer service, but no clue at all what happens each time.
Just dying for some milk. So I came into an Alfamart.
I always like to get the one liter containers, but they don’t put them in the cooler, so you can’t get cold containers of that much milk.
Who knows? Milk may just not be on the Indonesian diet anymore. Like up here, right? There’s chocolate, whatever. This is strawberry. Is that strawberry ultra milk? Like there’s no normal milk anymore.
And even the smaller containers.
There’s some blueberry blast. What the heck is going on? What happened to milk? This is crazy. Indomart, Indomaret, and Alfamart, neither one has any milk at all. There’s no milk for sale. Nowhere. Only chocolate and strawberry flavored milk products. That’s crazy. Anyway, I’m going to get some soy milk.
You may have noticed if I put that in the video that I paid for my drinks with GoPay, the local e-wallet. GoPay. I had to kind of remind myself, okay, how does all that work again? ‘Cause I made so many videos about Touch ‘n Go, using Touch ‘n Go here and GoPay. But at Alfamart and Indomaret, you can’t use Malaysia’s Touch ‘n Go. It doesn’t work inside these convenience stores. So that’s why I have a GoPay. And I have to remind myself how all of that works because I remember even when it comes to mobile data, I would buy packages directly from my phone, but I would pay for them using Touch ‘n Go or GoPay ’cause again when I was at Telkomsel, the woman wanted to help me out like buy a data package right away. And I was trying to explain to her that I use a lot of data. If I’m uploading YouTube videos I need a lot of data. So she’s showing me all these packages for 250,000 rupiah and 300,000 for 30 days with a lot of data. And I says no, what I get I usually get the one day unlimited package. And then she says oh we don’t have anything like that sir. And I’m like well yeah you do. Trust me you do. I use it all the time. So it was just so weird being in there where I’m pretty sure I understand IMEI registration better than she did. Or maybe there’s a new policy now where you have to extend your SIM card. Makes no sense to me at all. So I don’t think she was right about that. She was doing something entirely different. And then when it comes to these data packages, I’m explaining to her that well I just want to get a one day or two day unlimited internet. That’s what I normally get. And she’s like oh we don’t have anything like that, sir. Trust me, you do. So all I did while I was there, I just bought a very small data package that lasts for like 2 days. And now I can figure out, okay, get my own data packages, pay for it with Touch ‘n Go, pay for it with GoPay. And she said, “Oh, you can’t do that, sir.” I’m like, “No, trust me. I know how to do these things, but now I have to figure it out. I have to remind myself how I do all these things.” Anyway, no milk in Dumai. I don’t know what happened to the cows. Soy milk, though.
It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s better than chocolate milk or strawberry milk anyway.