FERRY DESCRIPTION:
Hello again, from Planet Doug. Today, I set off on what was supposed to be a straightforward bicycle ride from Melaka to the smaller city of Muar, located just a short distance away on the west coast of Malaysia. However, the beautiful and interesting coastal backroads had other plans for me.
I ended up doing a deep dive into the rivers, mangrove swamps, traditional fishing harbors, handmade fish traps, and shipyards along the Melaka Strait. The more I explored, the less time I had for cycling, and the less I wanted to rush to Muar. I also made a spontaneous decision to hop on a local ferry to Pulau Besar (Big Island) in the afternoon to check the place out.
In the end, I didn’t have enough daylight left to complete the ride to Muar, and I simply turned around and rode the shorter distance back to Melaka. What was supposed to be a straightforward city-to-city bicycle ride became essentially a daytrip out of Melaka with me ending up right back where I started. But I didn’t really mind. It was a great though extremely hot and exhausting day.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning. Welcome back to Planet Doug. Big day today on Planet Doug because I’m leaving Melaka. My bike is all packed up, putting on my cycling gloves, just loading up the bike and I’m just drowning in sweat. Just putting the bags on the bike and setting up the GoPros. I’m already so hot and sweaty. I’m ready to go back to the hotel, check back in, take a cold shower. And yeah, the hotel is right here. I’m like uh 20 m away and I’m ready for a cold shower already. But yeah, got my gloves on. Yeah, the gloves are kind of handy because my hands get so sweaty when I’m cycling from the heat and then your hands like slip and slide all over the handlebars. So that’s basically why I wear gloves. It’s not because of the padding or anything like that. It’s just to give a good grip on the handlebars, things like that. And I’m on my way to the small town, well, not really small, but the city of Muar. I’ve heard a lot of Malaysians pronounce it more as Muar, but I think a lot of English speakers would just look at that name and say kind of like Muar. Looks like an amazing place. From what I can tell, it’s in a way you could think of it as a mini version of Melaka. And in fact the history of the settlement there predates the Melaka Sultanate. So in fact Muar is older in a way than the community here in Melaka. Certainly predates the Melaka Sultanate.
And in fact, the founder of Melaka, I always have trouble with his name. Parameswara, something like that. Anybody turning left here? I don’t see any turn signals. Okay.
He stayed in Muar for a while when he came here from what we call Sumatra today and fled. There’s a lot of fighting going on in his home kingdom and he left. He was a prince, came over to the peninsula and was sort of moving up the coast and I think he settled in for a little while and then decided to move on and kept moving on up the coast and finally decided to settle down permanently here in Melaka. But he was in Muar first. Yeah, it’s got a lot of special things about it. It’s also a river town which I think is pretty amazing. It’s based on a long winding river, has a beautiful waterfront, beautiful parks as far as I can tell. It’s known as the royal city of Johor. And it is known as the furniture city cuz it has a lot of large furniture manufacturing centers there. Yeah. So, a lot going on though over there in Muar. It’s the kind of place I could easily spend a week without breaking a sweat, but I won’t be there that long. Maybe two nights. We’ll see how things work out. I don’t have any kind of a reservation there, so I don’t know where I’ll be staying.
Hopefully the holiday rush is over and it won’t be very difficult to find an affordable place to stay. Yeah, it’s a very popular town for tourism, local tourism. Yeah, I’ve got to do this long detour here to head out of town. I want to go that way, but because of the one-way streets here, you often can’t go the direction you want to go in. You got to go in a circle or something.
Early this morning, when it was still dark, when I woke up, there was a lot of deep thunder and the sky was black. It was really, really dark with the rain clouds, thunderstorms. So, there was a chance I wasn’t going to make it out today. If it’s pouring down rain, I don’t set off in the rain. I look out the window and see rain. Well, I just turn over in bed and go back to sleep or plug in my kettle and have another cup of coffee.
But, I decided to take a chance. I haven’t heard thunder for a while, so hopefully there isn’t a ton of rain today.
And I was hoping to be on the road a little bit earlier than this, but it just took time to pack up, get organized. I thought I would be on the road just a little bit before dawn, but it’s now after dawn. What time is it? About 7:30. I think the sun rises at 7.
On my right is the St. John Hill with the St. John Fort up on top. So, I’m riding by it right now, and we’ll see how it works out. But my plan for today is to stay along the water as much as possible.
The easiest way to go to Muar would be kind of a highway, I guess. There’s a good road that goes straight there, but it’s kind of inland.
As I talked about in a previous video, this part of the coast of Malaysia doesn’t really have a road that follows the coast. It just can’t because there are so many rivers, large and small, mangrove swamps, flatlands, muddy river deltas. So, if you tried to build a good highway or coastal road, man, you’d have to build a ton of bridges and causeways. So, they moved the main road inland quite a bit.
But on a bicycle, I can try to follow the coast and I’ll probably end up hitting barriers from time to time where I have to go inland around the river on a bridge and then back down to the river. I keep going in and out, in and out. But we’ll see how it works out. There looks to be a lot of interesting fishing harbors, fish farms, industry, residential areas all along the water. So to start that process, I’m heading down to the shore here at the Portuguese settlement again. And then once I get down to the shore, I’m going to try to cycle, just stay as close to the water as I can. Like this road here. I could just stay on this road and I would go directly to Muar without having to even think about it. But it might be less interesting and a lot more traffic.
So yeah, this is the main road heading down to the Portuguese settlement and the waterfront. I was down here a couple of days ago at the beginning of that video. I already tried once to cycle to Muar and I got this far, you know, I rode, I packed up completely, rode all the way down to the Portuguese settlement and that’s when I got a message from a Planet Doug subscriber inviting me out to dinner and offering me, yeah ended up being two nights at a hotel here in Melaka. So I got a bonus day in Melaka before I set off which is amazing. But yeah, so here I am at the Portuguese settlement. When I get there, I’ll check my phone, see if there’s another invitation there to keep me from leaving town, but I don’t think so. I think I’ll be heading down the coast.
So, this is going to be a very slow and methodical way. I figure in the morning since I have more energy first thing in the morning, I’m willing to go slowly, I’ll take advantage of that mood to try and cycle along the coast. As I said, it won’t be easy, but we’ll figure it out as I go. I’ll have to stop quite a few times and check Google Maps to get oriented. So, yeah, this is where I was. There’s the Jesus statue. I’m sure it’s designed to look like the one, the famous one in Brazil. And I have no reason to go down here. But yeah, this is the Portuguese square here. This is the Portuguese settlement.
Very nice hotel right here. The Lisbon Melaka.
And the original story when I was here and my mystery benefactor contacted me, he thought it would be really really easy because he just figured he could book a room for me in one of these buildings directly ahead of me and on the 27th floor of that tower. So, that’s where I was going to stay right there. And I don’t know how far he got in the booking. I think he actually booked it and it was reserved in my name, but then he got a message saying, “Oh, a pipe has burst.” And that whole section of the building was closed down. No water, no elevators, no electricity kind of thing. And that started us off on a road that difficult one for him trying to find a place for me to stay cuz it was a holiday weekend. It was really busy. I didn’t plan on getting off the bike, but I noticed that the water here looks different from the last time I was here. The tide has come way in. When I was here last time, yeah, there was no water here at all. And this was all mud flat as far away way out there. And that’s when I shot the video of the mud skipper. You can see all the mud skipper, the fish that can walk on the mud with their fins. But this morning it looks entirely different cuz the tide has come in. Yeah, that’s something you have to remember when you’re dealing with coastline how dramatically it can change from one day to the next. From morning to evening when the tide comes in. All right, I’m glad I came down here now just so I can see the difference. All those mud skippers are still down there, but now they don’t have to walk on their fins. They can swim and when the water goes out, they climb onto the land and they walk around. True. Yeah, they have a dual lifestyle. They live in the water and on land. Yeah, I keep adjusting how I mount things on my bike. These two pet bags, they’re heavy duty. They’re large bags designed to go on the rear of the bike. But since I have the trailer, I try to distribute the weight so I don’t break spokes and I don’t get flat tires. So, the way I think of it is most of the weight goes in the trailer and then my weight goes on the rear wheel cuz I’m sitting on the saddle. And if I put those bags, then it’s a combination of my weight and the bags and a lot of the water all on the rear wheel and nothing on the front. So, I’m experimenting with taking my big pet bags and putting them on the front wheel. So far, I don’t mind it. It actually makes the bike more steady because all that weight gives the front wheel like inertia and you don’t wiggle as much. It keeps the front tire steady like going in a straight line when you’re going over bumps and things. And then this morning I’m doing something entirely different because this one pet bag, it has a special compartment. This one here, it’s like a tall one. That was designed originally for like tent poles and sleeping pads. That’s why it’s so long. And I don’t usually use it because I can just put my tent poles and everything in the trailer. But just for fun, I thought I would attach it today cuz I have my sleeping pad in there. And the final thing is I have them flipped. This is supposed to go on that side. And this one is supposed to go on this side. But if I do that, this is getting very in baseball for Planet Doug. If I do that and I put this one on that side, when I park the bike, it swings inward and I don’t have access to it. And this is my main pet bag. This is the one that has all of my valuables and GoPro equipment. So, I need access to this bag all day long. And I go in and out of it to get GoPro batteries and things. And if I have it on this side, it’s when I park the bike like this, it’s hard to get into it. So, I flip them, which means now that this thing is looking kind of awkward. So, I probably I’ll probably remove that. Yeah, I don’t really like that right now. But anyway, and another change I made, I added another camera mount right here. So, this one on the handlebars. Normally, I put this GoPro here and then you’re looking through the handlebars so you can see my hands and the handlebars, but now I have an option. I can put the GoPro here and then you get an unobstructed view out the front. All right. Right there. You don’t see the handlebars. And if I move it to here, you get more of a POV through the handlebars. So, I can move the camera back and forth. I don’t know which is better.
Just stopping here. Drenched in sweat.
Time for my first Google Maps check.
I’m back on the inland road. There was no way to exit from the Portuguese settlement. You run into a river and there’s no bridge down there on the coast. So I had to come, as I said, come all the way back up here and then go this way, cross the river and then head down to the coast again. I think the river is somewhere around here. Maybe I’ve already gone over it.
But if I stayed inland the whole way to Muar, I think this is basically what I would be looking at the entire way.
So even though it’s going to take a lot longer and be more difficult to try to follow the coast, I’m going to do that for a little while anyway while I still have morning energy.
Huh. I don’t remember going over the river, but I think it’s supposed to be here. Maybe it doesn’t really exist this far inland anymore. So, next intersection. Maybe I can head down to the shore.
It turned out I had to cross over two rivers before I could get back down to the shore. And I just, there’s one river right here. So I got to cross over.
Yeah. Right there. That’s where my P bags are helpful on the front tire. Like if I do a full body turn and a head twist to look behind me, if there’s no weight on the front wheel at all, you tend to like jiggle it around. But because it’s got a lot of weight on it, I can look behind me and I’m still basically keeping the front wheel steady. And that’s because I’ve got weight on it. I didn’t realize that was an advantage. All right.
Down at the first of many, many, many rivers. And I moved the GoPro to the POV position. So, right now you’re looking through the front GoPro that goes through the handlebars. So, you can sort of see a little bit of my hands. Maybe depending on the angle and the width. Oh, yeah. I don’t have it on super view at the moment. That’s a wide. Yeah. When I was looking at Google Maps for this route, I noticed many, many places along the rivers where you saw what looked like hundreds, dozens. Anyway, dozens if not hundreds of boats. And from high up satellite view, I thought they were like big fishing boats, but it turns out they look like this. There are like hundreds of these boats all along these rivers. So, I guess this is how the fishing is done here. Not in big boats, but in these smaller ones, which is quite cool. Some of them are a little bit flooded. They’re sinking.
Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to take this route rather than taking the main highway is sort of a nod to Malaysia’s history because for centuries of course there were no highways there were no roads back in you know 1500s 1600s 1700s you know pick a century the rivers were the highways of everybody back in those days because there were no cars and there were no highways and no buses things like that. So transportation was all done by a river and the river was the road system of that day. So there was no way of traveling lengthwise up and down the peninsula inland. No road system. You basically had to go in and out by rivers. So it feels like trying to go along the coast and dealing with all these rivers that you run into is sort of apropos. Feels like it’s part of Malaysia’s history. Yeah, this landscape would have been far more difficult to traverse back in those days before the modern era of roads, highways, and cars. Can you imagine trying to make your way through all of these muddy swamps and river deltas and mangroves? Yeah. Basically, you keep getting pushed out into the ocean. Anytime you try to go traveling, you’re going to run into a river and then your route is constantly going to be pushing you by boat back to the coast. That would have been the way to travel up Malaysia, not inland. It was all done by water through the river system and then along the coast. And of course when people started settling down, building houses and all of that, they did it along the rivers. So that’s where all the towns are at the river mouths. Yeah, this is very nice. There’s actually two rivers here or this river is split into two channels. One on the left, one on my right. And all the houses here, they seem to have sort of a driveway that requires a bridge. That’s very cool. Like this one right here. I’m on the road, but if these people want to get to their house, you know, they have to cross this river. So, there’s a whole series of tiny bridges all up and down the river here. You can see it. This is the smaller channel of the river that’s looking down towards the coast. And you can see these houses over here. The only access to this house would be down the main road and then crossing that little bridge.
There’s a whole bunch more small bridges. So yeah, without bridges, nobody gets anywhere unless you have a boat. And I guess there’s a small community here, but it’s blocked by the river. So they had to build all these little bridges to get in and out.
In so many places I’ve visited in my life, there’s a certain irony in that I always find the coast, fish markets, fishing villages, fishing boats very interesting, but I don’t eat seafood. So, I just noticed this here. I thought maybe this would be part of some sort of a fish trap, but I don’t think. Well, maybe. Oh, maybe they build the lobster cages here. There’s heavy duty cast iron frames there. Maybe they. And then they take this chicken wire and build their own little cages for catching crab and lobster and things like that. It’s probably what’s going on here.
What do you catch with this? You catch lobster. Fish. Fish. Fish. Oh, it’s for fish. Oh, fish cage. Oh, I see. So, this would be the opening here and fish would go in here and then they have more difficulty coming back out in there. So, okay. Look at that.
They have special building the whole thing by hand with wire, putting bricks in for weights and rebar here for the base with little legs on it to keep it up out of the mud. Yeah, he’s doing it all by hand with pliers. And everything is tied together with the wire here. All done by hand.
Oh yeah, there’s a whole bunch of them here already completed.
Yeah, I guess you can catch fish because they’re not too bright, right? Once they come in through that handmade tunnel, they try to go out through the sides, but they can’t make it. And it doesn’t occur to them to look for the tunnel that they came in on. Huh. Wonder how old this technique is, this design in the past. Maybe it was all done with bamboo.
And even the frame of it, the structure is different. Some of it has like rubber piping. It makes it lighter. And then this one I thought maybe it was metal or is it. Oh, it’s also rubber. Okay. Lightweight rubber pipe. Very cool. Seems to be a thriving business here. All up and down this road, people are making these by hand. You see a whole bunch of them here, either completed or bits and pieces of it have been made. And here’s the sheets of chicken wire. And then they make all these cages. But you can see it all along here and then ahead of me all along the side of this road. So a small industry here.
I don’t know. It’s not looking good for following the coast down here. On Google Maps there’s a road that I could, this small road and then it curves and follows the shore. But there’s a big barrier here. They’re doing construction and I guess I’m on the wrong side of the river. I think I have to go all the way back to the main road again.
No access for unauthorized persons. And I’m afraid that includes me. That is quite the big sign there, the red circle with the white line saying, “Yeah, it looks like they’re building a bridge.” So, it will open eventually maybe, but for now, no.
I didn’t realize it, but there was a road on both sides of this river, and I went down the road on the wrong side. I’m supposed to be on the other side of this river, but it has multiple channels, so I just didn’t know which way to go.
This is normally the sort of district that I would explore while I’m staying in a town like Melaka, right? Like I’m just like 6 kilometers outside of Melaka. So you could easily stay in Melaka and hop on your bike and then ride out into the countryside like this. Go up and down the rivers and you would see all of this without having to change cities. Even you could do something like this as a day trip.
Luckily, it wasn’t very far to go from the main road down to where the barrier was. So, I’m already back at the main road. Only took a couple of minutes.
I end up being very curious about the daily lives of the people here. Well, the men in particular because you don’t see women here in these like fishing villages. But all up and down there, there were these like men in their 60s or 70s obviously lived their whole life here. There’s like a guy there who clearly is like a security guard or like a caretaker for a dock area and he’s sitting in a chair there. Looks like he’s been there for a thousand years and a thousand years from now he’ll still be there. He was napping in that chair and he heard my voice and all he does is open one eye, look at me go by, closes his eye and goes back to sleep. And that’s probably where he is the whole day. So yeah, I just crossed over the river. So now I’m on the other side, hopefully the good side. And from here, I should be able to go down and follow the coast for a little bit. The last couple of weeks, we’ve been getting more and more rain. Not during the day, but nighttime. There’s been some major downpours. So, some of the roads I might follow today or want to follow today might be impassible because of mud and puddles. We’ll see. Once I run out of morning energy, I’ll probably end up back on the main highway for the final 20 kilometers or whatever to get to Muar. I won’t have the same patience or energy for this kind of dipsy doodling. And I’ll just go back out to the main road and head to Muar more quickly. But for now, I feel like the whole day is stretching out ahead of me, and I have all the time in the world to go down these side roads, these bumpy roads, and do some exploring. I love seeing all the small industries, how people make a living. Fishing, of course, making fish traps, anything like that. On some other bike rides I’ve done recently, I would check out like a lumber yard. They’re cutting trees and making wood for building houses, things like that. If I see them, I like to pop in and check them out. Yeah, that was a good mistake though. It was a mistake to go down that road cuz that was a dead end. But at least on that side, I got to see all of those fish cages and all the boats. On this side there, there’s nothing on this side. Just trees all along the river.
Yeah, better choice following this road on this side of the river in terms of making progress. I’m down at the mouth of the river. The road I was following was on the other side for some reason. But yeah, I saw one fishing boat heading out into the strait already. And it looks like the road was going to curve here and follow the coast for a little while. We’ll see if there’s other interesting boatyards and things to check out along the way.
Oh. Huh. This may not be open to the public either. I’m not sure. There’s a gate, but the gate is wide open. It’s very muddy. It’s a dirt road. And there’s a gate on the other side. Yeah. I can’t go this way. So yeah, my way has been blocked again. On Google Maps, this road looks open, but there’s a gateway I can’t get past. I can see from here there’s a padlock on it. There’s a big boat building operation here. That’s too bad.
Got to turn around once more.
But I saw some interesting things on this road as well. But I’m pretty sure if I could have gone through that gate, I could keep going quite a distance. But that gate doesn’t show up on Google Maps. Like on satellite view, you can’t see down to that kind of detail. So, I didn’t know that the road was a private road that was blocked.
I was just chatting with my mystery benefactor back in Melaka and I was saying that had I known that this area along the shore and all these little fishing boat villages were so interesting, I probably would have just stayed in Melaka for another night or two, found an inexpensive hotel and then just come out here on a day trip rather than changing cities completely. It might have been something interesting to do like come out here as a day trip rather than packing up and moving on. It is always interesting when you’re on a bicycle and you’re communicating with people who have cars and motorcycles because you can spend an entire day on a bike and it feels like you’ve gone a thousand miles, right? You worked really hard and took 8 hours and you’re tired and hot and sweaty and you feel like you’ve gone on this huge journey. Then you turn around and your friend in a car can be right behind you like they could wait until the very end of the day and then just hop on their car and they can zip to wherever you are within minutes. Hey, do you want to go get dinner? Yeah, cuz in a car you could drive the distance to Muar in, well, it’s only 40 kilometers away by road. You could drive there, have breakfast, and drive back to Melaka. It’s so close. I’m going to spend the entire day getting from Melaka to Muar. But a friend of mine in Melaka could hop in his car and come meet me for dinner. He could just drive there and he’d be there instantly.
But of course, as I’ve talked about in the past, there are some differences where if you’re in a car, chances are you wouldn’t come down this tiny road because yeah, why would you? And so you just end up taking little detours like this on a bicycle. You see a lot of interesting things that you may, you can cover a lot more distance in a car, but on a bicycle you tend to get a little bit more in touch with your surroundings, I think. All the things I’ve already seen this morning, and I’ve seen a whole bunch of big monitor lizards along the edge here, and they all dash into the water when they hear me coming. Yeah. So, there’s another road right over there. I’m going to try one more time. There’s actually traffic on that road, but there’s another waterway between me and that road. There’s no way to get across here. I have to go all the way back to the main road again.
I thought maybe I could just pop across this dirt area, but it’s got another small creek over there. And that’s the thing about rivers. When you’re inland, you tend to think of them as a single river. That’s all you see. But as you get closer and closer to a big lake or an ocean or the Melaka Strait where the river empties, it starts to branch out into a river delta with many, many, many, many different channels. And that’s what I’m running into here.
For Malaysia though, more and more it seems like the sweet spot would be a scooter.
That might really be the best way to travel around. The car would be a bit too fast and you’d be reluctant to stop the car, get out, go exploring. You have to worry about parking the car, things like that.
Bicycle is pretty good, but it’s so hot here and you move so slowly. These little detours take a long time. But a scooter might be the perfect combination.
Wow, look at that. A 7-Eleven. Going to grab a little bit of milk.
Yeah, I did stop at that 7-Eleven. It’s funny. Yeah, when you’re on a bicycle, you certainly appreciate our dependence on liquids. You go in there thinking, I’ll just grab a little carton of milk, but of course, I bought a liter of milk because it’s a lot cheaper. And then like per volume, when you buy it by the liter, you get a lot more milk per ringgit basically. And then I’m holding that big heavy liter of milk and thinking, “Ah, now I have to carry where am I going to put this liter of milk on my bike? Where am I going to store it?” Cuz I have all these water bottles. But of course, I sat down at that little table in 7-Eleven. And then the entire liter gone just like that. I know where to store it. Right down here. I got a stomach. It’s currently carrying a liter of milk. It’s like my own built-in water bottle, milk container. So, I’m in some sort of a residential area. And again, from Google Maps satellite view, it looked like there was a way to continue forward from here, but we’ll see how far I can get.
Yeah. Another funny thing about being on a bicycle with your smartphone, I don’t mount it or anything like that. I just keep it in my pocket. But one thing I’ve learned is if you have a fingerprint lock on your front screen and you put it into your pocket, you get so hot and sweaty, like right now, my pants are just soaking wet already with sweat, and it activates, it tries to activate the fingerprint scanner. So, if you put your phone in your pocket and the screen is touching the wet material, it triggers the fingerprint scanner over and over and over and over again. And eventually you get locked out of your own phone because it looks like you tried the fingerprint scanner like a thousand times. So, you have to turn off the fingerprint scanner and just use the pin because the pin doesn’t get activated by screen pressure. So yeah. Okay. Yeah, there’s a possibility this dirt road will follow the shoreline a little bit. There’s actually I’m heading towards another river and this other river has a big fishing boat dock there with fish markets, fish restaurants, all that kind of stuff. So, that’s kind of what I have my eye on. I wanted to go there first out of Melaka and just check out all the fishing boats and then after that if it’s too difficult to go along the river then I’ll just head towards the main road and keep going that way. But for now let’s see how far we can get on this dirt road. Yeah, they’ve built up residential suburbs over there. And hopefully my tires are up to this. A couple months ago now. I bought brand new tires when I was in Seremban because my old tires basically exploded. The tire walls had gotten so thin. But the only tires I could find were like basic city bike tires. So hopefully they don’t bring on a lot of punctures. This is not looking good. Um, who knows? There’s like a big metal fence ahead of me, but I might be able to continue alongside it. Yeah, you can see just how wet this whole area is. So many. So I have to go left here. But just for fun, I’m just going to go off in this direction just a little bit because over here, this is where I tried to go before and then I got blocked. There’s all these shipyards here and there was a private shipyard with a gate I couldn’t get through and that was off in this direction.
Here you are, your own private beach outside of Melaka.
I keep forgetting I don’t have my fingerprint scanner turned on. So, every time I want to go into my phone, I have to enter my pin.
Yeah, hopefully I can go this way.
And again, yeah, all of this would have been much better as a day trip out of Melaka. You come out here for four or five hours, explore this whole coastal area, and then just go right back to your hotel in Melaka. But that wasn’t the plan for today. So, we’ll see how the day unfolds. Yeah, my mystery benefactor was saying that if that makes sense, then why don’t I just turn around and go straight back to Melaka? And I guess I may do that at the end of the day. If I spend the whole day exploring this area and I find I’m still just 10 kilometers away from Melaka, well, makes a lot of sense just to turn around and go back there instead of continuing on to Muar. But we’ll see how things go. So far, this shoreline road, you wouldn’t really want to do this in a nice car. Wow. This looks like some sort of a gold mining kind of operation. Looks like a dredge.
Check this out. What a beast.
See that whole thing there? What in the world? Like some sort of a giant water wheel. And I have no idea what that could be used for, but yeah, it’s got a giant conveyor belt. Water wheels could be dredging like sand or gravel or.
That is one thing that I don’t like about my trailer that I’ve got attached to my bike right now. Because the wheels are movable, the axles aren’t fixed in position. So there’s a little bit of movement around the wheels. So on a dirt road like this, it rattles a little bit. If you just had pannier bags, your bicycle is perfectly quiet, but the trailer always has that little bit of a rattle. You get used to it. I’m accustomed to it. But what’s going on down here?
And with this trailer, if you ever want to do a U-turn or a circle like I’m doing right now, you have to remember to always go to the left. You can do really tight corners to the left, but if you go to the right, you have to do a really wide curve going to the right. Yeah, there’s a gateway here in towards some shoreline property. Couple of guys up ahead fishing.
So far so good on this road, but there’s another gate here. At least on this side, it’s open. Doesn’t look like it could be closed anymore, but it could be some sort of semi-private property. Don’t really know. We’ll see just how far we can go.
I was just thinking about the American hobo who rode his bicycle. He rode from Melaka to Muar as well. And I remember he camped on the shore on the far side of Muar. Oh, this is, I was wondering what this was over here. And it’s a cattle barn or shelter.
Got some big boys or girls over here. Hey guys. Wow. Don’t worry. I’m not here to bother anybody. Just come to take a look at you. Aren’t you beautiful? Look at that. Size of those ears, man. Yeah, you are beautiful, aren’t you? You’re a cutie pie. You really are.
One, two, three, four, five, six in here.
Hey there. Oh, I thought maybe this one was scared of me and that’s why it got up, but I think it thinks I brought food. This one was actually trying to come closer.
There’s a lot of livestock here where I was taking that. I just took a picture. It’s just down in that little shelter there. But over here, we’ve got some goats. Goats are such cool animals. I love goats. They’re so curious. They’re very interesting animals, aren’t you? So, there are the goats. I’ve been on farms a few times where they had a lot of goats. And they have a lot of human qualities. They love to get in trouble. Anything higher than them, they want to climb it. Doesn’t matter what it is, they’re going to climb on top of it. And nothing is safe from a goat.
There’s a whole bunch of them up here.
Little ones. Hey.
And then a bunch more. Yeah. Whole lot more cattle over here.
I’m still here at this farm. Yeah, very interesting. Big cattle, goats, things like that. And then as I was coming out this end, this is one. There’s a whole bunch of goats in this pen here. And as I was going by it, I heard a voice talking to me. And I thought maybe my phone had accidentally clicked onto YouTube or something. But then I heard a voice saying, “You are under surveillance. Warning, you are under surveillance.” And they have a set of cameras up there with motion detectors. So, I guess I set it off as I was going by on my bike. I stood still for a little while and just waved at the camera to say hello in case they’re looking. Reassure them that I’m not here to steal any goats or any of these fellas. Look at that. That’s a big fellow there. The big black one, big hump. And I think they associate people with food. So I’m unfamiliar to them, but they’re willing to take a chance and get this close just in case I’m bringing food. But sorry, guys and gals. I don’t have any food. I’m just passing by, hoping that this road takes me somewhere.
I’ve reached the next river where I think there’s some kind of a fishing harbor and I had a choice. There’s a T intersection and a paved road heads off in this direction, but I don’t think it crosses over at all. I think I have to head up a little bit. This is heading down to the shore. But since it’s still morning time and I’m in the mood to explore, going to take a detour, head down and see where this road dead ends. What’s down here?
Hello, Deny. Muara Sungai Pongor. So Sungai is river I believe. So I guess that’s the name of this river.
Yeah, this is feeling more and more like a day trip instead of a day long city to city trip. There’re just so many interesting things to check out in the countryside here near Melaka.
Yeah. And I barely left. I mean, Melaka is like right around the corner. I’ve barely left. Yeah, there’s a breakwater here in the mouth of the river flowing in. And then the fishing harbor is up here.
There’s another dirt road. The dirt road is continuing in that direction, but I don’t think it goes anywhere in particular. That’s where we are right now.
So, I made it to the end of this dirt road to where I saw all these fishing boats and fish markets and seafood restaurants. And there’s a bridge here that crosses the river. Luckily enough, this is the bridge right here. I saw it from Google Maps and I could tell it was like a sluice gate, like flood control. And you never know whether you’re able to cross one of these or not. But this one is open. So I was able to cross. And over here are all the fishing boats. Not a lot of activity.
And maybe I can ride my bike around one of these seafood restaurants and get down to the boats there. Take a look at them. Yeah, there’s very few people here right now. That’s what normally happens. When I’m out middle of the day, these places all come to life at night. People come out here for a seafood dinner. But right now in the morning, there’s nobody here.
A group of men over there. I think they’re playing a game. I don’t know. It’s like I hear a plastic cup with dice or game pieces or something like that. Or else it’s a bucket of ice. Yeah, there’s no way to bring my bike here very easily. It’s all jammed and crowded here. So, I just got off my bike for a minute. Just wanted to walk along the river. Take a look at all these boats.
The noise I heard was a plastic bowl filled with checkers. So, they have checker boards embedded in the tables there.
I always have the same questions when I see these places. Questions about these boats. How much do they cost? How often do they go out or do the boats just sit here for days and days, weeks, and never move?
What about all these motors, boat engines? Are they still operational? It’s two pretty powerful engines there. Two big ones.
Yeah, I have trouble with my smartphone as well when I keep it in my pocket these days. Everything gets so wet. Something happens to the touchscreen that it starts clicking all by itself, like ghost tapping. So, I try to open my phone to do something, but the phone just starts clicking on buttons and clicking on windows at random. And it’s really dangerous because I have no idea what it’s doing. It could be making purchases on eBay by accident. It could be sending messages by accident. I have no idea what it’s doing. So, have to be very careful with my phone sometimes. Well, I’m not making much progress in terms of heading down the road. I went a short distance down the main road there. I think it’s Highway five or something like that. But right here, there’s another small road that goes back to the coast. And I think there’s another fishing harbor there. And I think there’s a small road that goes along the river shore or the river. I keep calling it river shore but along the shore beside the Melaka Strait.
So that’s where I’m heading right now.
And there’s this harbor up ahead. But then as you go along the shore, there’s another one that has a dock with boats that go out to the big island. I think it’s Pulau Besar, I think in Malaysian. I think it means big island. And I guess you could hire a boat to take you out to that island.
That again. I was thinking that would have been a good day trip out of Melaka if you just based yourself there and you had transportation like a scooter or something. You could zoom out here, hop on a boat out to the island and yeah, that’ll be a good day trip. And from Google Maps, it looked like there was a bridge cuz I’m on this side of the river again. I think I can cross over, but I’m not sure about that. There’s a hill up here going over a river. Oh, yeah. Okay. Maybe this is the bridge right here.
Very steep.
Need my low gear to get up.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on here.
Maidan ean Bakar Pernu.
Yeah, at this rate I’m never going to make it to Muar. I’m going way too slow.
I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. Some sort of a dock, but I think this is the. Oh, yeah. The river is over here where all the boats are.
Ah, very cool. Okay. All right, let’s go for a little stroll here. I’m still only 10 kilometers from Melaka, so I’ve hardly covered any distance at all, but I’ve been spending all my time stopping and checking places out.
I’m pretty tired already though, just from the heat.
And yeah, I could lie down right here. I could be done for the day right now. I’m pretty tired.
It doesn’t bode well for a guy on a bicycle to be this tired so soon.
This is what I’m looking at, and it’s why I decided to jump off the bike again, take a little stroll around. I saw this from satellite view on Google Maps. Looked pretty interesting. Might even be able to walk over that bridge over there. I’m just going to go for a short stroll down here. See what’s going on. Another small issue is that I ran out of data for my smartphone. Yeah, this is really annoying. I have a Digi SIM card. And the Digi app, when you buy a data package that lasts 20 days or 10 days or whatever, it tells you exactly what hour your data expires, so you know exactly when to renew, buy more data. But they were bought out by Celcom or they merged with Celcom. So now there’s a new app, the Celcom Digi app. And that app doesn’t tell you when your data expires. It kind of gives you a day. Says like, you know, maybe on this day it expires. And I guess that day was today. And I didn’t realize it. And yeah, suddenly my phone doesn’t work anymore cuz I don’t have any data. So for like booking hotel rooms, getting Google Maps directions, all that kind of stuff. It just doesn’t work anymore. And the catch 22 is that in order to get Wi-Fi, I have to buy data. But the only way I can buy data is if I have Wi-Fi, right? So, I’m in a catch 22. I have to wait until I get somewhere where I have a Wi-Fi signal, log on to public Wi-Fi, and then I’ll be able to buy data. All right, look this. Check this out. Very cool place.
This is the mouth of the river over here. And I guess that’s a big island out there. Yeah, that would be Big Island. Yeah, it’d be nice to spend the night out there.
A lot closer than Muar.
Huh? Yeah, look at that big old wooden boat. Basically looks like it’s grounded there, sunk and resting on the bottom. And it looks like there’s a trail on this side of the river.
I wonder if I can ride my bike along the trail. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So, I guess I’ll take my bike, go around. There’s a bridge here. And then I can cycle along. Just take see where this trail goes. All right. Beautiful.
I have mobile data. I’m all dated up. I stopped at this dock here for a iced coffee. I think you can see the boats and the river over there. And I asked the woman serving the coffee if they had Wi-Fi. She said no. But then she said, “Oh, like why do you need Wi-Fi?” And I said, “Well, I need to buy data.” And she offered her the hotspot from her personal smartphone. So, I connected to her Wi-Fi hotspot just for two or three minutes while she was making my iced coffee and then I bought a data package. I have 2,000 gigabytes of data, so more than enough. Yeah. I met a family on the other side was getting out of a boat with all their luggage. So I got the impression that oh they must be coming from Big Island. So I asked them and they said yeah they hired a local boat, one of these boats to take them out to Big Island and back. And they said it cost 160 ringgit round trip.
So to go out to the island and then they pick you up again. They said they stayed in a chalet out on that island, but I’m guessing the chalet would have been quite expensive. That’s kind of how things work here. Whenever I look into homestays, I have this idea, oh, homestay in my mind is cheaper than a hotel. But it doesn’t really work out that way because a homestay means renting the whole house or you rent a whole chalet. And that is for your entire family. So it might end up being a good deal for you because you go with your whole family and there’s 10 people and you rent a chalet, you rent a whole house. So, but for me being on my own, 160 ringgit to go out to the island and probably another two or 300 ringgit per night. Unless you rough it and camp out on the island, there’d probably be plenty of opportunities to do that. Though, to be honest, even in the past, I rarely would go out to an island because I mean, as a foreign visitor, everything is new. Like, look where I am right now. I’m in this mangrove forest on this amazing walkway. So, this whole coast is brand new to me and interesting. And so, what’s out on the island that’s better than where I am right now? You know what I mean? So, I don’t really need whenever I’m on a coast like this, I don’t feel the urge like, oh, I got to get on a boat and go somewhere else because look at this. I’m already somewhere very very interesting. Of course, going out to an island would be nice for a holiday. But for someone like me, there’s no absolute need to go out there, enough adventure for me right here on shore.
Huh. Yeah, this walkway has seen better days. A lot of the railing is gone, like broken, snapped off. But yeah, and up above there’s a walkway completely shattered. It’s dangling from one side. So you can’t. This whole structure feels like it’s about ready to collapse. Maybe you’re not even supposed to be out here at all. But I’m certainly not going up there.
So, here’s the end of the walkway. It looks like yeah, it used to continue. Yeah, you can see there’s the other side of it over there, but right here it just broke off. Everything just shattered. You can see all the pieces over there blown ashore. So yeah, who knows? Maybe this whole structure has been condemned. There’s the upper floor. I don’t know if it makes any sense to go up there. The cement part might be okay. But this part here, the wooden walkway, it’s what I was talking about. It’s completely. The cable on both sides is ripped apart. Wooden floor is all broken up.
There’s the island out there. Yeah, big island.
Yeah, if you lived in Melaka or had a place there, it would be kind of a no-brainer to go out to the island on a day trip someday.
Rent a boat now. Hopefully my bike is okay here. I don’t want it to fall over here. It’ll end up in the water.
I think this feels pretty solid. I think I can climb up here.
Get a little bit of a view from up here.
You just can’t walk across to the next one. Again, only if your life depended on it, you could make it across there. But only then.
Yeah. Really interesting coastline here. A lot going on.
Yeah, I suppose this would be a good camping spot right here. Yeah, just camping right by this tower.
A lot of wind though. You’ll be putting up with a lot of wind off the water.
I’ve seen a number of boats going in and out of this harbor carrying tourists out to the island. I was just chatting with someone local who knows this place or this area well and he didn’t think the island had opened up again like all the places out there had shut down. So he was surprised to hear that I was talking to these local people who said that they were staying in a chalet out there. So yeah, it’s good news, I guess, the island is opening back up again after COVID.
Well, I think it is time for sunglasses. I didn’t even think of it till now. I can feel I’m squinting and squinting and squinting.
Got to give my eyes a rest. Oh yeah, there. That’s better.
Here we go. Baseball cap and sunglasses for the midday sun.
Very industrial here in terms of lots of old wrecked boats, metal like metal yards, you know, repairing everything. You see this big pile of debris here and steel graveyard for boats and repair yards. They go hand in hand, of course.
And four or five kilometers down the shoreline here, there’s another harbor like this one that I wanted to check out along the way. So, I think I’m going to head off in this direction. So far, it’s a nice paved road. Very quiet.
See how far we can go on this road.
Beautiful ride along this road. It’s a dirt and gravel road, but occasionally has really smooth sections. No traffic at all, of course. A lot of birds, monitor lizards, and best of all, I’m right on the water. I don’t know if you can see it or not, but maybe I can point my Hero 9 off in this direction. Yeah, right there. Right. So you can see the water if it were later in the day. Yeah, that would be I think pretty nice camping spot right there. I’ve got more than enough water with me to get me through the night. Just need a bit of food and I could stay anywhere along this road. There’s a lot of openings down to the beach. So, no, there’s no beach down there, per se. Like, not a swimming beach, but the edge of the water.
Nice cool breeze coming off the water. And there’s a bunch of islands out there. Big island and then some smaller ones.
Hello. Yeah, look at that.
Something used to be here.
There’s all kinds of concrete and tiles. So, it must have been some sort of a lookout platform or something. It’s all been destroyed.
I hopped off the bike for a second. Notice some shade over here. I’m going to sit in the shade for a few minutes. Take a look out at the islands.
Yeah, out there. There’s the road. And there’s actually yeah, a house right there. But yeah, out there on that road in the sun. It’s pretty warm right now, midday.
Yeah, nice and cool right here.
I even found a bit of a back rest against this tree. It’s not the most comfortable place in the world, but I’ll rest here for a few minutes and let the wind cool me down. There’s my view out over the Melaka Strait and the islands.
So, I found the road that goes to the main ferry terminal heading out to the island. At least that’s what the sign says. But I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on here, whether there’s actually a ferry or just local fishing boats that you can hire. Yeah, it looks like it used to be pretty busy here. There’s like a big parking lot right in front of me. Parking for cars, buses, motorcycles. Says two ringgit per entry for a motorcycle, but I don’t know if anybody’s here. Doesn’t seem to be.
Yeah, if it wasn’t expensive and it was easy to do, I would throw my bike onto a ferry, go across to the island, spend the night there. But I don’t think there’s anything like that anymore, if there ever was.
Just heading out here to see what’s going on down at the dock. Yeah, it’s only 1:00 in the afternoon. So, there’s still plenty of daylight left, but I’m tired. All this stopping, walking around, taking pictures, taking video, getting off and on the bike, and I haven’t cycled for a long time. So, I’m actually feeling pretty tired. I’m not in the mood to ride all the way to Muar as I planned.
So, this place might be a bit more organized than the other dock. I mean, that was a private dock and I think those were all private boats, but here, yeah, like it actually seems to be a ferry terminal of some kind. And I see a lot of people pulling up in their cars with children getting out. And there’s some sort of a ticket counter over there. So, let’s go investigate. See what’s going on here. Hi. Hi. How are you? Great. Good. You want to go to the island or I don’t know. I was just riding by on my bicycle. Okay. And then I saw the island, so I came to investigate. Yeah. So, you have a boat that goes out there? Yeah. Yeah. And 2:30. 2:30. Ah, at 2:30. Yeah. Just coming back. Return is 5:00. Oh, it comes back at 5:00. Yeah. I see.
Out on the island, do they have accommodation? They have hotels out there. They have some sort of chalet. Chalet. Yeah. Okay. They have hotel, but they close for renovation. Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. And what is on the island? Why do people go there? They just go leisure swimming at the beach. Yeah. And just hang out on the beach. Yeah. Okay.
So, yeah, they have it’s like a ferry. Yeah. That goes back and forth and they have a schedule here which is all up to date which is nice to see. I’m not used to schedules being up to date but yeah. So it goes there 8 10 2:30 and 5 and then it returns.
I think these are the return trips something like that pagi pagi pang pan anyway so the next boat is at 2:30 and I guess I could come back at 5:15 if I wanted to and they would take a bicycle oh it’s at 30 ringgit foreigners that’s the foreigner price 24 for locals. So yeah, you can take one of these boats out to the island, which would be a nice day trip out of Melaka. I don’t know whether I want to do it today or not. If I went out to the island, I’d want to spend the night out there.
And here at the dock, they have a little restaurant.
I know I said that just a few minutes ago that there was no point going out to offshore islands because the coast is just as new and interesting for me. But it turns out that this ferry just goes back and forth quite frequently and it costs 30 ringgit round trip. So at that other dock it was 180 ringgit round trip. But I guess that must have been a private charter, a private boat. So but this is more like a you know you can see what it looks like. Private boat here. Not a public boat. I mean it’s got a ferry terminal right there. Oh no. I guess that’s not the one we’re taking. We’re getting on a smaller one. And for better or worse, I decided to hop on. I can head out to the island and then the last ferry back is 5:00. So, I just have to get back. The latest I’ll be back is like 5:15, 5:30. And then I’ll just have to figure out where I’m spending the night. So, taking a little bit of a risk if it’s pouring rain when I get back here. Cuz I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to Muar before dark. Still another 35 kilometers from here and I won’t be in the mood to ride that far. So, I’ll probably either head straight back to Melaka or try to pitch my tent somewhere around here. But either way, we’re heading out to the island, which is cool.
And off we go. So, these boats fit 10 people probably at the most.
We’ve arrived. Very short trip to get out here. And they have one of these floating docks. It’s very cool. You have to navigate a pretty bouncy boat and a bouncy dock to get off.
Okay, get off here. Ferry 5:00. Get here. Okay.
Okay. So, you aren’t getting off here. Oh, okay. Okay. So, there goes my boat. And I don’t really know why. Some people got off here, but some didn’t. And I’m not sure why. I think I got off at the wrong place. I spoke to the driver of the boat like, “Is this where I get off?” And he said, “Yeah, you get off here.” But I have a feeling I wasn’t supposed to cuz now I asked them, “Where are they going?” And they says, “Oh, we’re going to the beach.” Oh, that’s where I thought I was going. Anyway, I am somewhere. I don’t know where. Got to be very careful. I’ve never been on a floating dock before. So, this is very unusual. I can see a lot of people having trouble with this thing. Even as I’m walking around, I can feel it. Like I might just get tossed. Oh, so they’re going right over there. There’s the beach. So, I don’t see what the difference is. I can run and beat them to the beach, but yeah, I’m walking along here with all of my camera gear, smartphones, everything. You get too close to that edge. Yeah, you’re going into the drink. So, this is very cool. So, yeah. I don’t know why you would get off here as opposed to the beach. Maybe the people that got off here, they did seem to have suitcases. So, I think this is maybe where. Okay, this is like maybe a resort or a hotel.
So, yeah, there’s my boat right there. You know, they’ve stopped at the beach and I’ll just walk straight down there. But my dog DNA tells me I can’t just arrive at a dock and walk away. I have to explore. I’ve got to go for a little trot down to the end of the dock. See what’s here. Walk around in a circle. And I guess the boat, the guy did tell me 5:00. I have to be back here at 5:00 to get the ferry back again. I noticed a couple of women on the boat there. They had their eyes closed. They had their heads buried in the chest of their husband. And yeah, they were not very happy to be on a boat. That is for sure. Yeah, I guess if you’re not accustomed to the water and not accustomed to boats, it can be a little bit of a shock to suddenly be bouncing across this water on that little boat. So, I have a couple of hours basically to walk around. I brought a started as a liter and a half of water. It’s already down to 3/4 of a liter. I assumed I’d be able to buy drinks out here. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about what I wanted to do. When I showed up, I was trying to decide about coming out to the island or not. And I thought about bringing my bike out here with me, my bike and trailer, and then I could spend the night out here on the island, but I wasn’t sure if that was really possible. And the guy said, “Yeah, you could do it, but it would cost an extra 30 ringgit for the bike. For like a lot of luggage, you would have to pay 30 ringgit.” And I just packed it up and left it locked up down at the dock. I think that was the best thing to do.
Because that boat was pretty small, it would have been a kind of a real pain in the butt to try and manhandle my bicycle and trailer and all of my bags onto that small boat.
And once you come out here and you say you want to go camping, they’ll probably call it glamping and charge you 200 ringgit to set up a tent. So if I do end up camping, I guess I’ll just be camping back on the shore somewhere.
But yeah, I don’t really know anything at all about this island. So we are here to find out what’s here. What do you do when you come to this island?
I just read on a sign that this island, Pulau Besar, Big Island, it’s the largest island in the Melaka area and it is well known as a stopover point for long voyages. So like in the 1500s, it was a stopover point for ships and needing to restock with fresh water and things like that. And I guess it’s connected with the journeys of Zheng He, they would stop here. This island is mentioned in the journals that were written on Zheng He’s boats on his expeditions. So guess that makes it part of history.
There’s probably hiking trails things like that. I was just talking with the man who seemed to be attached to all those tents over there. There’s like a big set of tents and I was just curious what’s possible here. And he said if you want to put up your tent here, he said it’s free. You can just any of these spaces here, you can just put up your tent and camp there and it doesn’t cost anything. But he said somehow if you wanted to camp up here then you have to pay. But even he didn’t seem particularly clear on the details about everything. Like I have no idea how you would arrange something like that, who you would pay, how much you would pay, or I have no idea how any of this works. But that’s normal for me. I never know what’s going on.
There’s a boardwalk over here. Looks pretty nice. You can see some of the other islands.
To be honest, I was surprised that the ferry was so. Well, at the very beginning, I thought it was really organized because the guy said, “Yeah, the next ferry is at 2:30 and then the last ferry coming back is at 5:00.” And that’s exactly what their schedule said. But then when I said, “Yeah, I would like to go.” And I was going to buy a ticket, suddenly it was, “Okay, the boat’s here now.” And it was 1:30. And he says, “No, you can get on this boat right now.” And he says, “Well, I’m not ready yet. I have to go to my bicycle, make sure it’s secure. I have to kind of repack a little bit to, you know, to sort through my gear.” So, I bring stuff out to the island that I need. I can’t go right this second. And then it suddenly got very confusing about exactly when the boats went and what boats you get on cuz then he started saying, “Oh, okay. You can take the 230 boat.” And then he pointed to some other people and says, “Oh, you can go with them.” And he pointed to some other people and said, “Oh, or you can go with them. They’re going by boat.” So I have no idea what was going on. I bought a ticket for the 230 boat, but then suddenly it seemed possible to hop on any number of boats. Like anytime I was ready to go, I could have hopped on a boat. I but I have no idea why or how. Anyway, I couldn’t figure out what the organizational system was. Given a bit more time and a bit more information, I guess I could have repacked really quickly and just brought my camping gear out here with me. Just thrown a few things together to bring out my tent and sleeping pad, stuff like that. But I think in order to do that, you have to bring all your own food and water.
I don’t see anything out here. I don’t see any restaurants or cafes. So, even if I could have rummaged through my trailer and took out all my camping gear that I would want, still really wouldn’t have worked out because I didn’t know that you could camp here for free. And yeah, I don’t have any food in my bags. So, I don’t have any food at all. It’s another one of these situations. I run into it all the time where local people just know everything. They just seem to just through osmosis, they know all the details about everything. And then when I try to ask my questions, how exactly does this work and when does it go and how much and then it’s very hard to track down that information for me. Slowly getting the lay of the land. This trail that I started walking along seems to go off in quite a long ways. And I passed one place that appeared to be open that had chalets, like little cabins basically. And I see some more cabins up here. On my way back, I’ll stop and ask them how much it costs to stay in one of those cabins.
I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of luxuries out here. Air conditioning and Wi-Fi, things like that. Though I have a data connection. I just realized I’m chatting with people on WhatsApp and sending photos. And for me to do that, yeah, I have to have some sort of a mobile data connection. So, they do have internet out here.
I’ve just been following this orange brick road just seeing where it goes and it looks like it just keeps going and going. I’ll have to look at the Google Maps for a minute, figure out how far I want to walk or whether there’s any point to just walking and walking and walking. I’m I’ve been walking along the shoreline here. And over here is where the ferry dock is and all the little chalets and one open restaurant that I saw. And the ferry terminal on the mainland is off in that direction, too.
I did see a bunch of signs saying no swimming. So, apparently there’s some danger here in terms of the water. I mean on this side anyway it’s all kind of mud flats out there the water looks better but quite an effort to get out that far. So I don’t know if people come out here for the beaches to go swimming. There might be some nice beaches around the island but I’m not sure. And of course there’s all the usual signs about things you can’t do indecent behavior. There was a sign that said no indecent attire. And they showed a very very modest one-piece women’s bathing suit as the example of what’s considered not modest enough. So that basically means no swimsuits at all. You have to go into the water in your clothing according to that sign. And here we’ve got some you can’t do this sign. Anyway, I guess that means no hunting, no fishing, which makes sense.
Yeah, I’m in no mood to climb. So, if there’s any trails like going up into those hills, I’m not heading in that direction at all. I’ve already had my exercise for the day, and when I get back to the mainland, I’m going to have to do some more cycling. So, not in the mood for doing a lot of climbing. I’ll figure out how far I want to go on foot. And they do rent motorcycles here. So, that would kind of be I think that would be the way to go around this island if you want to go all the way around it. Rent a motorcycle for the day. I don’t know it’s necessary though. Like I said, I don’t really know anything about this island yet. How big it is, what the attractions might be, what you might want to do while you’re here. All I know is there was a boat heading in this direction and I hopped on it and that’s it. This is the place that I spotted that seems to be open for business, the chalet shri on Pulau Besar. There’s some phone numbers. I think that’s how most things happen around here. People just they get a phone number, then they call and make arrangements and then they go from there.
Personal touch. So, yeah, there. Hello. Where you from? Uh Canada. Canada. I didn’t take any video, but I had a meal here. Just mee goreng, you know, fried noodles basically. Yeah, they have quite an active restaurant here. Kind of a casual sort of place. It’s not super organized or formal. Nobody comes to your table with a menu. You choose, you know, you just sort of sit down and just sort of try to figure out how things work. It’s very casual. Everybody knows everybody else, family, friends. And they have a bunny cage. Hey there, bunnies. Whole bunch of bunnies.
They have 23 units in total spread out over this pretty large area. Some are aircon, some fan only. She said it was 180 ringgit per night for an aircon unit like this one. Yeah, this one has an air conditioner and then about 150 or something like that for fan only.
And then she did say they had single units. So I’m guessing this up here might be singles, though I don’t imagine there’s a huge demand for them, but maybe there is. And she said they cost 100 ringgit per night for a single. So, one person on their own could stay here. Though, I get the impression that they’re really busy, like they’re fully booked. So, you would have to contact them at their WhatsApp number and make a reservation in advance. You could just show up and see if they have one available, but it’s probably best to WhatsApp them in advance. But yeah, this is the place. I thought I had escaped from Melaka. Well, escaped isn’t the right word. I thought I had left Melaka, but actually I’m going to go back to Melaka now. Yeah, turns out today is more of a day trip than going to another city trip. I spent so much time checking out all the fishing harbors and all the boats and all the sites and then coming out here to this island, Pulau Besar that I’m just outside of Melaka. Um oddly enough, you can see the city right there. That’s where I left from. You can see all of the skyscrapers there. So there’s Melaka. My original idea of course when I left this morning was to go to Muar but Muar is still quite a long ways in that direction. So I can’t really cycle there before dark. So, I thought, well, since I’m only 15 kilometers away from my starting point, the easiest thing to do is take the ferry back to the jetty and then just don’t dawdle, don’t stop off anywhere, don’t go exploring. Just 15 kilometers straight riding right back to Melaka and then check into the Makota Vibe in my low budget hotel there. So that’s the plan now. I’m just out on the dock waiting for the boat to come. Supposed to be here at 5:15. Hopefully this works out. Though there looks like there’s going to be a lot of people to get on the boat. So, who knows? I may end up causing myself even more trouble by waiting for this boat and then turning out that there isn’t any room on the boat and we have to wait for the next boat or something. I don’t know. Looks like a lot of people are showing up. These boats don’t carry a lot of people. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve already booked a room back in Melaka anyway, so I don’t really have a choice. That’s what I’m committed to now.
Come on.
Oops. Sorry.
Do you mind? It’s okay.
So, the boat I was worried for a while that the boat wasn’t going to come. It was scheduled for like 5 or 5:15. And since I changed my plans and I want to go back to Melaka, if there was like an hour delay or something, that means I’m cycling in the dark. So, I was pretty happy when the boat showed up. But the funny thing is like there was no organization about the number of people that were showing up to get on the boat, how big the boat was going to be, could it fit all of us. So, when we were waiting on the dock, there was this tension in the air. We’re all wondering, is there going to be enough room for all of us? So, by the time the boat did show up, there was quite a rush to get onto the boat to make sure you found a space on the boat. But they managed to put everybody on. You can see behind me, every seat is taken and I think there’s. Yeah, there’s Melaka over there.
So, yeah, my seatmate was pointing out. I’m ignoring the nice view out the window. But yeah, that’s where I’m heading tonight. Back to Melaka.
It’s crazy that the buildings are so clear even from 15 km away.
But we all managed to get on. It’s a much bigger boat than the one we came out on. So anyway, once I hit the shore, then I’ll be hopping onto my bike and going right back to where I came from. Kind of funny. Back to Melaka.
That was pretty chaotic. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that. My heart was like, “Oh, and my throat.” Yeah.
So, that’s the boat that picked us up to bring us back. Yeah. Much much bigger than the one I like the one that brought us out there better because it was all open windows on the sides and I could stick my camera out the window. This one you’re stuck inside and I didn’t have a window seat so I couldn’t really film outside the window. But here we are back at the dock. Yeah, I don’t know if I finished my story because yeah, my seatmate wanted to talk and I don’t know what it is. Like all of today basically I couldn’t understand anybody. I mean I had all these conversations with all kinds of fishermen and other people that I met people out on the island. When I had lunch out there, I didn’t film my lunch, but the woman who ran the chalet there, she was the caretaker, the manager. She invited me over to her table so we could have a conversation. And I couldn’t really understand a word she was saying. There’s something about the rhythm of English, the mix of all the different accents, the way people speak. I just have a heck of a time understanding people. So anyway, yeah, my seatmate I couldn’t really understand, so I was like trying to focus and yeah, so I don’t know if I finished my story, but yeah, when we were out on the island waiting for the boat, there’s like no information. There’s no signage. There’s nothing. So yeah, all of us were standing on the dock asking each other like, “We’re supposed to be here, right? Is this where we get the boat and it’s coming at 5:15, right? Or does anybody know?” We all none of us had any accurate information. We’re all talking to each other. And then yeah, I think we all started to get worried that there was not going to be enough room for all of us cuz more and more people kept showing up. And then when the boat got there, people just ran for the boat. I thought I was sort of at the front of the line, but everybody it was like a rugby scrum pushing past me. People were jumping onto the boat before it came to a full stop. I was really surprised. I wasn’t expecting that kind of chaos. But yeah, and when we were coming back, occasionally the boat tilted when the guy was driving pretty fast and then again all the women inside screamed and they all ducked their heads down. I don’t think people here have a lot of experience with boats. Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t see a single life preserver, which kind of surprised me, too. Maybe they’re hidden in there somewhere, but there were no signs indicating where like I’m used to Asian countries having a lot of life jackets and yeah.
Anyway, here’s the beast and yeah, about to jump on it and head straight back to Melaka where I started this morning. Just mentally. Don’t think of this as a failure of a day. Think of it as turning a travel day into a day trip day. So, basically, I just packed up and now I’m heading back to where I started from. Anyway, I better quit babbling and hit the road. I’m outside of the jetty, the ferry terminal building. There’s my bike ready to go. Took a while to change over from knapsack walking around the island life to being back on the bicycle life. But I just wanted to come over here and capture this scene on video a little bit with Melaka’s skyscrapers down there, the sun in the sky. And yeah, I think I have plenty of time to get back there before the sun drops below the horizon. I think we’re okay. More challenging is batteries. Yeah, my GoPros just chew through the batteries. And then today, for some reason, I kept forgetting to turn them off. I think my brain was so preoccupied with so many other things going on that I kept forgetting to shut off the GoPro after I’d done recording whatever it was I wanted to record. So, I drained batteries.
And here we go. Heading back to Melaka. Should have a whole different feeling to it because on my way out here, as you saw in the video, if you made it this far, I tried to stick to the coastline as much as possible. So, I didn’t go down the main road number five. I just kept trying to go down to the coastline on the smaller roads. And that’s why it took me so long. Never made it to Muar. But now I’m going to zigzag a little bit of road here, get up on number five, turn left, and then stay on five all the way back to Melaka. And if I stay above like 15 kilometers an hour, should be back in an hour. But I don’t want to jinx myself. So I should better stop predicting.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Two ringgit. Yes. Where do you come from? Canada. Canada. Very good. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. You’re welcome. Good luck. Thank you. Hi, Canada. Canada. Very good. I need good luck. I know you. Thank you.
So, that answers one of my questions. When I showed up here earlier in the day, yeah, there was nobody here, but I saw a sign saying, you know, two ringgit entrance fee for parking basically, but nobody was there. I wasn’t sure whether that two ringgit fee was real or not, but yeah, there’s somebody there now. Two ringgit. He was saying.
Yeah, just saying I don’t want to jinx myself. I don’t want to deal with a mechanical breakdown or flat tire or anything like that on my way back to Melaka. Yeah, good day though. Really enjoyed that. Really enjoyed going alongside the coastline, stopping off here and there to check some things out and then capping it with the trip out to the island. Yeah, that island is a kind of a place where you probably want to go there in the morning with a full-on plan, kind of a family day. So you go out there, do some hiking, rent a canoe, paddle around, kids, play in the water here, there. You know, you kind of have to know what you’re doing and make a whole day out of it. What I ended up doing, to be honest, what I enjoyed the most were the two boat rides. It was just a lot of fun to sit on the boat and go out to the island and then that crazy boat ride back.
It was a blood sport seeing who managed to get on the boat.
I didn’t anticipate that I’m going to be cycling directly into the setting sun the whole time.
Probably have to get out the sunglasses again.
So, I’m on five heading back to Melaka. And I don’t imagine anything particularly amazing is going to happen. And I don’t think I’m going to have a whole lot to say. And I’m running out of battery power. So, I think I can safely conclude the video here. Yeah, as I said, I really enjoyed the day. Would have been nice, I guess, to end it in Muar instead of backtracking. But this is how things turned out. I don’t really mind. Part of the reason I made this decision is that I realized I’m going to need a full day to edit the video. So even if I went on to Muar, I’ll spend all day tomorrow just in my hotel room editing video anyway. So doesn’t really matter whether I’m in Muar or in Kuala Lumpur, I mean or in Melaka.
And with that, I have some shout outs to sprinkle around out there in the plan on Planet Doug. Yeah. Shout out to my touchandgo supporters here in Malaysia helping to fund my small adventures and my video production with your donations through Touch and Go. That helps out a great deal. You have no idea. Yeah. Shout out to all of the Planet Doug Patreon members. Love you guys.
And of course, shout out to my coffee posse at buy me a coffee.
I have a feeling this video is going to end up being a relatively long one. They all are, but somehow I feel like I shot a lot of video today. Had a lot of small experiences here and there. So, only the very best citizens of Planet Doug are still there watching the video. And you know what that means? Shout out to my crunch club members for watching the video all the way to the end. Yeah. And as someone suggested, if you watch the video all the way to the end and you’re subscribed to Planet Doug and you liked the video, well, that makes you an elite member for the Crunch Club. Put CCE in the comments to let me know. All right. From here, I’ll be sticking in the 3D flyover map courtesy of Strava and Map Director. You’ll see exactly the route that I followed. And that will be the end of the video. Now I just have to hunker down and keep pedaling here on road number five back to Melaka. All right, that’s it. Cutting down. And my next video will hopefully be just me riding to Muar without too many detours, without too many pit stops. And that’s the next video. Well, shutting down now and I’ll see you in that video. The road to Muar.