VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
How do you get cash when your only debit card gets cancelled overseas after one wrong PIN?
In this Planet Doug travel tip, I share the method that finally worked for me in Melaka, Malaysia: using PayPal’s Xoom service to send money to myself for cash pickup at a Ria outlet.
I walk through the whole process — the currency conversion tricks, the “sender and receiver are the same person” setup, the round-number ringgit requirement, and what actually happens when you show up at a Ria location.
This started as a pure how-to video… then turned into a long, hot walk across Melaka hunting for an outlet that actually had cash, exploring abandoned buildings, the old monorail, Kampung Morten, and the river.
I was pretty excited when I came across this apparently simple workaround, but since I live on Planet Doug, it turned into something much more challenging …. and exhausting.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This is a Planet Doug travel tip video and it’s all about a new way of getting cash while you are overseas. At least it was a brand new way to me and I thought since it helped me out so much, I thought I would make a video about it and perhaps it can help some people out there. And the basic idea is that it uses Xoom. X O O M and Xoom is the money sending like the money transfer part of PayPal. So, if you have a PayPal account and it’s linked to your bank account in your home country generally, or maybe it always has to be, I don’t know, but you have a PayPal account and you have a balance in your PayPal account. There’s money in it. Anywhere in the world just about, you can send that money from PayPal to yourself. That’s what I just did today. And actually, I’m on my way to go pick up the money. And this is the final stage of using this new system. So I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’s going to work out. I generally have horrible luck when it comes to anything banking, money, credit cards, debit cards. I basically I lurch from disaster to disaster. Everything I try to do never seems to work out. But so far this is working out. And I was able to send money to myself drawing on my PayPal balance and I can pick it up in cash here in Melaka, Malaysia. And I’m on my way to the cash pickup point. And of course, I’m in beautiful Melaka. You can see the river cruise boats going by. Another beautiful sunny day here in Melaka. The cash pickup point is about 2 kilometers from my hotel and I just decided to go for a walk to get there and talk about this new thing that I discovered.
This story, this new thing I learned began as I always do with a Planet Doug financial disaster. Completely my own mistake and yet at the same time another aspect of the modern world that drives me crazy. Basically like two days ago I needed money so I got out my ATM card from my bank in Canada and I walked to a local bank here in Melaka. I went to a Maybank. I went into the outer room, you know, the lobby where they keep all the ATMs. And I went up to one and I guess I really wasn’t paying attention. I was a little bit distracted. It’s always that way. I’ve got 20 things I’m thinking about all at the same time. I had to walk quite a distance here in Melaka in the heat to get to the bank and I was hot and sweaty. The ATM area was crowded. It was unfamiliar. I’d never been to this bank before. And I went up to the ATM, put in my card, and I accidentally entered the wrong PIN. Such a dumb mistake. I’ve never done it before in my life. But, you know, you kind of get you lose track of what you’re doing. The ATM, the screen was a little bit dim, a little bit hard to read. You’re trying to get at the number pad, right? And they have it covered up with a piece of plastic so nobody can see. But I’m so tall, I can’t see the number. So, I’ve got to bend way over and I got to stick my fingers in there. And I’m trying to type in my PIN. And I did, but I guess I got a digit wrong. And I entered the wrong PIN. And I didn’t realize this, but it turns out that my bank in Canada, the worst bank in the world when it comes to being overseas, only gives you one try. That’s it. So, because I had entered the wrong PIN one time, it didn’t let me try again. It basically turned off my card. You entered the wrong PIN once, they enter a code on the chip of the card that says this card is done. You can never use it again. And this sort of stuff drives me crazy because in the modern world, we have so many security features. All of our banking stuff, any online account that you have, any mobile app, there are so many layers of security protecting you. And yet all of those security measures always cause me trouble. I don’t think any of it ever actually protects me. It actually makes my life a hundred times more difficult. And in this case, my bank in Canada doesn’t give you two tries to enter your PIN. Doesn’t give you three. It only gives you one. And then if you enter it incorrectly, as I did, it’s not like they reject the transaction and you can try again. It’s not like you just have to wait for 48 hours so that the system resets and you can try again. No, that’s it. Your card, it’s garbage. You might as well throw it away because they physically enter a code on the card’s chip that says this card is now defective and you can never use it again. And I only have one card. That’s it.
Again, over time, I mean, I’ve been away from Canada for a long time. In I guess I left Canada semi-permanently back in 1991. So, what’s that? That’s like 35 years ago that I kind of left Canada. And then the last time I was even I even went to Canada for a visit was 16 years ago. So, the last time I was in Canada was 16 years ago. So, over that time as a Canadian overseas, it’s really difficult to keep your Canadian ID and systems and credentials up to date. And over time, I just kept losing them. I would lose a bank account, lose a debit card, driver’s license expires. You know, everything just expires over time. And no matter how hard you try to update all of this, keep everything valid, everything current from overseas, you eventually reach a point where the bank, the government, somebody says, “No, you can’t do this from overseas. You have to do it in Canada. You have to physically come into our branch to do it.” And then there’s nothing you can do. So, you lose it. You lose credit cards. You lose debit cards. You lose your driver’s license. You basically lose everything if you don’t return to your home country over time and get a chance to renew all these things. So, I ended up with only one bank account left in Canada and one debit card. And now, I didn’t even know this. I went to the ATM, entered the wrong PIN, card gone. I have no way of accessing my bank account. Like nothing. There’s nothing I can do because as I said, it’s physically altered the card itself. Even if I call my bank in Canada and say, “Oh, I accidentally entered the PIN incorrectly and you blocked my card.” They can’t unblock it from their end because the block is on the card itself. Because I tried this the first time it was the first time it was rejected because I entered the wrong PIN. I put it back in to do it a second time entering the correct PIN and it just spit out the card. Like I wasn’t even allowed to enter the PIN. I put in the card and the machine just kicked it out and says no, this is a defective card. And then I went to another bank. Not Maybank. I went to RHB. I think I thought I don’t know, maybe Maybank is blocking me, but I can do it at another bank. So, I went to a second bank. So, this was technically my third attempt. Put in the card and it just went beep spit it out and said, “No, this card is defective.” So, if you see what I mean, even if my bank in Canada can reset the PIN, I cannot reset it at an ATM in Malaysia. The only option is for my bank in Canada to issue a new card to my address in Canada and then somehow it has to be set with a new PIN physically in Canada and then mailed to me somewhere overseas like here in Malaysia. So anyway, oh it was so frustrating. I was just kicking myself and kicking myself and kicking myself. But again, I didn’t know it was so serious. I just assumed you enter the wrong PIN once. Oh, it’ll go, oh no, incorrect PIN, try again. That would be the normal human thing to do. But banks in Canada are not human in any way. And for my bank, one attempt, you get it wrong, card’s cancelled, end of the card. You can be at the very beginning of your vacation overseas, you know, your dream trip on the other side of the world. You land in Japan. You take your CIBC ATM card, your debit card, put it into an ATM, enter the wrong PIN, nope. Card’s cancelled. Now, for your entire trip, you have no access to your money. You have no access to a bank account. That’s just how that’s how Canada rolls. It’s yeah, very very touchy when it comes to this sort of thing.
I guess if you’re a normal human being leading a normal life, you have you you don’t have just one card, right? You use your debit card, it doesn’t work well, you just get out your second debit card or your third debit card because back in your home country, you have two bank accounts or three bank accounts. You have two credit cards, right? You have a variety of options. But because I’ve been away for so long and I’ve lost everything, I only have one debit card. That’s my only access to money. And suddenly I was completely cut off. And it was such a dumb thing to do. I kept thinking, oh, like this is the last problem I needed in my life right now. If only I had typed in the right PIN, I could have avoided all of this. It’s just that one little mistake and suddenly you’re stuck on the outside on the other side of the world. No way to withdraw money and no way to fix the problem. Like you’re just basically stuck. That tiny little mistake and you’re done. Oh, I could not believe it honestly. So anyway, I went back to my hotel. I sat down and then I just started brainstorming like options like what can I do? How in the world? Because I like I have like a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet and there can be money in that account and I have a Visa debit card connected to my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. So that is up and running. Can I transfer money from my Canadian bank account to Touch ‘n Go? Like is there any way of doing that? And I started doing all this online research. I was hours and hours on the internet typing things in trying to figure things out. And one of my AI buddies told me, “Yeah, you can do that. All you have to do is open an account with something called SEAGM. It’s a Malaysian thing, I guess, where gamers can buy credit for all kinds of cards, gaming systems, things like that. S E A G M. And on SEAGM, you can buy a Touch ‘n Go reload. So I thought, ah, okay. So online, if I open a SEAGM account and then I go to purchase a Touch ‘n Go reload and then under the payment options, it would list a credit card. So I thought, ah, I can use my Canadian credit card, which I still have, though I don’t have the physical card here. It’s still stuck in Canada, but I do have a valid credit card. And if I use my credit card to buy a reload pin through SEAGM, then I can take that, go to 7-Eleven. Well, no, you don’t have to go to 7-Eleven because you’ve got the reload pin already. And you’re basically, it was basically a workaround, a way to load to reload my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet using my credit card, which normally you can’t do. Like on Touch ‘n Go, I can’t top up my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet using a credit card or a bank card. It has to be a Malaysian bank doing it. I can’t do it for my bank in Canada. But the SEAGM, my AI buddies were telling me, “No, it’ll work. It’s a workaround. Trust me.” They all kept saying, “Trust me.” So, I did. I opened a SEAGM account. I went through all the steps. And of course, because I’m a Canadian and because I live on Planet Doug, at the very last stage, payment payment failed. No, we cannot accept payment from this credit card. It doesn’t work. So, basically, that was a dead end for me. It’s always because I’m from Canada. Canada is highly restricted it seems. Anyway, I was searching and searching and searching looking for like you’ve got, you know, a credit card, you got a bank account, you’ve got PayPal, you’ve got this, you’ve got that. Is there any way I can go from A to B to C to D to E and finally get money here in Malaysia? And I just could not find a route. Like everything I tried to do there was a block. It just would not work for me.
I have to interrupt my story for a minute here because according to Google Maps, this is where I can pick up my cash because short long story made short. I eventually found a way to do it, as I said, using PayPal and using the Xoom app, which is part of PayPal, to send money to a cash pickup point.
So, and the cash pickup point here in Malaysia is called Ria. Oh, and there’s Ria right over there. And I guess there are dozens and dozens of Ria outlets in Melaka. There’s thousands of them in Malaysia, but most of them are like a Ria feature at like a money changer or something. This one is an official Ria outlet. So, I wanted to go basically to their head office to make sure that everything works out. I didn’t want to try to do it at like a money changer and have it not work. So, there is a Ria and oh, I can actually go inside and sit down at a desk. Oh, I love that. I hate having to talk through bulletproof glass through the tiny holes. I can never understand what they’re saying, but it looks like I can go inside. So, I sent myself some money and I said I would pick it up at Ria. So, let’s go in and see if I can do that. Crossing my fingers, man. Holding my breath because on Planet Doug things like this never ever work out properly. But who knows? Maybe bit of luck is coming my way. Okay, here we go. I have my transaction ID number. So, I need to show them that number and my passport and they should give me some money. Let’s see how this works out.
Hey, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Oh, so very hot. Yeah, it’s too hot. Too much hot for me. I’m I’m sweating so much. Oh, yeah. Where are you from? From Canada. Oh, Canada. Yeah. Yeah, Canada. Very nice. Yeah, I just came to pick up some money. I hope you send money. No, I I sent money here. I send money. Yeah. To pick it up here. Oh, so they show me this. Yeah, in this case I sent it to myself from like PayPal. Yeah, you can send money to Ria or an email and then pick it up here. I never did it before, but I hope it I hope it works. Yep.
Well, I’m walking away and you don’t see a smile on this face. Yeah, I live on Planet Doug, so I don’t know how things work on your planet. They don’t have any money. Like they literally said, “Yeah, oh, we see your transaction here and everything looks fine and all you need is your passport.” Unfortunately sir, today they said we have no cash. Like literally they said we we don’t have any money to give you so there’s nothing we can do for you. I was just I was sort of stunned to be honest. I was like okay. And then she did say well we might get more customers today and if you want to sit down in the lobby you can wait and if other people come in and they give us money then we can give it to you. But right now, we don’t have any. Yeah. I mean, this Okay. Yeah. Planet Doug, I’m telling you, this is just the way my life goes. So, once I learn that, I have two choices. I can reverse course and try to go to like an agent, like a money changer, and they might they would have money. I I hope. And then but I I just have a feeling it’s going to be difficult like at a money changer. There’s going to be some kind of technical problem with the system. They don’t do this all the time. So I wanted to go to their main branch, but their main branch, one of their main branches, doesn’t have any money today. Anyway, they told they they made some phone calls for me and they found another Ria outlet similar to this one that has money. They called and confirmed. Makes me feel like I’m some sort of a billionaire, like I’m Elon Musk here trying to cash in, you know, a billion dollar certificate or or bond or something. But I’m actually I’m only getting a small amount of money because all I want to do is test it. I just want to test it to make sure it works. Because I didn’t want to send more than just a tiny bit because if I try to send hundreds of dollars and it gets stuck then then it’ll be stuck in limbo and that money will just be sitting there in international financial limbo. Yeah, I’m here also Malaysia man. Not a not a country for pedestrians if you like to walk places. I don’t know. I think I might have to cross over this way because everybody here is turning at this corner. There’s no I’ll never be able to cross over there, but I I can cross this way. Yeah, you can see the endless flow of traffic. There’s something about the way the stop lights are set up here that the traffic there like never seems to be a break. Very rarely anyway.
But unfortunately, this other Ria outlet is about 3 km away from here. So yeah, should have taken my bike. I just thought it would be a pleasant walk. I didn’t realize it would be such a long walk.
This was supposed to be a Planet Doug travel tip. Short and sweet and to the point. It wasn’t supposed to be a typical Planet Doug walkabout vlog, but that’s what it’s turning into. I’m afraid I haven’t even finished my story about sending the money to begin with. But hey, at least I get to see a new part of Melaka, like a whole new perspective. Check this out. A classic abandoned building. You don’t see that in the historic heritage, the UNESCO World Heritage Zone. And the crows, always crows. That would be a cool building to explore. You could probably Oh, looks like a skateboard park, too, right here. It’s kind of a classic place for skateboarders. Abandoned building over here. Lots of walls for graffiti. Some ramps and some I don’t know what you call those. You skid along them. And then a giant tower there. I wonder what this place used to be. Well, since we’re here, let’s go take a look. Oh, and I found the monorail station. This abandoned monorail is one of the fascinating artifacts of Melaka. I forget the whole history of it now, but they they built this monorail. It’s part of the tourism infrastructure and they had all kinds of problems with the infrastructure right from the beginning. And it it basically opened closed open for a short while and then closed permanently. But I guess this is the main base. You can even see the the train up there. But yeah, there’s two towers here. There’s that one and then this one. Man, that looks that looks for boating. This one solid. No windows at all. I wonder what it was supposed to be originally.
Yeah, I figured one of these sheet metal things would have been torn away so that you could at least take a peek inside. Just keeping my eye open for any packs of stray dogs. I don’t want to disturb them. Woo! Good home for pigeons. Wow. Look at this. The basement is flooded and then they’ve got stairs. Let’s go up a little bit. Stairs seem solid enough. Wow, what a crazy sight. I never expected to be doing this as I went out to try and get some emergency cash via Ria. Didn’t think I’d end up in a place like this. Yeah. Let’s take another look up that set of stairs. This is as high as I’m going to go. Going to stay down here close to the main floor. It’s really smelly in here, too. Powerful sewage smell. Down we go. Yeah, it looks like that used to be some kind of a a bathroom in a water container. Yeah. You look down there and you wonder, can I trust that to support my weight? Yes. Luckily, very cool. Whoa. Whoa. All of this. I wonder if Okay, it used to be covered, right? Looks like these openings used to have coverings over them. They’ve all been smashed over the years. So, you can look straight up. What in the world? What kind of a building was this? That huge open space in there. No idea what this could have been. It’s probably obvious what kind of a what function this building served, but I can’t tell you what it is off the top of my head. And then there’s a this one right beside it. Wow. Wow. There’s the basement of this building, also completely flooded. It’s crazy that these are open and you could actually go in there if you really wanted to. That is crazy. What did what was this building? What a crazy sight. You got a derelict tourist attraction, the monorail, the completely abandoned shell of a building there. And then those two huge buildings right there with the skateboard park. And then right beside all of this are the remains of the monorail. Every time I think of a monorail, see a monorail, I instantly get the Simpsons episode in my head. Monorail. Monorail. You got the monorail song. That is wild that they still have one of the trains sitting there completely falling apart. There’s no way that is ever going to run again. Look at that thing. Wonder how many times it went around before it was abandoned. I don’t think it ran for very long at all. There’s a sign there on the building says Nasi Lac Monorail. I had no idea it had a name. Certainly didn’t know it was called the Nasi Lac Monorail. What a sight. If you like urban settings, like abandoned urban settings, this is classic spot right here.
Well, I better keep going. I’ve got a long ways to go to get to this Ria outlet that has all the money. Walking anywhere in Malaysia is always an exciting experience. Never straightforward. So, this street here, yeah, there is no no pedestrian sidewalk of any kind. And I’ve gotten nervous about walking on top of these paving stones over top of the irrigation channels because I had one of them break on me. I stepped on it and it shattered and I fell in. So now I I tend not to walk on them anymore. I stick to the the edges where there’s solid ground. At least I hope so. Anyway, to get back to Ria and why I originally thought this was such an amazing thing because yeah, it’s interesting the way it connects things because I have my Canadian bank account which I can’t access, but I do have a PayPal account which is connected to my bank account, right? So, I have my bank account linked to my PayPal account, but that still doesn’t do me any good. I can transfer money from PayPal to my bank account, but I can’t get at the money from either one. But now you’ve got this PayPal service called Xoom, which is a PayPal linked send money app. So now what I can do is I signed up. Well, I didn’t actually have to sign up with Xoom. If you go to the Xoom website and you just click log in with PayPal, you enter your PayPal credentials because PayPal and Xoom are the same thing. And then like you don’t open a Xoom account because you already have a PayPal account. You already have one. So basically I just logged into Xoom with my PayPal credentials, you know, username, password, two factor authentication code. So you log in and now inside of Xoom, you can send money from and to various places. So when I when I was inside Xoom, I could send money from PayPal, but then when I went through the steps and I got to the end, it said, “Well, what source do you want to get the money from? Your credit card, your bank account, or yeah, that that those were the only two options I had.” And it turned out there was a little bit of a well there were several glitches or gotchas in the system where I was trying to send US dollars like $100 US because that’s what the system suggested when I opened it up. It just had like $100 US already entered as a suggestion and the money that I had in my PayPal account was being held in US dollars. So, I went through the whole system, but every time I got to the end, the transaction failed. Well, it didn’t fail. What I was trying to do was get the money from my PayPal account in US dollars, send it here to Ria. But every time I tried to choose where to get the money from, it only gave me two options, bank account or credit card. I thought, well, how do I I want to use the PayPal balance. I’m crossing the river, by the way. Check out that dragon boat. Okay, mystery solved. I think this is the famous dragon boat from China. They brought it here for the dragon boat festival to put it on display like an exhibition. I’ll bet you that’s what it is, though. Maybe not. It doesn’t really look that fancy to bring it all the way from China, but anyway, very big dragon boat. Yeah, I’ve got to cross the the river because the shopping mall I need to go to is a couple kilometers in that direction. But anyway, what I was trying to do, as I said, is send US dollars from my PayPal US currency balance, and I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t let me do it. But it turns out that because my PayPal account is registered in Canada, I’m only allowed to send Canadian dollars. My starting currency has to be Canadian dollars. Even though all the money in my PayPal was in US currency, but for some reason I wasn’t allowed to use that balance. It had to be in Canadian dollars. So I thought, “Ah, there you go. I can’t do it. Another problem.” But then I did more research and my AI buddies told me, “Oh, no, that’s no problem. You can go into your PayPal account and convert currencies.” So, even though I had a balance in US dollars, I took a took some of that, converted it into Canadian dollars. So, now I had a Canadian balance. And then when I went to Xoom to send the money, it gave me PayPal as an option. And I selected PayPal, tried to send the money. And there was another error. It wouldn’t work. And it turned out it wouldn’t work because the way their system is set up, you start with a dollar amount and then it converts it into Malaysian ringgit. But the way the currency converted it ended up being like a really weird number like it with decimal points in terms of Malaysian ringgit. So then I got an error message saying no your Malaysian ringgit has to be a nice round number. So you don’t start with the dollars convert to ringgit. You start with how many ringgit you want to get. So then you could put in okay send me 200 ringgit and then it converts it into Canadian dollars. See what I mean? So if you try to say send me $100 and it converts it to whatever $100 is in in ringgit and then $281.90 ringgit, it won’t accept that because it has to be a nice round number. So then you just put in 200 ringgit. Anyway, that was the other trick. But in the end, to my amazement, it worked. At least it got me this far where I sent Canadian dollars to myself from PayPal to a cash pickup point and it went through and I got the transaction ID number and I got a notification. The other trick in the system is that you are both the sender and the recipient. So what you have to do is when you are your PayPal account has all the sender information but in Xoom you have to fill out who you’re sending the money to. You’re sending it to yourself but in that window you have to put in Malaysian information. Your address in Malaysia, your phone number in Malaysia, etc. So when it asks for your name and address and phone number, you don’t put in your name, address, and phone number. In Canada, you put the address of the recipient, me, and the recipient happens to be in Malaysia. It’s not really that complicated, but it essentially took me most of the day to figure all this out. This was all day yesterday and then I woke up this morning fresh and I thought, “Okay, let’s do it.” And I finally sent the money. And now I’m trying to get the money. And as you can tell, so far it’s not as easy as I had hoped because Ria, the outlet I went to, didn’t have any money, like no actual cash. Anyway, hot today. Very, very hot.
There’s an interesting angle to this little expedition in that it really shows how Melaka is a completely different city to foreigners like me and to local people because to most foreign visitors, Melaka is the downtown core, the historic version, right? Right where I’ve been spending all of my time. The river, the tower, the museums, Dutch Square, that is Melaka. And yet for to the average Malaysian, maybe the million plus people that live here, this is actually Melaka. Giant shopping malls like Eon Mall over there, big parking lots and these strip malls, huge apartment buildings. So yeah, this is this is Melaka for the local people, not for the tourists. Totally different city.
Yeah, this is turning into quite the adventure I was not expecting. As I said, I’m not even sending myself a useful amount of money. I just wanted to do a test first because, as I said, I I have no other way of getting money. I’m basically stuck because my one debit card has been cancelled and I assume the only way I can access my bank account again is I have to contact my bank in Canada and they’re going to have to mail out a new one. But they will only mail it to your Canadian address. So, I will have to do that and then get somebody in Canada, someone I trust because in order to set the PIN, you actually have to take the card, put it into a CIBC ATM in Canada to activate it and choose the PIN or enter the PIN or activate the PIN, however they do it these days. And then I have to get the card shipped from Canada to wherever I am, you know, Malaysia. It’s going to take a long time and it could be a lot of trouble. So I thought, hey, this PayPal Xoom Ria would work out beautifully. I don’t even need the debit card anymore. But so far, this Ria approach is not working out very well because I don’t have any money. And I’ve ended up I’ve ended up out here wherever I am on the outskirts of Melaka trying to track down one of these outlets that actually has money in the till. But yeah, check out where I am. This is getting very industrial wastelandesque. There’s a big Decathlon over there. And I think I’m on the right track. There’s a Lotus over there. Big hotel. And the river is right over there. So when I go back, I think I can just go down here and go the whole way back to down to the historic district along the river.
All right, time to check Google Maps. Make sure I’m still heading in the right direction. Nope, wrong direction. I did the classic roundabout mistake. I went around that roundabout, but I exited too early. I wasn’t supposed to go down this road. I was supposed to go one more and go down that road over there. So, I have to backtrack here. Get back to the roundabout. This is what you get on Planet Doug on the YouTube channel. Smarter people than I am. They don’t show this side of being overseas. They just skip to the good stuff, the fun stuff, and don’t bother filming all the work that goes on in the background. It’s kind of like an iceberg in a way, you know, 10% showing above the water, 90% underwater. This is the 90% part of the 90% anyway. All the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. All right. Now, I think this is the road. Maybe that Lotus is in a shopping mall. And that’s the shopping mall I have to go to to find the next Ria outlet. Hopefully I get there before they close for the day. That would be another classic Planet Doug moment.
Man, it never ends. So, here’s Lotus, but my Ria is not here. It’s actually on the other side of this highway. So, as a pedestrian, you got to figure out how to get across. This looks like there’s a there’s a bridge going from the mall. Quite a fancy pedestrian bridge. But I don’t know if I can get up there. Man, I often talk about how the pedestrians get forgotten in Malaysia, but they built this for pedestrians. Look at the size of this walkway. That’s incredible. Not entirely sure I need to use it to be honest because I I could just run across the highway right here. Right. But just for fun, might as well use it. They built it. Look at the size of the stairwell. I bet they don’t get very many people using this. You can tell this is a land built for drivers. It’s not built for pedestrians. A vast majority of Malaysians would just drive. There they are down there. There’s the majority. Look how long that ramp is to climb up here. This is crazy. Oh, they have some kind of a barrier here. Is that just meant to keep out motorcycles? Closeup of the main bridge. Hopefully I can cross to the other side. Otherwise, I climbed all the way up here for nothing. Oh, check this out. A cannon display. And this is a replica of the Peça de Malaca. There’s a huge cannon that the Portuguese found here in 1511. Except a funny thing is all of these replicas, they’re way too small. The real cannon weighs 9 and a half tons. It’s much, much bigger than this. So, the main thing about this Peça de Malaca is how huge it was. But none of these replicas get that across because they all look pretty small. Yeah. And there’s the the history of the Peça de Malaca but in Malay.
I’m having trouble figuring this out because if I follow Google Maps walking directions, Google Maps wants me to cross over there and then go down over there. But according to Google Maps, my shopping mall is supposed to be over here. And yet, I think that might be it over there. It’s Melaka Central. So, I think maybe I’m just confused or something. I think I really do have to go all the way over there. Let’s give that a try. What an adventure. Now, I should hope that my test transaction for a small amount of money, maybe it got mistranslated along the way, and they’ll hand me $100,000 when I get over there. System error. And then it will make this long journey worthwhile. Look at this. Even has a built-in mist misting apparatus. Makes it nice and cool up here. Look at that. Yeah, it’s after 3:00 right now. Yeah, as I said, real Melaka for the Melakans who live here, it’s a very different place compared to historic Melaka. So, I guess you’re allowed to stand here, but you have to take your shoes off. Well, hopefully I’m on the right track. If not, I’m going to get down there and then I’m going to have to cross the highway to get over there. Let’s go.
Well, apparently I’m here. Yeah. At the other Ria. They kept telling me where this other Ria was and I didn’t really understand what they were saying, but I realize now they were saying Melaka Central, which is a bus station. I didn’t know that, but this is a bus station. And I guess Ria is inside this building over here somewhere. How in the world? Such a funny thing. Here I am. I thought I had discovered this amazing hack, this incredible workaround, this easy way to send yourself money overseas when all else fails. Turns out it’s not quite as easy as you might hope. It’s starting to feel like this is a for emergencies only kind of route. Okay, here’s an entrance. So, I guess this is a shopping mall in the bus station. And Maria should be down here somewhere. Crazy. Ah, might be hidden down here. I guess because it’s a bus station, a lot of people coming and going, they have like money transfer, money exchange, and maybe Ria is over here somewhere. Yeah, this isn’t one of your fancy malls. This is a bit rough around the edges. A bus station, shopping mall. Come on, Ria. Where are you? I found it. Look at Look where they hid it. I honestly thought I was tapping into some really fancy network, only the highest end shopping malls for Doug, but they take these Ria and they tuck them away in the middle of nowhere. Like literally surprised there’s even any lights on down here at the end of this hallway. All right. Now, do I walk out of this place with money or not?
Yes, sir. Hello. Cash pickup. You’re cash pickup? Yeah. Yeah, I went to a different one. Ria. Oh, okay. This photo. For that? Yeah. Are you sure? Yeah. This one. Okay. Just for this one. Three again. Yeah. Today 3 0 1 2. Give me your password. Sorry. Sure. Yeah. I never did this before. Okay. With Ria. New experience. Okay. So, this one you receiver sender name what? Sender is me as well. Oh, I’m the sender and receiver. Okay. Same again. Yeah, same name. Okay. Okay. So, who is Canada again? Send to Canada again. No, no, no, no. Send here. Okay. Which country send Canada again? Yeah. You received Melaka again? Yeah. Yeah. From Canada to Malaysia. Malaysia. Yeah. Okay. So, you number? Yeah. Zero. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Sign. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Hello. That’s the ooh transaction number. Oh, sorry. Oh, just need that.
I guess you can call that a success. I did get the money that I sent to myself. Not a lot of money. As I said, I was just doing this as a test just to figure out how to do it and whether or not it would even it would even work. And yeah, that’s where Ria is way down. It’s funny. Just the other day, I was watching a trailer from a like a South Korean movie, like a new like a zombie flick called Colony. And when I came into the shopping mall going down that hallway, it sort of made me think there there’s got to be zombies coming at me from this dark hallway. But yeah, I got I got the money that I sent myself, but it was a lot more complicated than I expected. Again, I was expecting a kind of show your transaction number and that’s it. Like transaction number, here’s my passport. Oh, here’s your money, sir. But they treat it like it’s a remittance. So, they actually made me fill out a big form like I’m applying for a bank loan or something. I have to write out by hand all the information that I already put into the computer like all my data from Canada, name, address, phone number, all of my data from here, name, address, hotel address here in Malaysia, on and on and on. And that that always drives me crazy when I do these things because when I when I arrive at these places, I usually walk. So by the time I get there, I’m hot and sweaty and my arm and my hand is just drenched in sweat. So I’m trying to write on paper and the paper just gets soaked and my hand is trembling because of the long walk and the heat. And I never write anymore. That’s why I use computers. Like I I don’t I my handwriting is horrible. So, I’m trying to handwrite and this time the guard, he came over and he filled out the whole form for me because I was sort of reluctant. I was going, “What? I have to, no, no, no. I’m not I’m not doing a remittance. I’m just here to pick up money.” And he says, “No, no. For cash pickup, you have to fill out this remittance form.” It’s like, “Ah.” And then he just did it for me. But he had to refer to all the data on my phone from the Xoom Ria PayPal transaction windows, copying by hand all the information from the app onto paper so that I could hand it makes no sense at all. But in the end, it it did happen and I have the money. Anyway, I’m at a 7-Eleven now and I’m just going to get something to drink. From here, I’m going to try to make my way to the river. And as long as my directions are not failing me, I don’t go that way. I can go down the stairs here and then retrace my steps there. And I should be able to I saw a couple of street signs that said jetty. And a jetty means on the river, of course, right? Some kind of a dock. So, I think I can get to the river over here. And then I’m just going to follow the river all the way back to the historic district. A wise man would summon a Grab, of course, but I don’t mind getting a bit of exercise. And now that my errand is taken care of, I can relax. And yeah, and I enjoy the walking because you get to see so much that you would miss if you were in a car. Even this construction going on here, it’s pretty interesting. And you wouldn’t have the time to see all these things if you were in a Grab. But this is definitely my favorite part of the whole trip. This giant pedestrian walkway. That’s really something.
Another confusing thing about that transaction is that when the guard was filling out the form for me, I’m there. I told him at first he thought, “Okay, you’re sending money, right? You’re sending a remittance home.” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m I’m receiving money. I’m getting money.” Says, “Oh, okay.” So, then he fills out all of my information on the bottom of the form, the person receiving the money. And then he says, “Okay, who is the sender?” Right? And then I said to him, “Well, the sender, me. I’m the sender.” And of course, that that just confused the heck out of him. He said, “No, you said you were the receiver.” Yeah. Well, I’m also the sender. I’m sending the money to myself, which of course in his mind the money is coming from another country, but I’m already here. So why am I sending my you made no sense to him at all. So that led to some more confusion. So I’m making it sound like it’s so difficult and complicated it’s not worth it. But really, it’s like just the first time that you do it. So in the future, like if I did it again, I would know exactly what to do. There would be no surprises and I wouldn’t come all the way out here. I would just try to go to a a registered money changer near my hotel so I don’t have to go on such a long journey and I would know how to fill out the form. I know how to do the online stuff. I wouldn’t have to do all of this research and I would if you’re going to go to all this trouble, send yourself enough money to make it worthwhile. Send yourself as much money as you can so that the whole transaction is worth the trouble. I don’t know exactly where I’m going, but I’ve spotted these big hydro towers and it feels like they would follow the river. So, I think maybe I can access the river up here. Looks like I might be able to. Yeah, I think this might be it. I recognize that fence over there. I think that goes alongside the the river. Yeah, if they had one of those river cruise boats at a reasonable price, I could just hop on the boat right here, go back into town. But doesn’t work that way. Yeah. I remember riding my bicycle out here, going underneath all of these bridges, following the the river riverside pathway. Oh, look at that. There’s a whole bunch of those birds, three of them on this giant tower. That was the original idea idea when they built out all this like this little building right here. That was intended to be a stopping off point for the river boats going up and down. This would be a dock where they could stop, pick up passengers, and drop them off. And they have them all up and down the river here. But it turned out that once they finished this whole big project, made the river a lot nicer, but nobody really wanted to come out this far. There just isn’t enough interest or population. So, this whole part of the river has basically been left somewhat abandoned. The river cruise boats don’t go up this far. Makes for a nice walkway though, a nice bicycle ride. You can see how nice the riverside is here. They did a really nice job with the walkway. That’s the direction I’m heading back into the historic district. And there’s another set of sluice gates for flood control. That’s the direction that I’ve been coming from. Yeah, during the daytime in particular, you don’t get a lot of people out here. Maybe at night you get quite a few people from this residential district will come down to the river for some exercise, but on a hot day like this during the day, yeah, pretty empty.
I’ve actually gone out far enough that as I walk back to the historic district. I’ll be going past Kampung Morten. It’s actually just up here around one of the bends here. And right up there is the Swiss Garden Hotel. Whoa. I think that was a catfish. Big one. And I have seen some really big catfish in this river going underneath the next bridge. I see a whole bunch of dragon boats. They don’t have the dragon heads on them anymore, but they look like boats that could have been used for the dragon boat races, which makes a lot of sense. Maybe they had their own dragon boat races up here on this part of the river. I mean, it’s pretty wide open, you know. Perfect set of curves there. Kind of a straightaway for some dragon boat races. I guess I just haven’t gotten around to putting the boats away yet in the storage warehouses wherever they keep them. Just seems like a whole bunch of boats over there. I just arrived opposite my starting point right there. Those are those two abandoned cement towers. And there’s the monorail station with a couple of abandoned monorail trains right there. So, right in there was the original Ria outlet. Man, I had to walk a long distance to get from here to the second one. I had no idea it was going to be quite that far. Yeah, another station along the river that they had big plans for. You can see all of these small boats docked. They just kind of lifted up out of the river and yeah, stretches all the way along here. And I guess in when they first were here, they were probably more decked out and people could rent them with oars and something and go paddling around the river. There’s quite a large dock over here. But as far as I know, they don’t have any scheduled boats that go up this far. This is beyond the typical river cruise boat route. They don’t go this high in the river. You can see how nicely developed it is with this bridge. Very colorful bridge. And there’s a pretty large building here, dock terminal. But as far as I know, it really isn’t used for anything. It’s just an empty building. Now, these boats actually look to be in pretty good condition. Looks like they do go up and down somewhere, but probably for private events, charters, like not something that goes up and down the river all the time. Melaka River Cruise. Yeah, they’re different. These ones are enclosed. Yeah, this is nice. There’s actually a little mimicking a boat here, a river barge. The cafe Terapong Mendam Berahi. Okay. They named it after the famous huge ship of the Melaka Sultanate, the Mendam Berahi. The original would have been a lot bigger than this, that is for sure. Yeah, it looks like this is probably used for big tourism events, festivals, and things. Yeah, they’re spending money on it, keeping it nice. All of this is nicely maintained. Beautiful bridge here. I think right around the corner here, that is the the end point of the the river cruises that are running right now. Right there, that’s the dock. I can’t follow the shore of the river past it. Going to have to go inland a little bit and walk around that harbor there. Not harbor, but that dock complex right there. So, that’s where the the river boat cruises start and end from up here. Yeah, if I were a wealthy man and I had 50 ringgit burning a hole in my pocket, I could hop on a boat here, just wait for the next cruise boat, take me back to my hotel. But I’d much rather keep that 50 ringgit in my pocket and walk the final stretch. Yeah, this is the ferry terminal at this end. So, if you wanted to take the ferry from here or the tourism cruise boat, this is where you get your ticket. You can go down to the historic district and then back again for 50 ringgit. It’s like a roundtrip ticket, which is why 50 ringgit doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because I would just want to go one way. And not as a tour boat, just as transportation. Station monorail Hang Jebat. Yeah. And the original plan had the monorail stopping here as well. Pretty nice design when you think about it. Combine the monorail with the cruise boats. You can just ride the monorail to here, get off the train, go down the steps, and hop on the boat. Pretty convenient. But something went wrong in the planning, and the monorail just never got off the ground. Well, they did. They got it off the ground, but they couldn’t keep it running. Now we just have the the remnants. Look how many boats there are. It’s big business. It’s river cruises, especially on the weekend. A lot of these boats swing into action. They need a lot of them to handle the crowds that show up here.
I mentioned that we’d be walking right past Kampung Morten. And this is it. This is the outskirts. A traditional Malay village basically in the heart of Melaka sitting right underneath the towering Swiss Garden Hotel. And the main pedestrian bridge over to Kampung Morten is right up ahead there. That decorated green bridge with the red flowers. So here the river cruise boats, they do go up and down here. And I learned something interesting about Kampung Morten. That historically it is the direct descendant of Kampung Jawa that was in the heart of the Melaka Sultanate when the the Javanese had a big trading village right in the downtown area on the river and the Melaka Strait. A lot of rice came from Java to feed the city of Melaka. And the Javanese came here in all their ships to deliver rice, trade, and other goods. And yeah, because Melaka was the heart of the the trade route between China and India and Arabia. And the Javanese lived in a kampung down in the historic district. But then when the Portuguese took over and then the Dutch after them and then the British, the Javanese in Kampung Jawa got pushed farther and farther up the river until they finally ended up all the way down here. There was a government loan for like $10,000 to buy all of this land. It was all basically just mangrove swamp at the time. And all the the remnants of the Kampung Jawa community built traditional Malay houses out here. And this is where the Kampung Jawa ended up all the way down here. Don’t know if you can see them on my GoPro, but there’s a couple hundred fish down there. Yeah, the river is really bounced back. A lot of fish life in the river. A lot of monitor lizards. River otter. Though I haven’t seen any otter for a long time. I used to see them frequently, but the last month that I’ve been here in Melaka, yeah, I haven’t seen any otter at all. They must be hiding during the day. I just don’t see them. So there it is. Kampung Morten Bridge. Morten Village Bridge. Jambatan Kampung Morten. Yeah, beautiful little bridge heading across to that traditional village on the other side. They have a really nice walkway here right underneath the fancy Swiss Garden Hotel. I keep calling it the Swiss Grand, but it is the Swiss Garden Hotel up there. And right below it is the river Kampung Morten right there on the other side of the river. And they built out this nice section of the riverside walkway. And along here, if you keep your eyes open, you should see some pretty big monitor lizards. They like to hang out on these trees. They have this big root structure. Builds like a little island down there. Yeah, right here. You can see one the island. I mean, this is all this root structure is all part of these trees because the roots that go down, there’s like no oxygen down there for them. So, the roots go down and then turn and come back up again. So, these roots actually feed into these trees, creates this island. You’ll often see a big monitor lizard hanging on hanging out down there. I don’t see any today. There goes one of the monitor lizards underneath the bridge, huh? So, I guess that’s where he lives. I saw another one earlier. 6 7 ft long. Much bigger than even this one. I wonder if he’s going to come out over here somewhere. Whether he’s going to stay underneath.
This should start to look quite familiar. Almost back. This is more or less where I started recording the video. What feels like 5 days ago. It was right around here. I hit record on the GoPro to start telling the story about how I used a Xoom app to funnel money from PayPal to a Ria cash pickup point here in Melaka. And it was supposed to be a quick and easy video just to break down the technical details of how you do this. And I was going to just say, “Wow, isn’t this amazing? This new thing I found out about and it turned into a Planet Doug walkabout. Yeah, really did. But I’m almost back where I started from.
The moral of the story is if you’re a Canadian and if you’re a Canadian with a CIBC bank account and debit card, be very careful when you enter your PIN overseas. One mistake and you’re toast and you end up doing a thousand kilometer walkabout like I just did to get a little bit of cash from a cash point Ria center. This is the Kampung Jawa Bridge right here. And of course, the moral of the story is have more than one debit card. Have at least two debit cards, two credit cards, a Wise card, a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, Touch ‘n Go Visa card. Just get every single financial tool you can get your hands on so that when one of them fails, you have something else to back them up and you can manage to get a little bit of money to get you through the days. So, here I am. I discovered this bar over here the other day. It’s a nice place to hang out. Have a cold beer right there where those people are sitting. Watch the river boats go up and down the river. I’m not quite back at my hotel yet, but I’m going to shut down the video here. Oh, shout out to the Crunch Club. All you loyal viewers who watch the video all the way to the end, put CC in the comments to let me know. I’m kind of out of breath if I try to walk and talk at the same time. Getting a little bit lightheaded here. A long hot walk. Yeah. I guess another moral of the story is have money in your PayPal account. And thanks to Planet Doug supporters who from time to time have donated a little bit of money to Planet Doug or a generous amount of money through the Planet Doug PayPal link in the video description. Yeah, the money that I withdrew today, it was in my PayPal account for me to withdraw it because Planet Doug viewers support my view my video making productions and yeah, contributed some money to my PayPal account. So, thank you very much. Without that, I would be I’d really be stuck right now with with my dead ATM card. Yeah. And shout out to all the Planet Doug Patreon members and the coffee posi supporting Planet Doug on the buy me a coffee platform. So that is it. I’ve been recording my walk using Strava. So right after this you’ll be able to see a 3D flyover map of the route that I followed and then the end credits of the video. And that’s it. Shutting down for now. See you next time.