VIDEO SUMMARY:

• An unexpected night at a fishing jetty: Instead of paying for expensive accommodation or pitching my tent, I spent the night on an old sofa surrounded by fishermen, boats, and the constant activity of a working waterfront. It turned out to be a surprisingly practical place to sleep.
• A journey into Malaysia’s complicated past: I continued south from Melaka toward Muar, trying to understand how Sultan Mahmud Shah and his followers escaped after the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511.
• Discovering the hidden life of the West Coast: Between conversations with fishermen, visits to a traditional heritage house, and detours to explore unfamiliar jetties, I found plenty of reasons to slow down and investigate.

An Unexpected Night on the Waterfront

Yesterday’s ride out of Melaka was more exhausting than I anticipated. I had planned to reach Muar, but the heat, frequent stops to film, and the effort of exploring places along the way made that goal increasingly unrealistic. By the time I reached Merlimau, finding an affordable place to stay had become the priority.

That’s how I ended up at a fishing jetty.

My original intention was to pitch my tent somewhere quiet, but then I spotted an old sofa. There was a fan, an electrical outlet, and eventually, a group of local fishermen who assured me I could sleep there. The decision made itself.

The jetty turned out to be much busier than it looked. Boats came and went throughout the night, motorcycles and cars passed repeatedly, and people kept switching on the fluorescent lights. My eye shade and earplugs became essential equipment.

Still, I had somewhere to sleep, a public bathroom with an actual shower, and electricity to recharge all my camera batteries, phones, and other devices. From a practical perspective, it was a success.

There was something appealing about the informality of the whole arrangement. Nobody seemed particularly concerned that a foreign cyclist had settled into their usual gathering place. People stopped to chat, asked the familiar questions about where I was from and where I was going, and carried on with their evening.

By morning, I was already thinking that I could happily spend a week at a place like this. Once you learned the routine, you could settle in, watch the boats, talk to the fishermen, and gradually figure out how the whole place worked.

Jetties: One of Malaysia’s Underrated Attractions

I’d visited plenty of fishing jetties in Malaysia, but this experience made me look at them differently.

They aren’t necessarily picturesque tourist attractions. Some are old, weather-beaten, and a little run-down. But they’re places where everyday life unfolds in front of you. Fishermen meet their friends, prepare their boats, share jokes, and head out onto the water. Cats and kittens wander around, macaques occupy the surrounding trees, and people seem to know one another.

The more I explored, the more I appreciated these places as destinations in their own right.

For a bicycle traveller, they can also be surprisingly useful. Some have public bathrooms, running water, sheltered places to sit, and electricity. The informal community around them makes a difference, too. You’re not simply occupying an empty space; you’re spending time somewhere people already gather.

Of course, one lucky night doesn’t mean every jetty is suitable for camping. But the possibilities are worth keeping in mind.

Later in the day, I stopped at another jetty closer to Muar. I found a small drinks stall, sat in the shade, and tried once again to master the bewildering vocabulary of Malaysian coffee. I wanted sweet milk coffee with ice. After years of travelling in Malaysia, you’d think I would know exactly what to order by now.

I still don’t.

Following the Sultan’s Escape from Melaka

The historical story behind this journey has become increasingly fascinating to me.

In 1511, the Portuguese conquered Melaka, forcing Sultan Mahmud Shah and his followers to retreat from the city. I’m trying to retrace that movement southward, visiting places associated with the retreat and imagining what the journey might actually have involved.

Reading that a sultan fled a conquered city is one thing. Trying to picture the event is something else entirely.

What did the route look like? How did people travel through the landscape? Where did they cross rivers? How did they move supplies, protect the royal household, and find shelter?

These questions become much more interesting when you’re physically travelling through the terrain.

The modern road network makes it possible to cycle from one settlement to another with relative ease. But take away those roads and you’re left with mangrove swamps, mudflats, creeks, rivers, and dense coastal vegetation. Even crossing a single river could be a substantial undertaking.

And Sultan Mahmud wasn’t travelling alone. His immediate entourage included members of the royal household and court, while armed followers protected the retreat. Portuguese chroniclers recorded aspects of the events, but I still need to distinguish what the historical sources establish from what I’m merely imagining.

One particularly useful idea is that the retreat wasn’t necessarily a single, orderly procession. The fall of a major trading city would also have displaced ordinary residents, merchants, artisans, and other people trying to escape the fighting. The movement away from Melaka may have been much broader and more chaotic than the story of a sultan and his army suggests.

That’s the larger picture I’m trying to understand as I make my way toward Muar.

The Rivers Are the Real Puzzle

One of the day’s important landmarks was the Sungai Rambai, where I reached the crossing between Melaka and Johor.

The main bridge was closed to cars and trucks, although people were apparently still getting across on motorcycles. And there was a tourist park and suspension bride nearby, and I went for a walk across the bridge and scanned the water for crocodiles. Standing there, I immediately returned to the historical problem.

Imagine moving hundreds or thousands of people, along with animals, supplies, and military equipment, through this landscape. How would you get everyone across a river? Would boats ferry people back and forth? Would some members of the group travel along the coast while others moved inland? Would they use smaller boats that could navigate shallow channels?

I don’t have the answers yet. These are possibilities, not established facts about Sultan Mahmud’s journey.

But looking at the river makes the questions tangible. The geography itself becomes part of the historical investigation.

The same is true of the mangrove coastline. From a modern road, it can be easy to overlook how difficult this terrain would have been to navigate without established routes. Looking out across the mudflats, I could better appreciate why people with detailed local knowledge of the waterways would have been so valuable.

The coastal peoples known as the Orang Laut are associated with precisely this kind of maritime knowledge. Their familiarity with channels, islands, and shallow waters would have been an important asset in a landscape where simply finding a navigable passage could be a challenge.

Muar and the Movement of a Trading World

Muar is an important destination for this journey because it connects two major chapters in Melaka’s history.

According to the historical accounts I’ve been exploring, Sultan Mahmud Shah retreated to the Muar area after the Portuguese conquest, establishing a defensive position before eventually moving farther south and founding the Johor Sultanate.

There’s a site associated with his defensive position on the far side of the Muar River. I wanted to see what remained and whether it was a developed historical attraction or simply a plaque marking the location.

But Muar’s significance goes beyond the sultan’s retreat.

The city’s history also connects with Parameswara, the founder of Melaka. After leaving earlier centres of power, Parameswara eventually established himself at Melaka, where a major trading centre developed. More than a century later, the Portuguese conquest forced the ruling establishment to move again.

Seen from this perspective, the history of the region is partly a story of continuity through displacement. Political centres changed location, but rulers, trading relationships, maritime knowledge, and established connections could survive those changes.

The physical city might be lost, but the people and networks that made it important didn’t necessarily disappear with it.

I find that a more interesting way of thinking about the history than treating each city as an isolated place with its own beginning and end. The story stretches across the region, following people and their connections as circumstances force them to move.

A Traditional House, a Giant Bicycle, and Other Detours

The historical investigation wasn’t the only thing happening along the way.

Before leaving Merlimau, I stopped at a traditional heritage house that I had noticed online. It appeared to date from the late nineteenth century and was described as having been built without nails. Its colourful decorative tiles caught my attention in the photographs, and the grounds looked lovely.

Unfortunately, the house was closed when I arrived on a weekday. I was able to admire it from outside the gate, which was better than nothing.

Later, after crossing into Johor, I encountered a giant bicycle sculpture that was clearly intended as a tourist attraction. I couldn’t work out its full story from the information available, but it was an amusing discovery.

These little diversions are exactly why I don’t always make the distance I originally plan to cover. A quick stop becomes a longer investigation, a side road looks interesting, or something unusual appears that I simply want to understand.

It’s also why a day of cycling and filming can be so tiring. My bike computer recorded 42 kilometres the previous day, but the distance doesn’t tell the whole story. Every stop involves getting off the bicycle, setting up cameras, walking around, filming, checking equipment, and then putting everything back together. Add the heat and camera overheating, and even a relatively modest ride can become a substantial effort.

By the time I reached the giant bicycle, I was struggling to catch my breath. I had to slow down, stop talking, and give myself time to recover. The plan for the day was going to have to remain flexible.

Seeing Familiar Things for the First Time

One of my favourite discoveries came from something much less dramatic than a historical site.

While cycling along a quiet back road, I noticed coconuts on the ground with new shoots emerging from them. It was a reminder of how much there is to learn simply by looking carefully at the world around you.

Growing up in Canada, I ate bananas, drank coffee, and enjoyed coconuts without knowing much about how any of them grew. My first actual encounters with coffee plantations, banana plants, and pineapples in other countries were genuine revelations.

Even after decades of travel, that sense of discovery hasn’t gone away.

I still stop to look at banana trees. I still find it interesting to see how a coconut begins growing into a new tree. Familiar food suddenly becomes something quite different when you encounter it at its source.

Travelling With a Camera Changes Everything

The day also brought back memories of cycling through Ethiopia in 1998.

Back then, I didn’t have GoPros, smartphones, a laptop, or all the batteries and mounts that now accompany me. I sometimes wish I had video footage of that extraordinary trip. It would be wonderful to revisit those experiences and share them.

But the technology that would have made that possible would also have created new problems. In places where unattended belongings could disappear quickly, carrying and using so much equipment would have been difficult. I couldn’t have spread cameras and accessories around my bicycle the way I do today in Malaysia.

Modern travel technology gives me an incredible ability to document the world, but it also changes the experience of travelling. Filming takes time and energy. Batteries need charging. Cameras overheat. Equipment has to be secured, and the process of stopping to record something can be almost as tiring as the ride itself.

I’m also experimenting with my GoPro Hero 12. I had been using HDR video because I like the image it produces, but the battery drain and overheating were becoming frustrating. For this day’s ride, I switched to standard video to see whether the practical advantages would outweigh the loss in image quality.

It’s a small technical experiment, but one with a direct effect on how I travel and what I’m able to record.

The Complicated Lives Behind Simple Questions

Conversations with the fishermen also left me thinking about how easily I misunderstand the lives of people I meet.

I initially assumed that most of the small boats belonged to hobby fishermen. Some of the men told me they went out simply for enjoyment, but others explained that fishing was a source of income. One man described working with fibreglass in boat manufacturing as well as going fishing.

The more I asked, the more complicated the picture became.

It reminded me that the simple questions travellers ask—What do you do? Where do you live? How long have you been here?—don’t always produce simple answers. People can have several jobs, multiple sources of income, family businesses, and responsibilities that overlap in ways a visitor doesn’t immediately understand.

I also noticed how much of the outdoor world I passed through seemed to be a male world. At the jetty, the men gathered, talked, worked on their boats, and looked after one another. During the ride, I encountered men and boys everywhere, while women seemed much less visible in the places I was visiting.

I don’t know how much of that reflects the particular places and times I happened to pass through, but it was a pattern that caught my attention.

The Journey Continues to Muar

By the time I reached the Muar River, I was finally approaching the destination I’d been thinking about for so long.

The river is much larger than the Melaka River as it appears today, and standing above it made the historical crossing feel even more significant. This was not just another obstacle on a journey south. It was part of the landscape through which a defeated sultan and his followers had to make their way.

The journey is still full of unanswered questions. I don’t yet know exactly how the retreat unfolded, how the crossings were organised, or what I’ll find at the historical site in Muar.

That’s the point of the investigation.

I’m following the road, looking at the landscape, gathering fragments of information, and trying to build a picture of events that took place more than five hundred years ago. Along the way, there are fishing jetties, conversations over iced coffee, unexpected detours, and the occasional mechanical problem to keep things interesting.

And if there’s one lesson from this stretch of the journey, it’s that slowing down often reveals far more than simply getting somewhere quickly.

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Notable Quotes & Reflections

“The physical city might be lost, but the people and networks that made it important didn’t necessarily disappear with it.”

The movement from Melaka to Johor makes me think about history as something carried by people, knowledge, and relationships—not just buildings and borders.

“Sometimes the subject is a coconut. Sometimes it’s a six-hundred-year-old trading network. The impulse is much the same.”

Whether I’m investigating a historical retreat or stopping to examine a coconut sprouting into a new tree, I’m following the same instinct: to look more closely at something familiar and discover what I didn’t know about it.

VIDEO FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Morning.

Morning. Where you from? Uh, Canada. Canada.

Spent the night here. City over here. No, I didn’t notice last night. There’s too many of them we can see. Oh yeah. Yeah. Last night it was okay. Not too many mosquitoes. I didn’t notice. Anyway,

you are going fishing today. Yeah. My friend said here 7. Yeah, it is 7.

Okay. Good morning. Just woke up. It’s 7 a.m. almost exactly. The man I was just speaking to, he just came back. He said first that he was here to meet his friend at 7:00, but he wasn’t here. And then when he came back, he said his friend already left. Hopped in the boat to go fishing. Yeah, without him. Yeah, the night worked out a whole lot better than I expected when I decided to just sleep outside and I came back to the jetty. My original plan was just to put up my tent somewhere towards the end because I thought, you know, over in that direction. So, I thought the jetty would be very quiet over there during the day. I really didn’t see any people and there was a little room over there that had running water. So, I thought, “Yeah, I’ll just put up my tent down that way.” But then when I came back, the first thing I noticed was this sofa, right? I mean, I thought, well, it was still I don’t know what time it was, 4, 5, 6 in the afternoon. I don’t remember. So, there was still a lot of hours left before it was time to go to sleep. So, I thought, “Ah, I can just hang out on the sofa, you know, a place to sit down.” And then I noticed, yeah, they had electricity here and a fan. So that became the place where I was just going to hang out. I managed to plug in everything, which is why I can talk to you this morning because all my batteries got recharged last night. Worked out really well. And then as time went by, you know, I just got comfortable here and I thought, well, I can just sleep on the couch. And after a while, lots of fishermen started to show up and they would hang out here not surprisingly. So there were groups of men who have a habit of meeting their friends and they hang out in this area, have a beer, have a cigarette, chat about the day thing. This is where the men come to hang out and they hung out with me here and I spoke to them and they said yeah just sleep on the sofa it’ll be fine. And they did tell me that a security guard comes every night and he sleeps over here. And he said, “Ah, that’ll be fine.” You know, don’t worry about him. He comes here at night to look over the boats, make sure everything’s okay. And that’s his sleeping place. He brings his own like mattress and things. So, yeah, there’s a guy sleeping there last night, too. I was really worried about mosquitoes. I thought I’d have to set up my tent in the middle of the night. And this man here, he also said, “Yeah, how could you sleep out here? I mean, there’d be so many mosquitoes.” But I didn’t notice. Maybe I got bit all over my face. But yeah, I never flies. Tons and tons of flies, things like that. A lot of insects. And funny thing is when it first got dark, I was happy to hang out here in the dark. And yeah, that was fine. And but then a man showed up and he ran along the dock and turned on all the lights. So you can see those fluorescent tubes up there. And then I waited for him to disappear. And then when he was gone, I turned off the lights right here because it was so bright. I thought, well, if I’m sleeping here tonight, I don’t want to sleep with the lights on. So I turned off the lights. But then I don’t know maybe 30 40 minutes later a guy showed up on a motorcycle right on the dock and he parked his motorcycle right here and the first thing he did was turn on the lights and then he and his friend hopped in one of these boats, one of these fishing boats to go out fishing. And then when he left again, I turned off this one light again. And then I was sitting here in the dark and then a man came by again and turned the lights back on. So, I got the impression that, okay, lights are on at night and they will stay on no matter what. It was a security issue, I guess. So, I ended up sleeping here with the lights on. So, but I have eye shade and earplugs. Without the eye shade and the earplugs, I would have gotten no sleep at all last night because it turns out that even though this fishing harbor looks pretty quiet when you’re trying to sleep, not so quiet. So like all night long there were people coming and going in their boats either coming back from fishing showing up like you know that man over there getting his boat ready to go out fishing and a lot of cars coming in here. I don’t know why but this area was extremely popular. People would drive up this road and then they park at the end down here for some reason. There’s something really, really important down there. There you can see a car parked there right now. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth all night long. Cars, trucks, motorcycles revving their engines. So, it was not the quiet paradise I thought it would be. It was really quite noisy. So, yeah, I managed to sleep with earplugs. But yeah, I didn’t sleep through the night obviously. I mean, I felt like I was awake most of the time. But the way I feel right now, it’s pretty obvious that I did get some sleep, that I feel okay. And when I was chatting with some guys here, I found out that there’s actually public bathrooms right over there, that yellow building. So, that was really handy. I was able to take a shower, get cleaned up, and then during the night, I went out there. Yeah. Just one time to cool down, take a shower, come back, go back to sleep.

A little bit sticky. Like it’s not cloth. Although if there was cloth, it’s been worn away. So, it’s actually just vinyl. So, took a while, but that worked perfectly as a pillow. I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I’m a very light, bad sleeper, but I did okay during the night. But now, I’m going to head over there and take another quick shower. Come back here. And since I have electricity, I think I’m going to make a cup of coffee.

That was great. The bathroom here even has a shower, so you can actually yeah, just take a full-on shower. I shampooed my hair. I even shaved. Pretty bare bathroom, but hey, if it has a toilet and an actual shower with water, that is pretty amazing. And when I came here yesterday, oh, if you haven’t seen the previous video, by the way, I was in Melaka yesterday and I left on my bicycle. And my original goal was to ride to a city called Muar, which is like 25 km further. But I stopped in so many places and I shot so much video and it was so hot that I just couldn’t make it. By the time I got to this town, Merlimau, I decided just to stay here tonight. I was going to look for a cheap hotel, but they don’t have any hotels, only home stays, and they’re really expensive. So, yeah, while I was cycling around, I found this jetty, fishing jetty, and it seemed like a possibility for setting up my tent. So, I returned here as the sun was going down and I just ended up sleeping on the sofa and it turned out really handy as I said because I could charge up all of my devices which was nice.

And it’s really nice not to set up a tent. It just makes everything so much easier, even for security reasons because to me that’s the biggest problem, security when you’re camping outside. If I there’s a bathroom over there, I want to go to the bathroom, but how do I leave all of my stuff if I have it open and everything is out? Right? So, but when you’re sleeping outside like this on a sofa, all I do I have a padlock on every bag. So, two pet bags, each one has a lock on it. And my trailer is over here. It has a lock on it. So, yeah. I can just put everything away. Like I didn’t have to take anything out. Basically, I left it all in the bags all night long and then put a lock on it. So, anytime I wanted to, I could walk away. And yeah, nobody has access to any of my valuable stuff. Put it that way. So that works out pretty well.

Kettle, Tim Hortons mug, and coffee. So yeah, because I have electricity, I can plug in my kettle right here.

That kettle has really done well. It’s like a DIY kettle. One of the cheapest things you can buy. And I’ve used it hard hard usage and it’s still going strong.

Hello friend. Hello. Good morning. Good morning.

You want breakfast? Yeah, they have over there, right? I’m just making coffee. Okay. Yeah. Coffee is okay. Good. Yeah. Coffee booth. Yeah. And they have a restaurant there, too. Yeah. Little kopi over there. Nice. Fishing today. Fish. Yeah.

Yeah, things are waking up. Boats coming back. I still I’m far far away from figuring out how this place works. I did speak to a few men yesterday just asking them about the boats and the fishing. How it all works. And most of them said they just did it as a hobby. So that made a lot of sense to me. They aren’t commercial fishermen. It’s not their job. They have these boats and they go out fishing. Yeah. As a hobby. Morning. Yeah. Morning. How are you? Yeah. If they were like commercial fishermen, you’d think they would have like much bigger boats. I saw one or two larger boats pulled up at that dock there, but they seemed almost to be passenger boats. Yeah, you’d have to live here a lifetime to figure out how this place works.

Oh,

when I came here originally like late in the afternoon yesterday, I was a bit disappointed because there wasn’t any kind of a kopi here and I was hoping to hang out, have a cold drink, things like that. But there was nothing. But this morning, there is actually one. There’s one open over there. Yeah, it’s a Thursday morning. So, it’s not a weekend, but I guess every morning they open up that kopi and all these fishermen are hanging out there having yeah, having a drink and breakfast. You can hear all the fishermen like teasing each other, shouting out greetings, jokes, things like that. It’s kind of like a social club, I think, for a lot of these men. Yeah. No mosquitoes last night that I can remember. Like I said, I don’t feel all bitten up, but there were a lot of bugs, like great big ones that were attracted by the lights, a lot of flies during the day. At least the flies disappeared at night. And the main wildlife here consists of cats. Tons and tons and tons of cats. They’re everywhere. Lots of kittens, like litters of kittens all over the place. I guess they survive on all the fish that these men give them and macaques. This whole area is quite wild. The trees, the forest, jungle maybe you call it. Filled with macaques. They’re all over the place. And I was wondering whether macaques, do they eat kittens or cats? Feels like or are they strictly vegetarian? I’ll have to look that up because it seems like for all these kittens if the macaques could be quite dangerous to them and the mothers would really have to protect them.

Yeah. All the men I talked to last night, a lot of them, so many people came cuz this was a real social hangout area. I even set up my laptop here because I wanted to copy my video files and I had my laptop here and my mouse and I was busy working and of course they were curious about what my laptop was doing. And then I realized that this is where they’d be sitting all the time. So I moved my laptop over to the counter and made a little workstation over there so people could sit here and hang out. And everybody was pretty casual about me being here. You know, the usual question, where are you from and where are you going and how long have you been in Malaysia? Unfortunately, those are always difficult questions for me to answer because I’m not here on a normal kind of trip like like I’ve been here one week and I cycled from KL and you know there isn’t a real clear answer to any of those questions cuz I’ve been in and out of Malaysia so many times.

And the technical answer in terms of how long have I been cycling, one day really. Yesterday was my first day cycling. And I sure paid a price for that. The skin yeah, the sun was hidden by the haze, but my skin still took a beating yesterday. My whole body took a beating. That was a hard day. We didn’t cycle very far. My bike computer said I rode 42 kilometers in total. But it wasn’t just the cycling. It was getting on and off the bike all the time. Setting up the GoPro to walk around, mounting the GoPro back on the bicycle, doing all of that in the hot sun, batteries dying, the GoPro overheating all the time. It was a big effort yesterday. Much more tiring than I expected it. Yeah, it really did me in.

It’s funny how easily you can misunderstand everything. This guy who’s here right now, you can hear his engine running. He parked his motorcycle here. He was the guy who came up yesterday, turned on all the lights the first time. And I asked him, well, I asked his friend cuz his friend spoke English better. So, you’re going out fishing. And he volunteered that. Well, they’re going out at 7:00. It was 7:00 at that time. And he said, “They’re coming back at 9.” And I just automatically took that to mean 9:00 in the morning, like overnight fishing. And I thought, man, tiny boat like that, these two guys out in the middle of the Melaka Strait from 7 till 9 the next morning. I mean, that’s a long time to be out there in that tiny boat. And they had supplies with them. They had big bags full of stuff. So, I just assumed, but then they came back at 9:00 p.m. So, ah, they just went out for 2 hours cuz I do worry about these guys going out in these tiny boats if their engine cuts out when they’re out in the middle there. How do they have radios? Do they have safety equipment that they can get someone to come rescue them? Are they out there floating until somebody stumbles across them? Yeah, I don’t know.

And I noticed something else yesterday and last night and today which has been pretty common for me in most countries that I’ve ever visited that when you’re out all day just sort of going places and then hanging out places like this, you exist in a male world. Like yesterday, everybody I interacted with, everybody I saw, all men and boys. Like here at the fishing harbor, not a single woman has shown up at all. It’s all men. And then I started thinking about that and yesterday while cycling, all I saw were men all day long, like outside. And I always end up wondering like where are all the women because they just don’t seem to be outside anywhere. Or at least none of the places I go to, you just find yourself passing through a world of men and only men. You rarely encounter it’s like a wildlife sighting. You rarely encounter women like out in the wild. They’re just not there, which is kind of interesting.

When I set off yesterday from Melaka, I was particularly interested in this trip trying to stick as close to the coast as possible, like instead of taking the main highway, which would have been pretty easy. I would have gotten to Muar in plenty of time. But I went off the main road and down the smaller roads. And part of the idea for that was retracing the steps that Sultan Mahmud Shah would have followed way back in 1511 when the Melaka Sultanate was defeated by the Portuguese. I’ve recently become fascinated in that story, particularly trying to picture what it looked like. It’s one thing to read in a Wikipedia page or some sort of blog that the Portuguese defeated the Melaka Sultanate and then Sultan Mahmud Shah and his royal entourage had to retreat from the city to escape from the Portuguese. I’m trying to picture in my mind what it looked like exactly. And this is sort of a question I’ve been trying to answer. And yesterday I had the opportunity to stop off at a few historic sites associated with this retreat. And I have a few notes here. Like today going to Muar is continuing that idea, this theme of investigating exactly what this retreat looked like and how they were traveling and how did they deal with the terrain cuz this is brutal terrain. If you didn’t have this highway that I’m cycling along, you’re stuck. Like how are you getting through this jungle, through the mud flats, the mangrove swamps, and then river after river after river, creek after creek if you’re walking over land. I mean, it would be a brutal journey. So, I was trying to figure this out and I was getting all these little bits of information here and there. And some of the things that I found out, for example, that Melaka before the attack by the Portuguese had somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people. So it was a very large city. And it says when the defense collapsed, the exodus happened in waves rather than a single orderly column. It’s like, “Oh, okay. That kind of makes sense to me because it wasn’t just the Sultan and his royal family retreating.” And it wasn’t just the army retreating. It was a lot of the local people too because they were scared what was going to happen under the Portuguese. The Portuguese were taking over, burning down a lot of buildings. All the fighting had been taking place. So, a lot of the civilian population also retreated out of the city. They basically fled into the countryside and some of them would have been heading south abandoning Melaka as well. So it wasn’t like a single organized military column. It was like an exodus happening over time. And it says okay there was the royal household and core court. So, Sultan Mahmud Shah retreated with an immediate inner circle estimated at several hundred to a few thousand people. This included the royal family, high officials like the Bendahara, Laksamana, Temenggong, royal guards, domestic retainers, concubines, enslaved court attendants, and the Royal Elephant Corps. And I don’t know how confirmed all of that is with the historical record, but there were Portuguese who chronicled all of this in their writings. One guy for now Lopez de Castanheda and I don’t know how to say this name João de Barros and they recorded that Sultan Mahmud maintained an active rear guard force of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 armed warriors during the retreat. So these 3,000 fighters were protecting him. They were in the rear in case the Portuguese followed them. And these troops were tasked with holding stockades. So they would build wooden stockades along the coastal rivers to slow down the Portuguese pursuit. And then they talk about the displaced civilian population. Thousands of local Malay residents, artisans, merchants fled the city into the surrounding hinterland and coastal villages to escape the looting and fire. And not all of these civilians marched all the way to Muar with the sultan, but because they were also fleeing, it was like the entire coastal area, this entire region that I cycled through was filled with people fleeing from the Portuguese after the fall of Melaka. So there was like a chaotic migration zone of tens of thousands of displaced people seeking refuge in secondary settlements along the coast. And this whole story is connecting with what I’m doing today because in Muar there is a historical plaque. Maybe it’s a fully developed site. I don’t really know. But it’s a spot on the other side of the Muar River where Sultan Mahmud Shah and his forces built a defensive stockade. So I guess they crossed the river. Again, I have no idea how they’re crossing all these rivers with elephants and so many people, but I guess they had access to boats that they picked up along the coast and they would use the boat to cross the river, maybe jump ahead along the coast to the next river and then keep walking inland. Honestly, I have no idea how it all worked and what it looked like. But when they finally crossed over the Muar River, which is a big river, so it would be a major defensive position anyway for the Portuguese would have to cross that river and it would not be easy to do. But then they built wooden stockades and they made a camp in Muar and built a defensive position there. And there’s a historic site. So that’s where my journey today is going to end at this site in Muar. I just want to see what’s there. What does the sign say? Is it a historical site or is it just a plaque? It looks like a bus station today. All the information on Google Maps just looks like a bus station. So, that’s my main goal for today is to get there. There’s a historic house in Merlimau. If I have time and opportunity, I will check it out. Though, it is a weekday and I see in a lot of the Google Maps reviews, people have trouble getting in on weekdays. The door might be locked like the gate might be locked. Most people go on the weekend. And one other thing that might happen today, there is a river and a bridge that marks the crossing from Melaka state to Johor. So you’re going from Melaka to Johor and it’s marked by that river and a bridge. So I was looking forward to crossing that bridge, but I see on Google Maps it keeps saying that it’s closed. That bridge and the road is closed to traffic. I assume for construction, rebuilding or something, but yeah, I don’t know. If you ask Google Maps for directions, it still takes you across that bridge, but then it says the bridge is closed. So, I might have to go in a loop around to get across that bridge. So, that’s something else we’re going to find out today. Your friend is coming, huh? Your friend is coming. Coming. Yeah. Okay. No. Cool.

So when you go fishing, is it for money, food, or just fun? Yes. Hobby. Just a hobby. Oh, yeah. I think I asked you yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all of these boats here, they’re small boats. So all of them just hobby. No, no, no, no, no, no. Some fisherman is money. For money. Yeah. For money. Okay. For money. And they can make enough money to survive to live. Yeah. What kind of fish do they sell? Like seller go to family market. A market and sell. Okay. Market. All right. Cool. But for you, just having fun. A hobby. Yeah, a hobby. Great time. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Have a good day. Yeah.

There’s the boat of the two men that I was just speaking with and they said, “Yeah, they do this just for fun, you know, as a hobby.” But my assumption that all of these boats were run by people just fishing as a hobby. They said no that some of them or I can’t remember what he said, a lot of them actually make money. They make their living doing this. They go out catching fish and then they take it to the local fish market and sell it. But in all the time that I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anybody unloading any fish. I’ve seen tons of boats coming back, but not once have I seen anyone picking up like a net full of fish or a bucket full of fish or anything. I haven’t seen a single fish in the entire time that I’ve been here. So, I don’t know how lucrative it is to be a fisherman in running one of these small boats. But, I mean, if you think about it, if they’re just doing it for fun as a hobby, I mean, they’ve got a lot of pretty serious equipment. You know, look at all of like that fishing net down there. That’s not a rod and reel, you know, dad going down to the river Sunday morning just to toss a line in the creek kind of thing. No, this is serious fishing. So, if you have all of that equipment, the outboard engines, massive fishing nets, yeah, you’re I think you’re trying to make money. All right. The boats might seem small, but when you look at the big piles of fishing nets, it starts to look quite a bit more serious. And people are very very serious about me and breakfast. I’m the kind of guy I can go the whole day without eating. As long as I know I’m going to have dinner at the end of the day, I might have a snack during the day or a drink, but I can I mean, I had a cup of coffee just now. I’m good to go. I’ll probably stop off at a 7-Eleven in Merlimau, have a carton of milk, and then I head out. You know, I might have lunch along the way. But, yeah, I can go without food, without that much trouble. But, the idea of going without breakfast in a country like Malaysia, I mean, it’s just horrifying to the local people. And there, everybody here is so worried about me, whether I’ve had dinner, breakfast, lunch, something to drink. And it’s nice. It’s very sweet that they’re so concerned about me. And I noticed this guy I was just chatting with, he called out to another guy arriving on the boat and he was pointing at me and then making kind of a drinking motion. So, it’s a possibility that somebody is going to bring me a cup of coffee or some food or something. Yes, they’re very very worried about me out here. So, what I’m going to do is get my bike ready, attach the trailer so I’m ready to go and then I’m going to make one last trip to the bathroom. And then change into my cycling clothes, such as my cycling clothes is, and then head out. I’m going to head into the town, head into Merlimau. I might stop at a 7-Eleven just to relax in the air conditioning even early in the morning. It is so hot out here and then get a carton of milk and then maybe visit this heritage house and then cycle out of the city. But I got to get my gear ready.

I did have my bike padlocked, but again, it’s not like anybody’s going to hop on this bike and ride away, I don’t think. But yeah, this whole idea of security, it has just as much to do with actual security as it does with just peace of mind, right? It’s just you like to have everything locked up and it makes you relax. You sleep better knowing that yeah, everything is locked up.

Having two kickstands, by the way, is amazing. Yeah, I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier in my life, but I ended up with two kickstands on this bike, and having two kickstands is twice as good as having just one, let me tell you. So, that has worked out really well. The funny thing is this rope hanging here has freaked me out constantly. Like out of the corner of my eye, it just looks like a person’s head. So, every time I’m walking by it, I’m like, “Oh, oh, just the rope.” And even though I know it’s a rope and there’s a rope hanging, every time I walk by it, I get startled again, which is kind of funny. I just changed the GoPro, by the way, to regular video. Up until now, I’ve been shooting in GoPro HDR because I find on this Hero 12, HDR video looks so much better than standard video. But I think under HDR, it just burns through the batteries twice as fast and it overheats twice as fast. So, I’m doing an experiment today. I just changed it from HDR to normal. You can tell me whether it looks terrible now and does it matter really compared to the constant hassle of overheating and batteries being drained. You know, I think I’d rather have no overheating, longer battery life. And if the video looks a little bit washed out, not quite as sharp and colorful, I’ll just have to live with that, I think. Anyway, let’s get my bike down here.

Yeah, without two kickstands, the bike would just fall. It would just fall over.

Turn off the fan. This fan has been a lifesaver.

Yeah. Can you believe finding a place like this to hang out? And you get a fan with it. That’s incredible.

Place like this, you have to be really sure you haven’t left anything behind. It’s a brand new environment. I unpacked so many things and you’re not familiar with this place. So, you could have plugged something in, hung something, dropped something.

I think I’m okay. I don’t think I’ve lost anything.

I thought I’d just ride my bike over to the bathroom, have everything with me. It’s possible that one of the guys at the kopi will like come, come, and then if I have my bike sitting over here, then I’ll be kind of like reluctant to sit down. But if I have my bike over there, I can I’m free to do anything I want to do. All right, I think that’s it.

I think I can safely say that I’m the first person from another country with a bicycle to sleep at this jetty. So maybe I will enter the legends of this place. They will talk about me for years to come. Remember that guy slept on the sofa for some reason.

Morning.

How are you? Yes, it’s very good. Sleeping there. Very comfortable. No problem. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Nice to meet you.

All right, time to shower and change.

Very good. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you letting me stay here. Was very good.

Wow, what a place. I mean, honestly, I could spend a week just at this jetty. Once you settle in, you learn the routine, you’ve got yourself a bathroom, electricity, place to sleep. Yeah, a week there would be amazing just to hang out, learn the ropes. You’d probably be invited out onto a boat at some point. Yeah, that would be very cool. Learn more about the place.

And I think I found another route to head into Merlimau. And this will actually take me beside the heritage house that I was thinking about visiting. May or may not be open though. But I think I’ll head straight for the 7-Eleven first, have a little carton of milk, take another look at the maps for today, figure out where I’m going, get organized, and then set off. Oh, yeah. There’s some huge like fish farms over here on my right. I saw those on Google Maps satellite view. Wonder if we can take a look at them.

Already being distracted. I’ll never make it anywhere at this rate. Okay. Very cool. I’ve never seen one drained before. So, there’s a complete pond, fish pond,

and they always have these gizmos churning up the water, aerating it. I assume they’ve got four of them, but only one of them is running. That’s what I normally see. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one empty of water. So, you can see how shallow it is. I was going to say how deep it is, but it’s not really that deep, is it? Yeah. 6 7 ft something like that. And yeah, they’ve got a lot of these aerating machines here as well. There’s another one on the far side. Yeah, there’s three big ones here.

Hello.

Hello. Come here. Come here, puppy. Come out to greet me. It’s okay, mama. Come on.

Hey. Hey. How are you? Come here. Come on.

I can see she’s got puppies over there. Maybe here comes dad. But no, she’s not going to come say hi.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, private property, I guess. I didn’t even realize I was going through a gate, but I think it’s okay to just pop in, take a little bit of video, pop out again.

Sure feel a lot better now than I did at the end of the day yesterday. At the end of the day yesterday, I was in this area at the jetty and then I cycled from there into the town to look for a place to stay. I was so tired. My legs were completely worn out. I was exhausted from the heat. So, it was like it was a major effort just to ride like 2 kilometers into the town. But after a night at the jetty, I feel much better.

Macaques everywhere. It’s crazy.

And I think this is the road I will follow leaving town when I start heading towards Muar today. And I probably would just head in that direction. Except I am quite curious about this heritage house. I want to see if I can drop by there before I leave town.

So, I’ve arrived at this heritage house. It’s on the outskirts of Merlimau. And I’m guessing, yeah, there won’t be any opportunity to go inside today because it’s a weekday. But you can get a very good look at it from the gate. I think it normally costs three ringgit to go inside, but I imagine they often only open on holidays and the weekend when there’s a lot of people or maybe if a school group makes an appointment. And don’t know if I can read it from here, but there is some information. Oh, I think they have it in English, too. I saw a photograph online that had that information in English. Maybe it’s on the other side. Yeah, there it is. A traditional house believed to be built by I can’t quite read the name. A tycoon from Palembang, I think. And what’s the date there? 1894, I think. And he was highly respected in society at that time. It was built without using nails. Six main rooms, a porch, a veranda, the main house, bedroom, home center, a kitchen, and a loft that is reserved for women. And I guess it was also wasn’t just a home. It was an administrative center for the community. And then a series of headmen lived here. You can see their names there and the dates. And then it was preserved by the Melaka state government. An amazing amount of tiling. That’s what caught my eye when I saw the photos online. I’m not accustomed to seeing that much colorful tiling, but yeah, it’s a beautiful house. Maybe we can get another angle on it from over here.

Nice grounds as well.

I did see a couple of reviews on Google Maps where they were saying they drove 5 hours to come here to see this place and then they found it. Even though it’s supposed to be open, they found it closed. So, they were quite annoyed. Luckily, I’m just cycling by anyway, so it’s not a big deal to me that it’s closed. I’m content, to be honest, just to see it from the outside. Be nice to go inside, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. All my little errands taken care of at 7-Eleven. And

what the heck was that?

Huh. My rear derailleur is giving me some trouble. It doesn’t want to go backwards.

See, maybe I can. Let’s go up onto the sidewalk.

There’s always something. But the rear derailleur problems. Yeah, those are the worst. So, as long as I

keep going forward, I guess I’m okay.

Yeah, everything looks okay, but somehow with the chain going backwards, it just jammed the derailleur for some reason.

There we go. As long as I can go forward, that’s the important thing.

Yeah. From here, my next major stop is the Sungai Rambai, the Rambai River. And that’s where the bridge is across that river. And that’s where you cross from Melaka State to Johor. And that’s where I’ll find out whether I can even cross the bridge or not. There still seem to be some indications on Google Maps that the bridge is closed, but we’ll find out when I get there. Between here and there, there’s no reasonable like small roads to go down. So, I’ll be on this the road you see around me for the next 13 kilometers or so. Something else that occurred to me this morning as I was getting ready and riding that I had a wet towel

and a wet pair of shorts. So, what I did was I just put them on top of my trailer, strapped them down so that as I ride along, my towel will dry during the day. Pretty normal. But I’ve been thinking a lot about my cycling trip in Ethiopia way back in 98.

And I remember having so much trouble there because as you cycle in Ethiopia, the children chase you all day long. And I couldn’t put a towel out. Like if I had my towel, I needed to dry it. I couldn’t put it anywhere because the children would just steal it instantly. Anything that wasn’t locked down, anything that wasn’t tied down, it just disappears in seconds. Just they snatch it and it’s gone. And it made me think about how different it would be to cycle in Ethiopia as a YouTuber because back when I went to Ethiopia, of course, that was before kind of before the internet even existed just about. I certainly didn’t have there was no smartphones,

digital cameras, YouTube didn’t exist. So, I wasn’t there shooting video and traveling with a laptop and a tablet and three smartphones and tons of batteries and chargers, all the gear that I have. And for me to use that gear efficiently, I kind of have to have it spread out all over the place, right? I got the Hero 12 up there with a microphone attached to it. I’ve got a Hero 9 down here mounted there. I’ve got all kinds of mounting apparatus set up all over the bike. Got a microphone around my neck. All kinds of gear. And I remember thinking, “Wow, it would have been so amazing to shoot video in Ethiopia, such an extraordinary country.” And my trip there was such an adventure. And I don’t have, you know, obviously I don’t have any video record of it. So I keep thinking, wow, it would have been nice to have had a GoPro back in 1998 and a smartphone and a digital camera. But at the same time, cycling in the mountains of Ethiopia, you couldn’t have all that stuff. I couldn’t have all this gear on my bike. You just couldn’t do it. It would all just get snatched by the kids, damaged. If they can’t steal it, it’ll end up damaged or broken.

First a major landmark of the day. Just coming up on the river, Sungai Rambai. I get the feeling like this little town here is also called Sungai Rambai. Like maybe the town is named after the river. And looking up ahead, I see barriers. So, the information seems to be correct that the bridge is closed. I don’t know if that means it’s like permanently closed and is never going to open again or they’re just doing repairs. I’m not sure. And when you look on Google Maps, it says, you know, road closed, no other options available. So, it’s like according to Google Maps, this is the end of the world. If you come here, that’s it for you. There are no other routes. You are stuck here forever. But there are a bunch of parks alongside the river. So, we’ll see. I’ll turn left. And I think the route you have to follow is to the left and then meandering. There’s a big highway system. I don’t know whether I can get under the highway or follow the highway.

I just saw a motorcycle go through the barriers. Not sure if he’s crossing the whole bridge or just going into one of the parks. We’ll find out. Yeah, maybe motorcycles are able to sneak through. That would be cool. So, here we are the border between Melaka and Johor. And I’ve heard a lot about food when it comes to Muar. And everybody seems to be there’s a sign up ahead of me there. Mee Bandung. So mee noodles. So Bandung noodles I think is sort of a well-known dish from Muar. Oh yeah, there’s a suspension bridge here. I wonder if it has a maintenance budget, whether they kept it in good enough condition to walk across. Let’s find out.

Oh, time for a drink. This bottle unfortunately wasn’t refrigerated, but it did come from inside 7-Eleven.

Ah, so it isn’t at the temperature of the sun just yet.

Here’s the river Sungai Rambai and the suspension bridge. I still don’t know whether it’s blocked off or not.

There’s yeah, Riverside Park here. I think there are a couple along this river. Oh yeah, seems still seems to be open. People say looks like it can hold 15 people at a time and I’m just one person, so I think we’ll be okay. No, it looks to be in great shape. The wood looks like a kind of a new bridge. At least the wood looks like it’s been replaced recently. The cables are all rusty. But I’ll bet you that wood’s been replaced not that long ago.

But yeah, once again, imagine you are Sultan Mahmud Shah with a couple thousand people traveling with you. Your core, your royal core of elephants, wives, consorts, children, bunch of soldiers. How are you getting across this river? It’s going to take some effort, right? Though. I’m thinking more and more that maybe they were following the coastline for the most part, but man, the coastline would be difficult. But then maybe every time they get to a river, they just cross over it on boats. And then the boats go back and forth a couple dozen times to ferry everyone across the river. And then the boat still goes along the shore while everybody keeps walking a little bit more inland until the next river. And then they meet up with their boats. That’s what I’m thinking. But hey, without a time machine and without maybe reading a lot more documents, maybe this has been documented somewhere. I don’t know. I don’t know how they did it. Back to the other side. Yeah, it’s a good bridge.

Kids would have fun on it.

I think I remember reading something about crocodiles that there could be crocodiles here. Certainly got a jungly shoreline over there.

I don’t know what kind of wildlife would be hiding in the water and in these bushes. When I saw that log underwater over there, the first thing I thought was, “Oh, crocodile.” Cuz they yeah, the logs kind of look like they could be crocodiles.

There’s the bridge. I just circled back to it. Looks very classic. And I’m guessing that it is permanently closed for cars and trucks. Like it really looks it’s just not it can’t hold up heavy traffic anymore. So the whole bridge is going to have to be replaced. You can see the columns have split open. But I’ve seen a couple more motorcycles go across. So I think I can cross on my bike, which is very cool. Anything like this makes me think of movies like Vietnam War movies, Apocalypse Now. I’m expecting some helicopters to appear, some jets, and then just blowing this bridge up. It just sort of looks like that’s what’s about to happen. Well, let’s see if I can get across it before it gets blown up or before it collapses.

I can enter in Johor.

There’s the closed bridge.

As you can see, I’m not the only one doing this. Yeah, people just pushed aside the barrier. I can hear a car coming behind me as well.

I probably shouldn’t cycle on this side. This is where all the columns are broken. Hello.

On this side though, it looks like they’ve developed like a full laneway for cars. Huh. Who knows? And there is a big tourist attraction over here. I’ve seen lots of photos of it, so I better do my due diligence as a tourist and go get my picture taken with the giant becak or whatever you call it. Hey, try every country has a different name for these things. So, I can never remember which name to use. But anyway, it’s a bicycle a bicycle taxi and a giant one.

There it is. I have a feeling that bicycles are somewhat special in this area. I didn’t I don’t I didn’t point them out on video, but when I was cycling along the coast here from Melaka, there were a lot of homes that had old bicycles mounted as pieces of art beside the road. I saw places with five or six of them mounted right beside the road. As if somehow bicycles are important here for some reason culturally.

Yeah, that is a giant bike. What is it made out of? Oh, it’s got to be metal, right?

Yeah, even the pedals are metal. Everything is metal.

Yeah, the tires the tires really look like rubber from a distance, but just painted black. And yeah,

different types of metal.

And there’s a story here, Amazing Tangkak. And if you want to find out about it, I guess there’s some QR codes there. You can scan them from my video. A fun map. Tangkak nay port and Ole. Ole must be local. Oh, okay. So, it’s a region, a tourism region, but I have no idea what this bicycle is all about. Can’t read it. It’s all in the Malay. And they even have stairs so you can

climb up.

Oh man, here I am.

Yeah, if I could pay this guy to carry me the rest of the way to Muar, I would do it. Just bring my bicycle up here. There’s plenty of room. And he could pedal and bring me to Muar. Yeah, you can hear how out of breath I am. I don’t know what’s going on. Takes so long after I stop cycling for me to catch my breath. I think it’s partially because of all the shooting video. It just means yeah, it’s more and more tiring if I’m talking while I’m cycling. And when I’m off the bike, I fire up the GoPro and keep talking. And I think that just leads to me being yeah sort of out of breath. I never catch up with my breathing. Makes me feel exhausted. Like I feel lightheaded right now. Like if I’m not careful, I’ll go I’ll get dizzy and lose my balance.

Here on planet Doug.

We’re not in very good physical condition apparently. Yeah, it’s going to take a few days in order to get into the rhythm of cycling. Always takes a while. So, there it is. The famous bicycle.

Oh, yeah. Just getting back on my bicycle. I’m feeling faint. I guess because of the heat and all this talking, I have to stop talking. But I think about 1 kilometer ahead there’s a side road J134 or something like that. I could follow this road all the way into all the way into Muar. That’d be the quickest, most direct route. But if I follow J134, I can yeah, just maybe have a more enjoyable ride. We’ll see. It’ll add It’ll add a few kilometers to my route, but I think I’m going to head that way. Take it nice and slow. Stop talking so I can catch my breath.

I think I’m making progress.

I ended up back on the main highway here.

And I think a short distance ahead, 100 meters or so, I think I can turn right and get off this highway.

I’ll stop at that corner. Check Google Maps. Make sure I’m still on the right path.

Yeah, definitely. I think now that we’re entering sort of the outskirts of Muar, you’re basically folding that into the urban area of Johor Bahru, which I think is like the second largest urban area in Malaysia like Kuala Lumpur of course being the largest and then around Johor Bahru might be the second largest in terms of like overall population.

Welcome to somewhere. Every time I see a place with a roof, I’m really happy I can pull over here, check Google Maps on my phone, make sure I’m heading in the right direction.

I rested in the shade of that little bus stop or bus shelter or whatever it was. Yeah, that felt nice. And while I was there, I looked up some information. When I said something about Johor being the second largest like greater metropolitan area in Malaysia, what I was thinking of is if you stay on the main highways starting here in Muar and as you head towards Johor and Singapore, the amount of truck traffic would just grow and grow and grow and grow because it’s such a large population there and so much industry also connected with Singapore. So, I was just curious. I looked that up and I was right. You know, based on population, based on industrial output, all that kind of stuff, the greater Johor area is the second largest in Malaysia after of course KL and the Klang Valley, that metropolitan area.

So I think starting at about Muar maybe it’s 200 kilometers from there to Johor Bahru maybe and then as you get closer and closer I think you’re going to get more and more traffic as you enter into the yeah the Johor city itself and Muar with a town the city where I’m heading to today by the way is a very interesting history. Of course, it ties in directly with the story I’ve been telling about the fall of the Melaka Sultanate and Sultan Mahmud Shah retreating from Melaka and then he made it to the city of Muar, crossed the river and then stayed there for a little while. I don’t know how long to be honest, but according to what I read, he built up a kind of stronghold there, built some fortifications and settled down there for a while before eventually moving on to Johor itself at the southern part of Malaysia, the Malay Peninsula, and then founding the Johor Sultanate when he gets there. So he eventually it’s a fascinating story in a way when I trace to Melaka to its beginnings. You’re starting off with a prince from Palembang from the a descendant of the royal family of the Srivijaya Empire Parameswara. And Parameswara basically fled from his city there under pressure from the Majapahit Empire. And then he first so he basically had a trading empire already underway and then he was forced from there in battle and then he made his way to Temasek or Singapore and he basically took the trading you know network that he had and just transplanted it to Temasek or Singapore and then he was driven out of there and then he basically picked up and moved up the coast. And he actually, according to what I read, he stopped off in Muar as well, thinking maybe he would settle down there. And I think he did settle down there for a while, but he decided to move on. And I keep reading online that it was written it’s written down somewhere that the reason he left cuz there were too many monitor lizards which is kind of a famous statement in the history. But of course I don’t really know what that means. Could mean any number of things. Maybe it was just too swampy. Too many mud flats there. Too much water. Too many lizards. In any event, he ended up moving again. And then he finally established Melaka at the, you know, it wasn’t called Melaka at the time, of course, it was just a river and some fishermen. And then when he showed up with all of his ships and all of his people settled there and then over the next 100 plus years, he built up the trading center of Melaka.

Converted. He either converted to Islam or his son did and it became a sultanate. So now you had the Melaka Sultanate and now along comes the Portuguese and that entire Melaka Sultanate has to pick up and flee again and it moves south to Muar and then on to Johor and establishes the new Sultanate in Johor and again brings the international trading network with him as far as I understand these things. So yeah, it’s fascinating to think of this network of international trade and it’s not entirely based in geography. I mean a lot of it has to do with geography but a lot of it has to do with connections and Parameswara he had I forget the name of it now it’s a local name for like royal authority so where he went he brought this royal authority with him and then the Orang Laut would support him

and he knew about trade, about ships, about how all of this stuff operated. So he just took all of his knowledge, his network, all of his connections and then just moved it from Palembang to Singapore. Then he moved it from there to Muar, from Muar to Melaka. And then over a century later, they were forced out again. And then this Melaka Sultanate, this trading experienced group of people fled from Melaka and they ended up in Johor. And they just basically took the original city based on international trade and shipping and just started it all up again in Johor. Yeah, kind of a fascinating way of looking at it that this international trading city just kept picking up and moving its physical location from place to place to place. Finally settling at Johor. So yeah, I’m going down J134, this quiet back road. I’m very glad I did instead of say staying on busy highway 5. And I think there’s a lot of tourism back in this area. A lot of home stays. I don’t know if there are any beaches or fishing harbors, jetties, things like that. But yeah, it’s pretty quiet back here.

From here, maybe 10 kilometers to get to the Muar River, crossing the bridge into Muar itself. I’m really looking forward to that. I’ve been thinking about that place, that bridge, that river for a long time.

Along this road, I’ve been passing a lot of palm trees, like coconut palm, and something kind of interesting. A small thing, but maybe you’ve never been in this part of the world. It might be something interesting because I mean everyone knows about coconut palm and coconuts and eating coconut and coconut drinks, things like that. But how does the coconut tree grow?

And I just noticed at the side of the road where all of these coconuts are falling to the ground, you can actually see the shoots of a new tree growing. So right up there, of course, there’s a whole bunch of fresh coconut. And they fall into the ground here. And I noticed this one as I was cycling by where you can see the coconut and it has so much fruit and liquid on the inside. The stem just shoots right up through the shell like that. And that’s how the new coconut tree starts to grow and then the roots come out the bottom and start going into the ground. And then the whole thing basically just sinks into the ground like that where you got the new coconut tree on the right there and then the coconut that’s feeding it feeding this basically this coconut seed more or less. You can see it on the left there. And then here we are getting two brand new palm trees, coconut palm trees growing right here. Yeah, I just thought that was kind of cool to see that. I remember as a young very inexperienced Canadian the first time I went to a whole bunch of new countries and my whole life I’d been drinking coffee, eating pineapple, eating coconut and yet it had never occurred to me like what where does coffee come from? So, I remember going to places like Guatemala and places like that, Peru, and for the first time seeing coffee plantations and the coffee berry, you know, the red coffee berry, and it’s like, whoa, that’s a coffee bush. Never seen it before in my life. The first time I saw a banana tree blew my mind, you know, as a young Canadian kid who’d never who’d eaten bananas his whole life. I’d never seen a banana tree. I didn’t know what the banana fruit looked like. That blew my mind. Yeah. And on and on. Pineapple. The first time you see a pineapple, how it grows, it’s like, what the heck? I didn’t know pineapples grew like that. And now we have yeah, how coconut how palm trees grow. And since I opened that particular can of worms, I’ve kept my eyes open for other fruit. And luckily, yeah, banana trees. And I’m sure a lot of people that watch YouTube travel videos are very familiar with banana trees and the banana fruit, but man, I can never stop enough to take them in.

I think they’re just such amazing fruit, you know, and I remember the first time I saw them, it just blew my mind the way it grows like this with this giant purple flower at the bottom and then the bananas are all growing upwards like that. I was like, “What the heck is going on here?” Never occurred to me that banana would look like that. It was such a Yeah, such a crazy thing to see for the first time. And now these days, even all these decades later, every time I see bananas like this, I stop and take pictures of them, but I just find them so interesting. I’m not a big fruit eater, but I grew up eating bananas cuz, you could chop up a banana, put it in your corn flakes. So, I loved bananas. So, I have a soft spot in my heart for banana trees. The first time I saw the way they grow in the wild. Yeah. Blew my mind. It really did.

I was just looking at Google Maps and yeah, looks like there’s a jetty down here. I love me a good jetty. So, I’m going to go check it out. As I mentioned before, my home stay. I can’t check into the room until 3. It’s actually already 1:00. Yeah, I’ve been moving so slowly today as always. But there’s no need to rush to Muar.

I can’t check into my room or drop off my bags anyway. So, might as well, yeah, take a little detour. Head down to the jetty. One of the hidden gems of Malaysia. I’ve seen a million. Well, exaggerating. I’ve seen a lot of YouTube travel videos from Malaysia, but I don’t know if anyone’s ever focused very much on the jetties here on the West Coast. There’s so many of them, and they’re all so interesting. I’m hoping this one will have a little kopi. I’m still running and I can just grab a iced coffee or something like kopi o.

And then finish the final six or seven kilometer ride into Muar, the royal city of Johor.

Yeah, it’s fascinating landscape down by the coast. You get a lot of farms here. I heard some sheep back there. I think you get cattle, goats, lot of oil palm here. Banana plantations. Ah, looks very similar to the one I just left. They have these same poles stuck in the water and each boat ties off to one of these poles. I think they were white at the jetty where I spent the night. This one seems to be blue. Blue poles.

Looks like there’s some kind of a little restaurant. A warisan is open.

Maybe I can get a cold drink.

Nice little sidewalk right here beside all the boats. Yeah, they’re definitely sitting on the mud. Low tide.

Maybe being closer to Muar, maybe they’ve developed some seafood restaurants here. People from Muar come here on the weekend and get some seafood. I don’t know.

Yeah, very small river mouth here, especially at low tide.

Just stepped off my bike for a minute. Walk along. Yeah, I’m right by the river mouth, the channel mouth. Very low water here. I think the jetty where I spent the night had a better better access. Much wider, deeper channel, I think.

Yeah, very similar scene though, the boats. Yeah, looks like this could be a place to camp as well if you wanted to. That area over there. Look at that. There’s so much over there. Maybe I can check that out on my bike afterwards after I get my cold drink.

Fish market or some kind of market over there.

Yeah, a lot of these jetties certainly have the a bit of a feeling of parts of it being abandoned. Definitely old and worn worn down. Whatever this building is or was.

Yeah. A scuttled boat waiting to be repaired, put back out to sea.

Yeah, looks like you can go somewhere over there. A car is actually taking that route across the river.

Oh,

yeah. Back in the days of Sultan Mahmud Shah, big boats with a big draft wouldn’t be able to make it up here. You’d have to have boats with a very shallow draft to make it across.

Hey, you could camp out here if you have a tent.

Yeah, I never thought about that before. Jetties being a good place for a cyclist because, you know, you just want a place to put your tent. But these places might often have a public bathroom and access to water

and even electricity. I got lucky last night. And these jetties seem to be a good place to camp, too, because they have like a ready-made community. All the men who come here all know each other. They’re all like a big happy family. So, it’s got a very casual, informal vibe. So, when someone as oddlooking as me shows up on this beast, they’re like, “Hey, welcome to the family. Settle in.

Hello. Hello.

Hey. Do you have a cold drink? Ice drink of some kind? Any like kopi o with ice? Ice. Okay. Okay.

It’s embarrassing, but after all this time, I still don’t know how to order like coffee with milk and ice.

I just end up saying kopi o, which is like plain coffee, right? You think someday I could commit the names of coffee to memory, but I just can’t do it.

Where you from? I’m from Canada. Canada. Yeah. Cycling. Just cycling. Yeah. Traveling around Malaysia. Canada. How how weather? The weather. Right now this is October. Temperature is good now in Canada like not cold yet winter cold is like January February then it becomes very very cold but right now it’s good weather rain no no no rain yeah for me Malaysia is so hot so hot can I ask you about the drink so this is kopi o, if you want it with sweet milk, what is it called? It’s called kopi. Just kopi. Kopi ice. Kopi or ice? Just milk. Kopi ice. Kopi. Kopi. Not kopi o. That’s kopi o, but with milk. Just kopi. Just kopi. Oh, okay.

So, yeah, I’ve had a pretty good experience so far. Sitting in the shade here and yeah, I always get tripped up by ordering the kopi. So, I’m asking for advice that all the different types, kopi o, kopi c, kopi susu, and then yeah, I get a different answer everywhere. Like if all if I what I want is milk coffee, like sweetened milk coffee, the message I’m getting here is you just order kopi kopi ice and it’s automatically like this one. So all you do is say that or you could say kopi susu or who knows? I also looked it up online and online they said like kopi c or no kopi ping. So yeah, after all this time in Malaysia, I still don’t even know how to order local coffee. I just get mixed up by all the menus. But the good thing is you can end up ordering two or three of them. Just keep ordering one until you get what you like. So there it is, the lifeblood of Malaysia, the ice truck delivering bags of ice. Yeah. Without that, man, how would people survive? It’s crazy to think about history before the modern era. Yeah. People surviving in Malaysia without ice, without ice coffee. But do you have a boat here? Do you have a boat? When you go fishing, is it for money, for food, or just for hobby? Money, food, hobby. All three. Oh, okay. How many? I work. How many days per week do you go fishing? Every day. Every day. So today already you went fishing. Did you catch anything yesterday? Yesterday got Yeah. What kind of fish? I got 5 p.m. 5 a.m. p.m. Okay. All right. Back 10 10 p.m. Okay. So you went out at 5, come back at 10:00, and then now morning work. Oh, okay. Morning in the work. Do you have another job or only fishing? Other other jobs. I did a fiberglass. Oh, fiberglass. Okay. Oh, okay. Cool. Interesting. Interesting. Okay, sir. See you.

He was my guide helping me to order a milk coffee. But people at the other tables, they overheard our conversation and everybody was telling me a different word. He was saying just order kopi kopi ice, you’ll get this. That’s the standard. And then if you want something else, then you say kopi o plain coffee, which is what my first one was. But other people were saying, “No, no, no, no. Kopi susu. That’s what you order.” And they said, “No, no, no.” So, I mean, it’s not really my fault that I don’t understand. But anyway, yeah, he was just leaving. And he said, “Yeah, he

I’m so confused, though. This happened to me every time. Every fisherman, I asked them, “What kind of fish do they catch?” and they always tell me when they go fishing. So, there’s something weird about that vocabulary in English. I asked him, “What kind of fish?” And then he said, “No, he went out at 5:00 p.m., came back at 10:00 p.m., but now it’s 1:00 p.m. So, what happened?” Like, he went I guess yesterday he went out for 5 hours, but what about this morning? Like, why is he here this morning? Like the lives of local people are so complicated to me. That’s why I asked him why I asked him as you heard is it for money, for food or for a hobby you go fishing. And he said all three, but he also has other jobs. So he has a job at a boat manufacturing place where he does fiberglass work. He probably has a third job on top of that. You know, people have very complicated lives sometimes that way. It’s hard to sort through all the details. People in Canada, I think we tend to be very simple. We have one job. We work from 9 to 5 in this one office. We live in one place. We have one property, one car, and you’re done. Here in Malaysia, quite often there’s multiple properties, multiple vehicles. The family, extended family is all connected with various businesses, various income streams. Very true in Sumatra as well. I found so if you try to apply the Canadian simple way of looking at somebody’s life, what is your job? Where do you live? It doesn’t apply here because they could be earning an income from many different ways. They could have a scooter, a motorcycle, a car, and a truck or the whole family has a group of vehicles. You know, it’s all intermixed. And that’s my take on it. Anyway, people from Malaysia, you can tell me in the comments whether I’m anywhere near the truth. Maybe that’s only that’s only true out in the countryside, but I think even in the cities, people in the cities seem to have an apartment there, but then they’ll have a another house, a farmhouse in the countryside, and they go back and forth between them, different vehicles. Yeah. Seems to Yeah, lives are a little bit more complicated here that way. Oh, that was so nice. I feel like I’ve stumbled across one of the keys to enjoying Malaysia. Jetties. Head for the jetty, man. There’s such amazing places all up and down the West Coast. But don’t tell anybody. It’s our secret here on Planet Doug. It makes me want to stay on the West Coast now. To sort of go all the way up the coast, stopping off at all the jetties along the way. I don’t know about the East Coast. I don’t think they have the same sort of jetty system that they do here on the West Coast, but I’m not sure. More like a

like a long stretches of beach and stuff like that, but I don’t know if they have quite as many small rivers. They got big rivers there. I’ll talk about one of the big rivers when I get to the bridge across the Muar River if I remember to talk about it. Yeah, I just crossed over to the other side where I saw this car going down this coast road. Just curious where it goes. I’ll bet this is all a fishing territory heading out into like deeper water along the shore. And I think you’ll find men over here fishing as well. I don’t know what it is with men and fish. I’ve never been a big fan of fishing myself, but men apparently, we just we have a bond with fish. We want to catch them. It’s what we do.

Yeah, it’s exposed to the weather from the Melaka Strait, but could get quite wet if it rains, but this could be a place for wild camping, too. Though. I think I would put up my tent right in the middle of the jetty, you know, hang out, hang out with all the people there. Oh, when I got up to pay for my kopi o and kopi susu, the woman said something like and I couldn’t understand what she was saying and someone else had to translate. A man that I was talking to who was telling me about the names of coffee and about his life as a fisherman and fiberglass boat. He already paid. So when he settled his bill, he paid for my two coffees as well. Very very nice of him. So yeah, I think I’ve reached the end here. Not much point going further on my bicycle. Very rough. Very rough road.

But yeah, you can see it’s just a they took a grater down here, flattened it, and then they just dumped a bunch of rocks. It’s not a paved road or anything like that, so it’s pretty hard to move along here in a car. Bicycle or motorcycle. Just wanted to go to the very end here cuz check that out. I’m guessing that this pipe, whatever it is, it’s the reason that this road was built in the first place. I have no idea what it is, what it connects to. But here where Oh, it’s dumping. It’s a dump. It’s a exhaust pipe of something dumping something into the Melaka Strait. Or is it sealed? And when I walk back, I’ll take a look at the end of it.

Maybe that’s why this road was built to give access to this drainage pipe, whatever it is. And where would it go? I wonder what’s here in the mangrove. But again, I keep harping on this that take away the modern highway system. Oh, what the heck is going on here? That pipe doesn’t go anywhere. It stops there and then it goes along here and then stop. It’s just It’s just a big hunk of pipe. Like, did it float in from the ocean and it’s just debris? That’s probably what’s going on. Yeah, I bet you it’s just Melaka Strait. Oh, there goes a big monitor lizard. I scared him when I hit the pipe with my foot. But yeah, look at that landscape. Mangrove has got to be some of the toughest geography in the world. Like tell somebody there’s something important over there, you know, on the other side of this mangrove and they have to get there. How in the world are you making your way through this dense mangrove? Absolutely brutal. Yeah, nobody’s making much progress through there. It’s crazy. Anyway, so I don’t know why this road is here then. I thought maybe there was a factory and this pipe went to the factory, but apparently not. Maybe this is just ocean debris broke away from something farther out in deep water and just floated here in a storm. I have no idea. Just curious whether the end is sealed or open on this side. Yeah, it’s sealed, too. Okay, this side of the pipe is sealed. So, yeah, there’s no way it could be a drainage pipe. Another mystery. Yeah, look at the mud flat here.

And I remember reading a lot about Parameswara, how he had the loyalty of the Orang Laut, the people of the sea. And they are always described as the as these seagoing people. They live on their boats and they had like a deep intimate knowledge of all of this land, all the rivers, the mud flats and they knew how to navigate them. Particularly down around Singapore where there’s that big cluster of islands and only one narrow channel to get through. And when you look at something like this, yeah, you can see how that knowledge would be useful if a mud flat like this is just sitting here. It’d be nice to have the Orang Laut as guides to help you find the opening into the river. Like you’re in a boat here and then you want to cut inland into this river. Well, where is the channel? And I guess the Orang Laut would be able to guide you to exactly where the channel was. Otherwise, yeah, you’re just running aground on this mud flat. You’re not getting through that. Huh. All right, let’s start riding towards Muar. Cycling away from this the Muar jetty. I don’t it has a specific name on Google Maps, but I don’t have it in my head right now. Ah, that was a great experience. I love hanging out at these jetties. I wonder how many I’ve visited now in all my time in Malaysia. A lot of them.

But I’m seeing them in a new light right now as a great place to hang out, even camping if you’re traveling by bicycle, bike touring. Just passed by a drinks place. So,

it’s one of the greatest pleasures of bike touring, especially in a country like Malaysia or Indonesia where they have so many of these stalls at the side of the road where you can get a readymade ice cold drink. That’s what I’m going to do

right here.

I think I’ll have green tea. Do you want cup? A cup. Three or five? Three.

I’m from Canada. Yeah.

So, I got my green iced tea. Yeah. So amazing that you can stop almost anywhere and they have it in the jugs already. Like you don’t even have to wait for the ice to cool it down because the big jug is already full of ice.

Yeah, there’s nothing like that when you’re when you’re this thirsty. I could just drink all everyone I see on the road. I could just drink and drink and drink and drink.

Got a little bit of a climb coming up here to get up and over the bridge. Very exciting. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this river for a long time.

The you know the Melaka River has been the center of my life for a long time. But the Muar River, Muar River is a lot bigger than the Melaka River.

So I really want to see what it looks like from up there.

There’s not a lot of room here for motorcycles, so I have to stay to the left. Leave enough room for motorcycles to get past me.

Yeah, maybe I’ll be able to walk my bike along the sidewalk near the top.

All right. Yeah, look at the size of that river.

So much bigger than the Melaka River right now. I mean, I read over and over that the Melaka River used to be wider in the days of the Melaka Sultanate, but I’m willing to bet it was never this big. The Muar River was always much, much bigger, which always made me wonder why Parameswara

decided to leave here. To me, it seems like such a much better place to establish a city. You know, the entrance, the river so much bigger, so much wider. Wouldn’t it be easier access for all the big ships?

But what I read online is he decided that Melaka was easier to defend. But you know, nobody has a time machine to go back and ask him exactly what he was thinking. But Melaka has that hill, the Melaka Hill right on the here comes a motorcycle. Yeah, right on the mouth of the river. So that was an advantage. But I remember also reading somewhere that because this river was so wide, it was harder to defend. Yikes.

Yeah, there’s not much not much room up here. I’m trying not to This is where my GoPro broomstick is a little bit of a disadvantage. It sticks out to the left and if I get too close to the side, my GoPro will hit a telephone pole or a light pole.

All right.

Going to park my bike here just for a minute. Yeah, not much of a sidewalk.

Oh, I didn’t even realize that I got so close to the side. My trailer hopped up onto the curb. I didn’t even feel it when it did that. It is pretty amazing. When you’re riding with this trailer, it you don’t feel it at all. It tracks directly behind the motorcycle. Yeah, it doesn’t bother me at all pulling the trailer. I didn’t even feel it when it came up the curb. But yeah, you can see how narrow the sidewalk is with this huge pipe. Cuz yeah, Malaysia, they don’t really make accommodations for pedestrians. They don’t walk here as a rule. They’re always in cars or on their motorbikes. But there is the Muar River. What a huge river.

That’s incredible. I suppose in on world terms, it’s not like the biggest river in the world, but I’m just comparing it to the Melaka River, and this one is so much bigger.

And one fascinating thing about this river that I read, I don’t know how true it is, but I mean I did research online and I got it confirmed from a few different sources that long long ago there used to be an established path for crossing the entire entire Malay Peninsula by river. So you would start in Kuantan, not Kuantan, Pahang, Pahang on the other side, and then you would follow the Pahang River all the way inland by boat. You go all the way into the middle of the Malay Peninsula over to the other side. And then at one point a tributary of the Pahang River is like 500 meters away from the Muar River. So you basically pick up your boat, portage it half a kilometer and you basically go from the Pahang River to the Muar River and then come down the river to here. So you could travel from one side of Malaysia all the way to this side without going through Singapore like without going all the way down to the tip of the Malay Peninsula through like past all the like the Riau archipelago beyond Temasek or Singapore and then come all the way back up again. It’s like a shortcut right across the peninsula going by river. All you have to do is portage like half a kilometer from one river to the other. And they used to do that. Not everybody, but it was a was an old way of traveling in the old days, which I find very cool. So you could have seen a boat coming up this river that traveled from all the way the other side of the Malay Peninsula going all the way from there to here completely by river hopping from the Pahang River to the Muar River which I think is a very cool idea.

It’s hard to get your thoughts straight up here on the bridge with all the traffic passing. It’s very very noisy. And I’m also having trouble catching my breath and my heartbeat. And I’m feeling quite dizzy again. But I have some notes. I’m going to try to read it from my phone that I made about Muar or Muar. So it is known, according to my notes, you better fact check me on everything. It is known officially as Bandar Maharani, the empress town and is recognized as the royal town of Johor. So in pre-colonial times and

somebody better call that ambulance. I think I need help.

But anyway, this river was like a highway into the interior. The main thing is that the modern royal town was founded in 1885 by Sultan Abu Bakar. And so he is the father of modern Johor. And he founded this town and called it Bandar Maharani after his consort. So I guess he had another very beautiful consort and named the town after her. And it was a modern planned administrative town with a grid street layout like grand public buildings, a thriving river trade driven by rubber, spice and gambier. And World War II there was a famous battle that took place here between the Allied forces and the advancing Japanese troops. So when the Japanese were when they occupied Malaysia or the Malay Peninsula, they there was a battle between the Japanese and the Allied troops and I assume the Japanese won, but it was a big battle here in 1942. And then during the Malayan Emergency, a sort of an insurgency by homegrown communists, there was another big battle here between Yeah. Government forces and the communist forces. So yeah, it’s a very very interesting town. A lot of history. Beautiful place. Not so beautiful right now with the haze, but I can get a feel for it.

So that’s this side of the river over here.

Hello.

Some visitors. And I’m going to cross over hopefully to the other side of the bridge.

I got to get a break in the traffic from both sides. Oh, look, a couple of pedestrians. Very unusual.

And I wanted to come over to the other side, risk my life, look in both directions like 10 times. But yeah, you see the boats there. I think those are the ferries that go across to Dumai in Sumatra. So if your visa’s expiring or running out, you can hop across on one of those boats. I think

Muar and then over here is the park that I mentioned. I wanted to go over to that park and explore that area, but yeah, there’s no easy way to get across the highway.

But I’ll probably tomorrow ride my bike all the way up to the river mouth there. There’s a big park. It’s quite well-known tourist attraction here. So there it is, Muar.

And right there on the sign, yeah, Bandar Maharani Muar. And I think there’s a very famous clock tower right there. And there’s my bicycle on the other side.

See if we can make it back across. Well, at least on this side, the sidewalk is wider. Doesn’t have a big pipe on this side.

All right, I can go across this side. How’s the traffic on that side? Oh, it’s looking good. There we go.

We made it. We survived. I’m going to sit here for a minute or two, catch my breath, and then I’m going to try to find my homestay. It’s a quarter after 3 now, so it’s check-in time. Pretty good timing to arrive in Muar. What a day. Great, great day so far. I’ve enjoyed this very, very much.

Turns out it’s a bigger city than I thought. To get from here to my homestay is still 3 and a half kilometers. I had no idea it was so far away from the riverfront. I guess I didn’t choose wisely. I just went on the cheapest price and I ended up being farther away from the riverfront than I thought than I planned. So, I’ve got to go this way, I think, and then do a U-turn around a roundabout.

But that’s okay. I get to see some of the city, I guess.

If I see a place in here with cold drinks, I’m getting another cold drink. Oh, I was going to find that historic site. I almost forgot. I’ll bet you it’s right over here cuz I think this is the bus station. Hello. Ah, I just remembered. I’m so happy I thought about it at the last second. So, I think it’s around here somewhere. Let’s find the fortifications of Sultan. Oh, hey there. Oh, thank you. Let me park my bike here.

H I was just thinking I need I needed a cold drink. Where you from? I’m from Canada. Oh, wow. But yeah, just riding around Malaysia. Are you a YouTuber? No. No, I guess just taking a personal video. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I as a DJI. Yeah. Action 4. Well, today I’m just staying here in Muar. So, I have a home stay here. So, yeah. Right now I’m looking for there’s a historic marker here. Do you know it? Where Sultan Mahmud Shah, he built like a small fortress here on the river. Do you know about that place? I think it’s near the bus station. So, I’m going to go look for it. Yeah. Now, thank you very much. It’s so hot today. Thanks again. This is great. Okay.

Oh, I didn’t even realize my cameras were running for all of that. Yeah, a young guy. Oh, man. Just looking down, I got dizzy again. I am not dealing well with this heat.

Yeah, he pulled over and gave me a cold drink just as I was talking about getting a cold drink. Yeah, I got to sit down.

But maybe I’ll Yeah, soy milk. I love soy milk. Nice and cold. And he was shooting video with a DJI Action and he had one of these around his neck as well. He said he didn’t have a YouTube channel, but

Oh, I’m telling you, you could put a 100-gallon drum on the back of my bike and just put a tube down my throat and just feed liquid in like all all the time, hour after hour, just liquid pouring in. You can’t drink enough each day to keep up.

Oh, it barely even touched my thirst. Anyway, ah that was amazing. I was just thinking about cold drink and then boom fell right into my hands. So, let’s look for this historic site. Where is it? Let me look it up on Yeah, even my phone is is malfunctioning because of the heat. Every time I turn it on, it’s jumping from screen to screen to screen even though I’m not touching it. I’ve got to be very very careful. I think it’s going to shut down from overheating. Give me a second to locate this place. Ah, amazing piece of luck that I remembered because when I saw the buses, it triggered my memory. It’s 160 m from here. It’s called Kubu Bentayan is the name of this historic site. And when I was chatting with that guy in the car, I knew he wouldn’t know it, but I was just curious like, do you know about this famous historic place in your city? But he maybe he knew it, but I didn’t describe it properly.

But yeah, there’s a bus stations here. That’s kind of cool. If you come here by bus and you get dropped off right here, you’re right in the heart of the town, right on the riverfront.

So,

and this historic site is right inside this bus station complex, I think. So, it’s a funny thing when you look up this place on Google Maps, all the people that leave reviews, they actually leave a review of the bus station rather than the historical site, but it’s in here somewhere.

Here it is. There’s the marker right there. Hello. Yeah, I can see why people would walk right by it and not even know it’s there.

So, so far, yeah, it looks like there’s no like not much of a display here at all. So, you’d be forgiven thinking that it’s only about the bus station. So, right there, Kubu Bentayan,

which I think is this historic site. And I was hoping there would be some information, but yeah, you know, there’s the marker for it. And that tells you there’s really something important going on here. 1511, right? So this is where Mahmud Shah stopped with his big set of troops and the royal entourage and his family and all the nobles and they crossed the river and they decided to establish a defended position right here. So, I guess they put up like wooden blockades or stockades, I guess you would call them. I don’t know how they were arranged. I’ve never seen any kind of a drawing of it or a map or anything that it might have looked like, but it is Yeah. Right beside the river.

Yeah. You can see everybody here is they’ve got their luggage for the bus station. Everybody’s ready to get on the bus. And it’s right down by the river right there. So somehow this hundreds or thousands of people, I don’t know whether the royal elephants made it this far. If they did, how in the world did the elephants get across that river? Can elephants swim? If you ride an elephant and you know how to train them, can you train an elephant to swim across the river? I have no idea.

So, all of this story is more of a more of a mystery, more of a conjecture than anything else. But this, as I said, is the end of my journey in terms of trying to trace the steps of the Melaka Sultanate in retreat from the Portuguese. And this was, I think, was their first major stopping point after about three weeks fighting through the jungle, the mud flats, the mangrove, constantly looking over their shoulder,

constantly leaving soldiers behind to keep an eye out for the Portuguese in their boats, trying to find them, maybe engage them in battle again. Yeah, what a what a story. What an adventure. And then they got here, Muar crossed the Muar River and yeah, they must have been exhausted by the time they got here and just a bedraggled crew and they decided to settle down here for a while. Yeah, amazing. I wish there was more information, of course, but there’s really there’s really nothing else here but the sign and maybe even local people have no idea what it means.