After almost a month waiting in Kuala Lumpur, we finally had It Zwibble back.
We had shipped our campervan from New Zealand to Malaysia to begin the overland part of our journey, but delays at Port Klang meant we’d spent our first four weeks in the country without it. When we finally collected the van on 1 April, we were more than ready to get moving.
We knew we eventually needed to head north, but first we turned south. Our loose plan was to visit Melaka, continue to the southernmost point of mainland Asia, then turn around and begin working our way up Malaysia’s east coast.
For the first time since leaving New Zealand, we weren’t limited by hotel bookings, flights or public transport. Our home was travelling with us.
We were about to find out what that freedom actually looked like.
Our first stop: Melaka
Melaka was our first proper sightseeing stop, and we started with one of our favourite ways to get to know a new city: a walking tour.
We joined the Tour of Historic Malacca, Malaysia: World Heritage Site and UNESCO City through GuruWalk, led by Imrahn, a local guide who had grown up in Melaka.
We only had a short time in the city, which made the tour particularly worthwhile. Melaka’s history is layered, and simply walking past its temples, mosques, churches and historic buildings wouldn’t have told us very much. Imrahn brought that history to life, but what we particularly liked was how personally connected he was to the city. He showed us where he’d grown up, and his affection for Melaka was obvious throughout the tour.
By the end of the morning, we were very aware that we could have stayed longer. There were museums we hadn’t visited and plenty more of the historic centre to explore.
But we also had a campervan we’d waited a very long time to use.
So we continued south.
Learning to travel without a booking
That first afternoon gave us our first real taste of why we’d wanted to travel this way.
We were aiming for the southern tip of mainland Asia, but weren’t going to make it before it closed for the day. A month earlier, that would probably have meant finding accommodation somewhere. Now we simply opened Google Maps, found somewhere that looked promising between us and our destination, and drove towards it.
We ended up somewhere quite near the water. There was nobody else around, we had everything we needed in the van, and there was no reason to keep driving.
So we stayed.
It wasn’t a spectacular tourist attraction or a campground we’d researched months in advance. But after all the complications involved in getting It Zwibble to Malaysia, being able to change our plans that easily felt significant.
The following morning, we continued south.
Our unofficial starting line
We’d already been in Malaysia for more than four weeks, but reaching Tanjung Piai, the southernmost point of mainland Asia, felt like the unofficial beginning of our overland journey.
From there, everywhere we wanted to go was north.
We continued into Johor Bahru. It wasn’t somewhere we’d particularly planned to visit, but that was becoming part of the point. We found somewhere outside to park our 2.8-metre-high van, went looking for lunch and air conditioning, did some work and eventually decided it was late enough that we’d stay rather than push on towards the coast.
That night’s home was a free lakeside car park we’d found on Park4Night. It had no height restrictions, there was enough space for It Zwibble and it was comfortable enough for us to cook dinner and settle in for the night.
The next morning, we turned east.
Finding our rhythm on Malaysia’s east coast
For the next few days, we largely stopped trying to achieve very much.
We found a beach and stayed. We swam. We discovered public showers. We cooked in the van when we had food aboard and ate out when it made more sense. Then we moved further along the coast and found another beach.
At the same time, we were figuring out the practicalities of living in It Zwibble in a tropical climate. Malaysia was hot and humid, and our van doesn’t have habitation air conditioning. Once the engine was off, keeping ourselves comfortable meant thinking about shade, airflow, where the sun was going to move during the day and whether we could open the van enough to catch a breeze.
And then it rained.
A very wet introduction to tropical vanlife
Heavy rain exposed two leaks in the van. One was something we’d suspected before but had never managed to see happening. The other seemed to be connected to damage sustained while It Zwibble was being shipped to Malaysia.
Then, in the middle of the night, our front MaxxAir fan began beeping and behaving as though it was short-circuiting.
Megan’s initial preference was to ignore it and go back to sleep.
Darryl’s was to deal with the electrical problem occurring directly above our bed.
Darryl won.
Unfortunately, reaching the fuse box meant unloading bikes and moving enough of the contents of our garage to get to it. At around 2.30 am we were therefore dismantling the back of the van, pulling the fuse and putting everything back together.
It wasn’t one of vanlife’s more photogenic moments.
The following day, however, brought one of the best experiences of our first days on the road.
Meeting Ainey and Pardun
We met Ainey and Pardun by chance.
Before long, they’d invited us to follow them back to their home, where they also had space for us to camp. We spent the evening together, communicating largely through Google Translate, and Ainey cooked for us.
We barely filmed any of it.
In hindsight, we’re glad.
Some experiences are better when the camera isn’t the centre of them, and this became one of our favourite memories from our first weeks in Malaysia. The following morning Ainey made nasi lemak, a dish we’d already eaten elsewhere and would eat many more times before leaving the country.
Hers remained the one we compared the others with.
Five nights at Pantai Air Papan
Eventually we reached Pantai Air Papan, just north of Mersing, and stopped.
For five nights.
After waiting so long to get It Zwibble back, parking it beside one beach for nearly a week might seem slightly counterproductive. For us, it was exactly what we’d wanted the van for.
We worked. We slept. We swam. We relaxed.
There were facilities nearby and, although it wasn’t entirely free camping, we only paid a small amount for the weekend nights we stayed.
It was also where we started getting better at managing the heat. Finding a good park-up wasn’t simply about finding shade. We needed sun on our 1,200 watts of rooftop solar, but didn’t necessarily want full tropical sun beating onto the van all afternoon. We began paying much more attention to trees, the direction the sun would move and where we might catch a breeze.
We eventually shared the practical lessons we learned about keeping It Zwibble comfortable in tropical conditions in our guide to keeping cool without built-in air conditioning.
For the first time, we were properly learning how our New Zealand-built home worked in Southeast Asia.
Getting off the mainland
From this part of Malaysia we also booked a four-island day trip, giving us a chance to see a very different version of the east coast from the beaches we’d been parking beside.
We booked Package C through Causeway Link Holidays, with the island-hopping and snorkelling tour run by Snorkelicious Mersing.
In April 2026, we paid RM150 per person, which included lunch, snorkelling equipment, snacks and drinks.
Our first island was home to a private resort, so we stayed aboard the boat. At the next, we could finally get into the water. It was noticeably clearer and cooler than the water we’d been swimming in along the mainland coast, and the beach itself was cleaner.
Then came snorkelling.
Megan’s GoPro promptly detached from its handle and sank to the sea floor.
Without fins, she couldn’t dive deeply enough to reach it. Fortunately, one of the men on the trip could, and returned it safely. Camera recovered, Megan carried on swimming.
Darryl, faced with a reasonably strong current, decided the boat was an excellent place to be.
After lunch on another island, a second snorkelling stop and some time to wander on the final island, we headed back to the mainland and our home on wheels.
You can watch our first days overlanding Malaysia, from Melaka to the east coast, in our YouTube episode below.
Our first weeks of actual overlanding
There was no particularly tidy itinerary to our first weeks in It Zwibble.
We spent less time in Melaka than we could have. We drove all the way to the bottom of mainland Asia largely so that we could turn around and drive north again. We stayed in random car parks and beside beaches, dealt with rain coming through our roof in the middle of the night and unexpectedly found ourselves welcomed into Ainey and Pardun’s home.
Then we stayed in one place for five nights simply because we liked being there.
After months of flights, accommodation bookings, organised tours and waiting for our van to arrive, that freedom was exactly what we’d been missing.
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