Brunei

After a marathon 6 hour, 4 bus change to get to Bandar we finally made it! As you enter the city you cant help but gaze at the sultan's huge palace. Its only open one day a year but there are various spots for a great view.

Our digs for the next few days are in a local sport youth center come hostel. The place has a really nice swimming pool that needs to be tested out but the rooms are seperated strictly male/female with big signs saying 'no females/males allowed'...although strangely enough the guy running it is allowed to 'check' the girls dorms... Me and Graham are in one room on the lads side whereas Frances is in a huge 10bed dorm and now she is all on her own (all togeher now...)

F- The first night ther girls who were staying in the dorm with me kept the lights on and aircon off, it was impossible to sleep so i legged it into the boys dorm when no one was looking! I spent the night with a blanket over my head just in case someone looked through the door and saw my hair!! was a bit worried about my ecape this morning but i put lukes clothes on so i looked like a boy and after luke gave the all clear i legged it back! Now i have the dorm all to myself so hopefully i can get some sleep tonight!

For some reason guys who are staying here cannot set foot on the girls side but its quite ok for the bloke running the place to keep going in there! Still its cheap.. and cheaper than anything else around by a mile! Its fairly expensive here so we're keeping busy by seeing the local sites. No drinking either so unfortunately we're back to mundane conversation with other people who are staying here... you know how it goes, name... where u been etc etc.... only messin everyones really nice!

F- i'm finding Bruei a bit disapointing, when i ask guys a question they tell luke the answer which is very frustrating! alcohol is illegal, which would be fine if there was other things to do but there isnt! no holding hands, no drinking, no skin, no fun...... I think if we had the money to explore other areas of the country we might feel slightly different but as there are no other cheap accomodation options and transport is so expensive we are very limited as to what we can do. Unfortunately we couldnt afford to visit the rain forest as it is very expensive, however it does seem that the expense is due to the protection offered to the rainforest so it does seem like Brunei is taking positive steps to protect some natural areas.

Bandar is a small city surrounded by thousands of houses on water. Beside the elegance of the Mosques and the Palace, Bandar comes accross as a little rough... if a tad boring! Most of the main attractions in Brunei are on the outskirts, which are too expensive to stay in. Made our way yesterday to the local mall to do a bit od shopping for food. With drinking against the law and the buses stopping at 6pm.. its very hard to do anything at night.

Taxi's here are really expensive and we were really lucky to have some guys who had been to the cinema with us offer us a lift home in their van.. a journey that would have been quite expensive otherwise.

L- The next day Frances, Graham and I went for a wander about the city and visited the water village in the center of the city. Now Brueni's water village is huge! The biggest in the world in fact and houses no less than 30,000 people! Its a huge place but looks like a shanty town! Apparently the sultan keeps offering people free houses on dry land to entice people to move out but they're quite rightly having none of it.

On our final night we clubbed together with some Canadian guys and went on a tour of the city which allowed us to spend as long as we liked in the Jerudong Park playground. Now i have heard about this place back home and it sounded amazing... a free theme park the size of disney world, open till 2am in the morning and no waiting to get on teh rides!

What we found when we got there was somewhat different! Jerudong PLayground is indeed huge! So huge that you have to drive to various points of teh park as its too far to walk but unfortunately alot of the big rides were closed due to the insurance company changing hands. It was a shame not to be able to go on the huge rollercoasters but we did manage to get onto a realy good log flume where we kept going round and round without having to even get off.. how cool is that?

We also managed to get on a great go-cart track and race each other.... i won of course.

It was quite a strange feeling to walk around a theme park this size and it be completely deserted... a dream come true for me in fact.

When we had finished our driver drove us to the elusive 6 star Empire Hotel built by the sultan's crazy brother Jefri.

Jefi - This guy has it all. Or should i say he had it all before he was sued by the sultan for taking Brunei (thats right.. the whole country) into financial crisis! He spent a whopping 15 billion dollars on ships, hotels, cars, houses you name it and he bought it... his is a guy so wealthy he bought a fleet of boats called 'Tits' and named 2 of the boats 'nipple 1' and 'nipple 2'!!

The Empire Hotel is truely an amzing place. Its the only place in Bruei where you can actually have alcohol with your dinner! The swimming pool is the size of a lake and has its own private beach, theatre, cinema.... its huge and only 7,000 pounds a night.. think we'll stick to the youth hostel thank you. Quite an experience..... (empirehotel.com)

We then visited the Sultans palace... the largest palace in the world with over 1500 rooms! Could only see it from the outside at night but the place is open once a year where the sultan meets everyone... 100,000 people last time!

Last of all we visited the night market for food which was open till 3am! Had some great fried rice and chicken before heading home.

Making our way to Kota Kinnabalu tomo and readying ourselves to climb Mount Kinnabalu - the highest mountain in SE Asia... wish us luck

---

---