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Asia » Brunei » Bandar Seri Begawan
April 20th 2006
Published: May 2nd 2006
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... a land where you don't pay any taxes, where free health care, free schools etc etc is available for all... oh and retirement is around 50!! Sounds like heaven! The only tiny weeny downside for me (and not to give the impression that I'm an alcoholic!) is that as of 1991 you can't buy any alcohol here - so that's no after work drink, no glass of vino with dinner in a restaurant, nothing. We saw the impact of this as we got off the ferry from Kota Kinabalu at Labuan - still part of Sabah this island is at the mouth of Brunei Bay and is where you get the ferry to Brunei... and has the largest concentration of duty free alcohol shops I've ever seen!! So many I was surprised they could all co-exist. When we arrived at customs on the Brunei side everyone from our boat had their bags searched and was explicitly asked if they had anything to declare.... with signs everywhere spelling out clearly the downside of not doing so and being caught. No sneaking in over your allowed limit here!

Brunei today is sandwiched between the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak and is only a fraction of the size that it was in the past, when it's rule spread throughout current Borneo and out to the Philippines. The arrival of the British in the 1800's was followed by a series of treaties (and there were a lot of them..) which made Brunei a 'protectorate' of the commonwealth (the museums we visited were very explicit in emphasising that Brunei was never a colony.. a 'protectorate' is quite different!). Independence was again attained in 1984 - Brunei today is an independant Sultanate, Islamic, has it's own currency, but the language, food and culture is very much Malay. The streets were all spotlessly clean.. but strangely very empty. OK so maybe the population is only some 300,000 odd people but a large proportion is in BSB and they are rich enough to drive some very nice cars... but walking around the streets of the city we saw very little motor traffic apart from buses. In fact it felt like you could almost do away with pedestrian crossings here!

We only had 2 days in Brunei and spent those in the capital BSB (or to give it its full name Bandar Seri Begawan... we stuck to BSB). If we'd had more time I would have liked to explore up river more - with the countries wealth coming from oil, and offshore oil wells at that, the forests here haven't been subjected to the large scale logging and palm tree plantations that we saw in Sabah. In the time we had we managed the Brunei Museum and what we thought was the far more impressive Royal Regalia Museum. The latter contains paraphernalia used in royal processions, the crown, medals, presents from foreign dignitaries (the less valuable ones - the others are kept in the royal palace), and lots of detail on the history of the country. We'd planned to visit Kampung Ayer, the water villages built on the river running through BSB. We got into a water taxi which was an experience in itself - I did wonder if one of us would go for an impromptu swim - but decided that passing through on the boat was enough. It felt all a bit too weird walking round to deliberately peer into someones house. So next was the mosque - the Omar Ali Saifuddien mosque, named after the 28th sultan, the current sultans father. It is adorned with some 28 golden domes, has stain glass windows from England, inside is decorated with the best marble imported from Italy, carpets from Belgium and beautiful venetian mosaics on the underside of the dome. I've been to enough historic cathedrals and churches over the years but never a mosque and I wasn't too sure what to expect. As women there were robes for us to wear over our clothes to ensure we were appropriately dressed (although there was no need to cover our hair which suprised me) and we were welcomed in and had a little tour by a very knowledgeable guy who proudly pointed out all the key features, where they came from etc.

To get into Sarawak from BSB involves some 5 buses and about 6 hours..... so we were v v happy when the hotel owner told us off a 'friend' who would drive us for the same price as the bus fair. So after a leisurely breakfast we were picked up, driven over the boarder and deposited in Miri in time for lunch!!


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