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Published: July 20th 2010
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Boat Tour upstream
Kampong Water Village in background Day 1 - 17/7/10
Off again - ah what adventures lie in wait for us this time...
Here we go again flying Royal Brunei (a Muslim alcohol free airline) and true to form we brought out a bottle of Shaw & Smith Sauvignon Blanc and requested that it be chilled to have with our dinner. The flight attendants were extremely helpful and brought it out nicely chilled when dinner arrived - in our section we were the only ones drinking wine for dinner - how uncivilised were the rest?
Landed at Bandar after an uneventful flight and stayed at the Radisson as guests of Royal Brunei as they had initially stuffed up our booking - so here we are in Brunei - where they're celebrating the Sultan of Brunei's 64th birthday celebrations.
We went for a walk after dinner as it appears we're in the heart of the city and the population is 375,000 and we think every single one of them were out last night after the celebrations. By time we returned to the Radisson we were dripping wet as the day had reached 31 degrees celcius and the afternoon tropical rains came down in the
Boating companions
We found friends in Bandar! afternoon similar to Darwin.
It was a wonderful evening with lots of people, bright lights and heaps of photos - massive ones, everywhere of the Sultan of Brunei- he lights were like Christmas... with a difference.
The next day - not flying out until another hour now but today we got up - had breakfast and decided to go for a walk and see what was happening around the place - being a Sunday it was pretty quiet and then we reached the river and the markets - we had been told we should go on trip down the river on an old wooden boat which was motorised. Whilst negotiating a price we started talking to a local & he offered to assist & after a short while we had five in the boat heading up river. Peter was a retired banker from Singapore having lived in Bandar since he was 19 - who married a Brunei girl, he was with his 7 year old nephew and the house girl from the Phillipines. He gaves us heaps of information which was a brief history of Brunei and most of his own history....! We certainly were shown a good
Mode of travel
Peter negotiating our trip - would've cost us $20 - he got if for $7 as only the locals can do! time by him and he gave us a bag of fruit - beautiful but the only fruit not allowed in hotels because the skin colour leaves marks so it costs $100 extra cleaning if found in the room!!
One of the highlights here was finding a stadium which had a group of teenage boys who had been playing some sort of game and were packing up but showed what they were playing on the court - which was a tupe of soccer over a volley ball net and court. They were fantastic and very agile with one dropping into the splits! OMG they were so agile - we chatted about a few things and as we left the stadium they sang to us - was great to see kids that age interested in us all as we enjoyed being with them.
We really enjoyed Brunei - especially this morning which was amazing considering that we hadn't really planned anything but then again after our last trip the unexpected keeps happening and we end up having adventures and a real ball doing it.
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andrew
non-member comment
Envious again
Hey can you not once do when in" rome do as the romans do"!!! trust you 2 to have chilled wine on a muslim plane. PLus it was only a short flight oh thats not right you did not fly out of Darwin did we???? Glad you are having a good time whilst we freeze up here with cool winds and lots of sun sun sun hey and we dont pay to chase it it!!! take care guys catch up with you both in Brizzie at Xmas and Kay's big Birtday bash 20th