We were quite curious how Brunei will be like so we spent 2 days there… is Brunei another small version of Dubai due to the oil found offshore of this little sultanate? Well, it isn’t really… there is a mosque with lots of gold on the exterior, but some of the houses (especially the traditional water village houses) are still quite basic (although there is water and electricity supply)…
The water village Kampong Ayer is HUGE, we strolled around and found quite some plant loving inhabitants (almost anything makes a good pot for plants) and it is interesting to see that everything seems to exist in a way: schools, school boat, petrol station for the boats (yes, a liter is only 0,5 Brunei Dollar = 33 Euro cent!!!), little restaurants…
Also quite interesting, there was a quite ugly clock tower somewhere in the city which is supposed to be important. Why?
All distances in Brunei are measured from there… People in Brunei love shopping (and as it is really extremely hot in the sun, there are such things as notebook cooling pads) and eating. For later, a lot of garlic is involved, hopefully the bats (vampires) in Mulu National Park will not be scared if we arrive there… *smiley winking*
Talking about food, the market was really nice for me. Lots of known veggies, but lots of unknown too. And they have those yummy dried chilies (I need to import some to Germany), they make really good food, not too spicy but with a nice flavor. Brunei people are very friendly are quite relaxed fellows, they let you look and smell at all their fruits and veggies even if you don’t buy. On the stand we bought some coconut, the old lady asked very interested where we are from and she seemed to be kind of proud to have international customers *smiley winking* I also made a friend, a nice cat with blue eyes and her little kids…
Quite sad to see (especially for divers) that they sold reef sharks and rays for food *smiley sad*
Some years ago the brother of the current sultan, Jefri, was the finance minister as well as chairman of the investment board. He did invest a lot, not only in the country but also in himself. Nine private airplanes (including a 747 with golden water taps), about 2000 cars (not only the normal ones you can buy from the factory but also special made ones), lots of houses abroad (Paris, LA, you name it) as well as in Brunei. It is said that he spent around US$ 4 billion of state money on himself… When this all was discovered, they tried to sell some of the stuff and turn for example one of his guest houses into a luxury resort, now the Empire Hotel. The building costs for that one was US $1.1 billion (compare with US$ 1.9 billion for both of the KL Petronas Towers!!). We wanted to check this one out to understand the dimensions a bit better. To go there, we thought, we use public transport (a bus) to see more of the life there. Unfortunately, our bus didn’t really go directly to the hotel but the driver said, you can walk from here, just follow that road and then to the left. He did not mention, that this “road” is a highway… so we walked 2km besides the highway to reach it (the security guy made some big eyes seeing us walking into the hotel complex). Well, this former guest house is just huge and in a way glamorous, but not really nice to our eyes. We walked to the beach but catched a tremendous rain shower, so we dried in nice aircon hotel cafe and spoiled ourselves with some nice coffee specialties. Thorsten took an espresso pured over a scoop of vanilla ice cream… no more comments needed *smiley winking* Of course we took a taxi (Teksi in Malay) on the way back to the town where we had some nice dinner and fruit cocktail (no alcohol is sold in Brunei!).
