Yesterday I spent my day walking around the downtown part of Bandar Seri Begawan. It’s a small area that is maybe twenty square blocks filled with some restaurants, government buildings, and shops. The downtown area is next to a river and on the other side of the river is a very large area of river houses, houses on stilts.

After wandering around for a little while I decided that I wanted to walk along the river. As I was making my way along the river walk, I hear, “Yoo-hoo.” I mean who says that? Turns out it was a boat taxi driver, and he didn’t stop at “Yoo-hoo” either. He actually said enough stupid things that got me laughing. Is normal job was to taxi people from the bank of the downtown area to the river village on the other side and back. As you can imagine, he also just happens to give tourist tours of the area. The thing was, was that I was getting bored and the thought of riding in a boat for about an hour sounded like fun, so I decided to do it.

There wasn’t really much to tell about the boat tour except that it was nice to be on the water. The scenery really wasn’t that great and although I took a lot of photos, I don’t think any really turned out.

 

This morning I hired a driver to give me a tour of the rest of the area. I wasn’t sure what else there was to see but since I’m only here for three days I felt that I should see as much as possible. I left for the tour at 10.

 

 

Most of the tour really wasn’t that great. The driver took me downtown to show me all the things that I’d done yesterday. I can’t blame him but earlier I mentioned that I had been downtown all day, so he knew that I had been there. It ended up him just driving through downtown and not stopping anywhere.  The next stop was a very large mosque and then on to the sultans palace (which you can only see the driveway). After taking photos he took me to a botanical garden. I enjoyed this stop the most. It had all different plants from around the world, cactus from Mexico and the US, trees from Australia, and many more.  There was even a very small zoo there as well. The zoo had ostriches, peacocks, indigenous deer, some goats, and another bird that I don’t know what it was.

After the botanical gardens, we headed to another mosque and then he tried to show me the mall. I have no desire to see a mall and told him to skip it. Then he took me back to the hotel.

I’ve been in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei for the last two nights. First arriving on a ferry from KK on Wednesday. I didn’t get any sleep the night before I left so I spent the whole ferry ride snoozing away.  The ride to get here was uneventful and don’t know if I should include anything of the experience in this entry.

My impression of Brunei so far is mixed. It’s clean, and there is a strong sense of order everywhere you go. Which, I might add is kind of nice…at first. Not long after getting here I started to notice many things that raised an eyebrow. The first being that tobacco is illegal, well not exactly illegal, but the way it was explained to me was that I should hide my cigarette if I saw a policeman. You can’t buy cigarettes here, but you can smoke if you aren’t visible in public—I think that’s how it is, but honestly I can’t get a straight answer, some say it’s illegal, some say it is okay to smoke in certain areas.

Alcohol is illegal. Not really that big of deal to me. I can take or leave alcohol and since Brunei is a Muslim country I would expect them to be strict in regards to alcohol.

Littering is illegal. You can kind of expect that of most countries, but here you can get a fine of over 1000 Brunei Dollars, about $800. That’s a pretty steep fine when you think about it.

I was talking to some of the smokers around the hotel and they told me that they don’t have any fun here, that they need to go to Malaysia if they want to enjoy themselves. I’ve been here for about a day and a half and I’m already feeling this too.