I was alone in Bandar Seri Begawan (BSB) in Brunei. How would I survive?
BSB is the capital of the country, and I rarely saw anyone outside. It was like walking through a small town/kampong in the UK. I was also here alone, and BSB and Brunei, are not really popular destinations on the South East Asia backpackers radar. This might be due to the lack of alcohol, the cost and the lack of activities such as river tubing. I wanted to learn more about this small place that no one’s ever heard of.
Hostels don’t really exist here, my preferred place of stay for lone travel as it helps you meet people. Instead, I stayed in a hotel called LeGallery. During my stay the staff were very helpful and arranged airport pickup. It was the location however that made me choose it as it was within walking distance of the centre piece of Brunei and its top sight – the impressive Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. I did go and see this, and messed up big time by walking on some carpet with shoes on. I felt terrible. The reason I went inside was I wanted to learn more about Islam, a religion I knew very little about that gets a lot of bad attention. I tried to engage in conversation with a man inside, however he sent me to an information booth which was not in English and had no time for me. I was slightly disappointed but felt foolish to think I could condense learning about an entire religion into one visit.
What was bizarre about the mosque was the contrast with everything around it. It’s right next to a water village – lots of houses on stilts built over water. The mosque on the other hand is made of gold. It was an unusual sight. Talk about “keeping up with the Jones’
“… this village had no chance. However, from another perspective you could say that there is something rather beautiful about living in wood but giving God (Allah) gold.
Later I went to the downtown market, and I took a jetty ride around the river in BSB. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen a shell garage in the middle of a body of water. When much of the traffic here is boat it makes sense.
I took a bus ride to the beach and there was nothing much there but driftwood and young couples getting some privacy. Depleted of things to do, I had an early and drawn out dinner at a waterfront restaurant.
The evening I had there was the hardest. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. In the absence of friends (a hotel is not a good place to meet fellow backpackers) and alcohol (where I usually meet people) headed to a cinema on a bus, where I watched some forgettable film where Benicio del Toro was a werewolf (or something like that). I then walked into the night market where I finally got to talk to some Bruneian people.
They were running a hamburger market stall and were very curious to meet a 20-something.
They were helpful – they gave me somewhere to sit down and asked about England.
One was curious about my (unmarried) sex life – not what I expected in a strict muslim country – but goes to show you shouldn’t judge people on the little you know about a religion or a country.
They asked me what I was doing in BSB. I said I didn’t know. I asked them what I should do with myself, and they suggested shish-a pipes. They knew a great place and said they’d order me a taxi.
After waiting, much to my surprise the two women from the hamburger stall were my “taxi drivers”. I was a little apprehensive about being driven by these strangers but I figured it was no different than hailing a cab, I really wanted to believe them to be good people and I had nothing else to do. I wrote out a draft message with details of my last known location on my Nokia phone and prepared to dispatch it to England.
Lucky for me, I was not driven to an organ transplant facility but to a shish-a joint and when they got there and realised it had closed early. Why?! What else could they possibly doing, I wondered. They asked me where to go and I was out of ideas so I suggested back to the hotel.
On the way back they drove me to the Sultan’s palace just so I could say I had seen it. The sultan is perhaps the richest person in the world. He has hundreds of cars and a palace with hundreds of bedrooms. That was probably the key to spending time in Brunei – driving nice cars.
I on the other hand, without the riches of a sultan, arrived home at 8.30pm and after flicking through television channels went to bed at nine prepared to grab the morning by its ears (I planned to take a boat to Kota Kinabalu).
I don’t usually get into cars with strangers. The only time it tends to happen is on the road. Something about travel brings out the best in me – I meet people, I gain trust and just believe in them again. It might be naive, but it feels the way it should be.
In the end I didn’t completely find the secret to being alone in BSB, but I got close. Whenever and wherever you are alone (and don’t want to be) the key seems to be as simple as talking to somebody. You’ll always find someone to talk to if you need to, even in the places you least expect and you don’t need to be as rich as the sultan of Brunei.
Someday, we will see the world 
Leave a comment