South China Sea Circuit, part 2: Brunei Darussalam

I'd never really heard of Brunei, then we decided it could be fun to go there.  It was really a result of a time crunch and the inaccessibility of Bornean Malaysia.  This leg of the trip could be divided into two distinct parts: in the Empire, and not in the Empire.

What is the Empire, you ask?  It's a hotel, but not just any hotel.  The Empire is a 1.1 billion dollar gilded marble monster jammed between the beach and the Borneo rainforest.  I've seen conflicting reports, but the hotel is rated at the very least 5 stars, and as many as 7.  I did not know 7 star hotels existed, but now I've (maybe) stayed in one.  How, you ask, could I afford such a place on my meager teachers salary?  I have the Sultan's brother, Jofrie, to thank for that.  When he was made the money manager for Brunei, he basically went on a spending spree, building himself a multi-billion dollar playground with private residences and a fully functioning amument park.  When the Sultan found out about his little bro's indulgences, he was not pleased, and Jofrie left the country in disgrace.  The Sultan then ordered the billion dollar residence converted into a luxury resort in an attempt to recoup some of the losses.  As you can probably guess, Brunei isn't the hottest place for luxury tourists, so in an effort to fill rooms, they are sold at relatively low prices.  Couple that with a 50% discount for Ramadan, and you've got the like of me staying here:

Opulent much?  We got picked up from the airport, and this is what awaited us in the car:

 Cool towels and a personalized letter welcoming us to the Empire.  We went and checked in and were shuttled to our room.  I was kind of flustered, but Jaclyn was right in her element.

We got to our room, and were pleasantly surprised to discover we'd been moved to face the ocean.  This is more or less the view from bed:

The weather wasn't great, but it still made for a lovely sight.  We were starving and none of the restaurants were open, so we ordered up some room service.  It was literally served on silver platters under those silver dome things like you see in movies.

You can see Jaclyn being dwarfed by our bathroom door here.  Everything about this hotel was done on a grand scale.

After breakfast/lunch/snapping hundreds of pictures of our luxurious room, we wandered around a bit and happened upon a display of former guests: 

 Recognize anybody?  Here are a few pictures from around the hotel:

Everything was Italian marble and real gold.  The columns were so big I couldn't fit a whole one into a picture.  You can see Jaclyn below helping to provide a scale.

The next picture reminds me of the Titanic for some reason.

You can see several things in this next picture: the marble inlays that were in every railing, the detailed mosaics on the bottom level, and one of the two Fazioli pianos in the lobby.  You read that right: TWO Faziolo pianos in the lobby.

I only got a few pictures outside, but it was hard to capture the scale of the buildings.  That, and the weather wasn't any good anyway so most of them came out bleak and grey.  Everything was massive marble walls, huge pots full of plants and tiered gardens overflowing with lush tropical plants.  There were fountains everywhere, wide lawns and marble arches topping marble columns.  Some buildings were even bordered portullis.  At one point I said to Jaclyn, "It feels like we're walking around in ancient Babylon."  "Yea," she said, "Or Qarth" (incredibly apt Game of Thrones reference).

When we weren't ogling at the sumptuous archtiecture, we were in the infinity pool, or the salt water lagoon that it flowed into, or walking on the beach below that.  It seemed to me there were several acres of pool, but I'm not so good at spatial reasoning.

Taking "swim-up-bar" a bit too literally.  Of course, it's hard calling it a bar since there's no alcohol.  In all of Brunei, in fact.  It's a "dry" country, as per Sharia law.





Living in such luxury was tiring, so Jaclyn had a nap where the pool flows into the lagoon.

A sudden storm chased inside for a bit, but was considerate enough to leave in time for a killer sunset.  You can kind of see here the tiered pool/lagoon/ocean.

We had the Ramadan buffet for dinner (twice), and got to sample this local dish called ambuyat, among others.  This was the highlight, though.  It's a thick, sticky, flavorless, gelatinous gloop.  It gets it's flavor from whichever sauce you opt to dip it in.  Some were quite tasty, others literally made me gag.  Nearly all of them were blindingly spicy.  You pop it in your mouth, all the sauce leeches out into your mouth then without  any chewing, it kind if squips down your throat.  It was a... unique... gastronomic experience.

I've got about 600 more pictures of this hotel, our room, the grounds, the marble bathroom with the deadly slippery floor, the huge bathtub looking over the ocean, a bunch of panoramas of various things, other famous visitors, all sorts of things of that nature.  I'll leave you with this example of conspicuous consumption: a foot tall, 24k gold adorned half million dollar crystal camel.  Why?  Because they can.

And now for something completely different!

This is the real reason for our trip the Empire, if we're being honest.  Jaclyn was extremely reluctant to do an overnight tour in what may be some of the thickest jungle in the world, chiefly due to her arachnaphbia (see the Somaemul-Do entry for evidence).  When she consented, I found and booked the Empire as a sort of thank you surprise.  In hindsight, it would have been wise to schedule the 7 star hotel AFTER the jungle trekking.  But in any case...

Brunei's jungle is said to be one of the best preserved in the world, for no other reason than the countries economy is singularly fueled by oil.  The jungles have been protected for years, and hardly any logging or deforestation occured prior, mostly because nobody lived there.  Now it's illegal to develop any forested area, and it's been mandated that any tree cut down must be replaced by a tree of the same size... clever. It's an effective deterrent, apparently.  Since clearcutting is illegal, Brunei is home to the largest "floating" city in the world, but we'll get to that later.

We got picked up early morning from the empire, and shuttled to this "water bus" that would take us onward into the jungle.  It's actually the only way to get to the Temburong district without crossing into Malaysia and back again, as it's physically separated from the rest of Brunei.

The trip was fast and bumpy, whipping through narrow, winding, mangrove lined passages at breakneck speed.  The vegetation was thick.  Really thick, like Heart of Darkness thick, and it spilled out over the water. There was literally no land visible, just trees and water.  You could not tell where one tree ended and another began, they were packed in so tightly.  When Jaclyn saw what we were getting into...

We got off the boat in the middle of nowhere (Bangar town, the "capital" of the district), and wandered around for a bit until our guide found us.  She led us to a van that would take us from the city to the "real" jungle.  As it turned out, our "group tour" would be private, thanks to the low season.  After another bumpy ride we got dropped for our first trek and headed into the jungle.  Despite her fears, Jaclyn took to it like a fish in water.

Champ.  I had certain expectations for "jungle trekking," but upon arrival I realized the discovery channel has given me an extremely skewed perspective of the rainforest.  I expected orangutans swinging through the trees, bright colorful birds on every branch fighting off the snakes trying to steal away their eggs. 

Delusional.

The truth about the rainforest is: is it's dense, it's green, and it's loud.  I think the volume was the most surprising thing, for me.  We didn't the multitude of animals I was fancifully expecting, aside from some lizards, various butterflies, and more varieties of stinging insect than you'd know what to do with, but we sure heard a lot of them.  Some caw or hoot or bark would ring out and our guide would say, "That's a horn bill," or, "That's a horse-gecko."  Yea, apparently there's a really loud gecko that lives in Borneo, barks like a dog but is named after a horse.  The amplitude of noise attested to the fact that the aforementioned multitude of life is out there, but why would it allow me to see it?  Beyond the fact that we're destroying their habitiats all over the world, we're big, loud, hairless, potentially dangerous apes.  And with the density of the foilage, something could be hiding out a few feet from you and you'd never know it.  It made me realize why "Planet Earth" took five years to make: because somebody sat in a tree for 4 months waiting until a bird happened to wander in front of their camera.  I actually looked it up, they filmed for a total of 2000 days.  2 days hiking was not going to yield the same result.  I suppose if you want to see "wild" jungle animals, you'd be best off doing it in a preserve rather than in the virgin rainforest.  We did see an iguana sprinting along on it's hind legs, though.  So that was neat. 

Let me show you what else we saw:

Big plants.  Really, really big plants.  I kind of felt like I was wandering FernGully.  Everywhere it was massive leaves and thick knotted vines and tangles of roots.  It was hard to establish a scale in pictures because everything is so freaking huge.  You can get the idea in this picture of me with the giant yams, but the spines in the picture above, for example, were all between an inch and two inches long.  You did not want to go wandering off the trail in this place (apparently one kind of tree has bark so poisonous it can kill if you happen to brush against it).  An interesting thing to note is that the trees were massive at the root and though they climbed sometimes two hundred feet into the air, their trunks were relatively narrow.  Especially so when compared with the redwoods or sequoias we have at home.  When we were done checking out the foilage, we popped over to the jungle lodge.  I taught Jaclyn to play Rumy, her new obsession, and we relaxed by the river and watched the long boats whirr by.  It was, contrary to all of our expectations, serene.

Ahhhh

They fed us and we lazed about some more, then that evening I headed out for a "bonus trek."  I had two different guides, both of whom were from the indigineous Iban tribe. This isn't to say they were "primitive," he was wearing Crocs and her DSLR camera was leagues beyond my point and shoot.  What I do mean to say, though, is that they have a wealth of knowledge about the jungle that they were happy to share with me.  We basically went on a "things you can eat" and "things not to touch" tour through vegetation so dense it made the place earlier look like a public park.  As Michael literally hacked us a path with his machete, I said to the other guide that it must have been a while since anyway had been through this way.  "Well, I haven't been up here for... maybe two weeks," she said.  Two weeks, and the trail had been completely swallowed up by the jungle.

They showed me some things I could eat, and how to tell if certain plants were ripe or not.  They told me how you could generally eat something if insects were eating it (so long as you don't mind sharing), and showed me a thick vine that would yield a liquid to drink if you cut it open.  Then they showed me a vine that looked exactly the same and said make sure you don't drink the liquid from this one, because it will kill you.  I'll stick with my Dasani, I think.  They showed me which leaves to burn to will keep insects away (and malignant spirits, according to their folklore), then they showed me a tree that has a hard sap that can be used to catch a spark and make a fire.  Without a further word, he pulled out a lighter and showed me how well it works:

You can see below some of the foraging we did.  These seeds are from a strain of wild ginger.  You find the flower (on the right) and if it's starting to rot and go black, you can pluck out the seed pods and eat them.  My guides said they were really tart, but I found them delicious, kind of like a jasmine flavored kiwi.

  I ate a few other seeds and flowers and a thing called, "Longjack."  Maybe you've heard of it, athletes take it in supplement form to raise their testosterone levels, and sometimes it's added to coffee.  They warned me, "This is really bitter," but, after their overwrought warning about the ginger seeds, I failed to heed their advice.  They were impressed that I didn't spit it out.  I brought some back for Jaclyn to try, and told her that it was super tasty, strawberry sweet.

Prank!

When she got all that scraped out of her mouth, we went to a native longhouse.  These are massive buildings in which whole tribes would live.  They are different from what I expected, and kind of reminded me of a dorm.  Basically, there are a bunch of individual dwelling spaces all in a row with a huge shared living space, kind of like if your whole block shared one front porch.  The houses are measured by "doors," each door being another family or dwelling.  This longhouse was a 16 door longhouse, but they can be anywhere from 4 to 40 and upwards.  Our guide told us the "houses" are all different sizes behind the wall, despite appearing equal from the outside.  Some extend further back and some take up more space laterally, depending on how much money the inhabitant contributed to the construction.  Some still maintain the tradition of having detached kitchens so that if a cooking fire gets out of control in one, the whole village doesn't go up in flames.  We peeked inside one house and it looked just like any house you'd see, a gang of kids sitting on the carpet watching cartoons, their father on the couch reading a magazine.

They were traditionally built beside rivers, since that was the main transportation route.  They would be built on stilts to mitigate the risk of flooding, with their longboats hung in the space below.  Now they're built along roads, but some aspects of the tradition remain.

We got up early the next morning to head to the flagship park in Brunei, Ulu Temburong.  It's quite big, and totally undeveloped.  It's so undeveloped, there are no roads; the only way to access the park is by boat.  It hadn't rained in a few days, which they said marked a "Borneo dry season," so it was a slow, rock scraping ride in the longboat.  Our guides were kept busy poling us off of rocks and, a few times, jumping out to pull us up over shoals. 

The longboat ride was really incredible.  I couldn't help feeling like Stanley in search of Livingston, pushing deeper and deeper into untouched jungle.  Or maybe like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, but the images that conjures aren't nearly pleasant enough.  I'd say again that the sheer volume of plant life was staggering, but then I might run the risk of getting redundant.  You can see the entrance to the park below.  They pulled the boat alongside, we jumped out onto the steps, and they drove the boat off again.

In the park, aside from the ubiquitous trees, there is a canopy walk and a suspension bridge over the river that was absolutely demolished by a falling tree.  The canopy walk is basically a 150-200 foot high, 1.5 foot wide steel catwalk spanning six towers made of tinker toys, tethered to the surrounding trees for stability.

It provides an unparalleled view of the jungle at heights to get your heart racing.  Climbing so high just to reach the level of the treetops gives their height a poignancy that can't be attained from the ground.  The swaying of the towers did distract from the view a bit, though.  Plus they thoughtfully provided a level at the pinnacle of each tower so you could watch just how much you were pitching to and fro.  I couldn't help but think of the suspension bridge we'd passed, constructed to standards well surpassing the canopy walk, yet utterly obliterated by a falling tree.  I was glad for a day without wind.  My luck held out, though, and we made it back to the longboat intact.

All over Asia you can get a "foot spa" where you stick your feet in a pool full of fish which then chew the dead skin off of your feet.  I've always found the thought of this quite repulsive, dunking your feet in a pool full of other feet and fish excrement comprised of dead bits of other feet.  Our guide took us to a "waterfall" (just a trickle, since it was "dry season") with a tiny pool.  In that tiny pool were loads of the famous foot-eating fish.  This I could try.

You can see one of them here munching away, but when you went deeper they would attack in a swarm.  It really tickled, as Jaclyn considerately demonstrates on the right, so it was hard to stand still long enough to get a good picture.

After this, we took a boat to a boat to another boat, and made it back to the capital, Bandar Seri Begawan (BSB).   It's a smallish city, packed with gold plated mosques and containing the world's largest "floating city."  As I said before, since people can't cut down trees, they build out over the water.  An estimated 22 thousand people live in the floating city. It has it's own schools, stores, mosques, police stations, even a supermarket.  It also has the world's largest house (the Sulatn's), but since basically all you can see is a giant golden dome and a tall gilded fence, I won't waste your time with pictures.  The driver of our boat was fed up with our not believing him that it wasn't worth seeing, so he sped off after we dropped us off at the dock.

Here's a chronological photo tour of the rest of BSB:

Mosque

Mosque + Lagoon

Entering the floating city





Houses

Bare essentials

Busstop

Got tired and rented a boat

Floating mosque

What happened to our boat?

Sunset over BSB

Full circle



Well there it is, more than you ever wanted to know about a country you've probably never heard of.  Sorry it was so long, you may have been reading about it for more time than I actually spent there.  It was a great time, though: unique sights, interesting food, kind, helpful people, lots of trees and lots of things coated in gold. 

Now, off to Palawan.

 Part 1: Singapore and Kuala Lumpur   -   Part 3: Palawan