The Sultanate of Brunei
Thursday, March 19th, 2009An exchange that took place yesterday:
Brunei Immigration Officer: “What is your job? Student?”
Me (wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sandals, and looking a bit unkempt having spent previous night on a bus): “Project manager.”
Him (looking me up and down): “A very simple project manager.”
And so we entered the Sultanate of Brunei. Questions about my appearance aside, the entire process of arriving from Kota Kinabalu was somewhat of an ordeal. To get to Brunei overland from Sabah, you need to first cross a state border to Sarawak, which is bizarrely considered to be an international border, so you get stamped out of Sabah (i.e. Malaysia) and then 10 metres up the road you fill in an arrival card and get stamped in to Sarawak (i.e. Malaysia). You can imagine our confusion when we had to fill in the ‘Port of Last Embarkation’ question on our arrival cards (What was the last country we were in before arriving just now in Malaysia? Why, Malaysia!). You then enter a small strip of Brunei that is unconnected to the main part of Brunei, then re-enter Sarawak (another arrival card), then re-enter Brunei. All told, I got nine new stamps in my passport in one day (including three Malaysia exit stamps!), a new personal best.
Having come all the way from Semporna to Kota Kinabalu on a night bus, then taken another bus to Brunei straight away, we were pretty tired by the time we arrived in the capital Bandar Seri Begawan, or BSB for short. Besides, entering tiny, oil-fuelled Islamic sultanates (or emirates, kingdoms etc) is a bit nerve-wracking for someone who once lived in one of them for more than a year, but thankfully, Brunei is a long way from the Arabian Gulf in distance, and a shorter but still reasonable way in culture, and in any case hopefully they’ll let me depart tomorrow.
So far, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by Brunei. The town centre does have a bit of the Gulf to it in the wide, heavily-planned but mostly empty streets, the somewhat contrived architecture and the Arabic signage (though this is just Arabic script spelling out words in Bahasa), but that’s about the end of the comparisons. The Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque that dominates the centre of BSB is grand in its ambition and design, and with its huge golden dome it is one of the most beautiful modern buildings I have seen in a while.
But what’s most remarkable about Brunei is that literally a stone’s throw from the country’s centrepiece building (a pretty decent throw, but a throw nonetheless), the 28 stilt villages that make up the Kampung Ayer begin, and a completely different life begins with it. We spent this morning wandering along the boardwalks that connect some of the villages, and they really do seem to go on forever. It was by far the largest stilt village we’ve ever seen, and one of the most intriguing as well – it really is something resembling an actual village, rather than just a residential area, and some of the houses are quite large and most of them look pretty comfortable. After the government originally tried to move everyone out of the villages so it could demolish them, only to have the villagers refuse to move, the Kampung Ayer seems here to stay for the long-term, and indeed a quarter of BSB’s population (30,000 people) live on stilts. This is an interesting contrast with the development that we’ve seen overtaking and marginalising stilt villages in certain places in Malaysia, notably Kota Kinabalu. Here, there are schools and restaurants on stilts within the villages, the villagers have postal services, garbage collection and public transport in the form of water taxis, and there are even advertising billboards on stilts that can only be seen from those water taxis. All in all, it’s a pretty remarkable place.
Tomorrow we get to fill in our fourth Malaysian arrival card of the past two weeks and get two more passport stamps as we re-enter Malaysia. Our main goal in this, our third ‘trip’ to Sarawak in the past three days, is to actually get off the bus…
***Late breaking news update: We just discovered another, not so pleasant similarity between Brunei and the Arabian Gulf: no cold, or even room temperature, water out of the taps during the day – only hot.
Nick