Experience the kingdom: Brunei
Jan 29th, 2009 by bjoern
As the majority of Singapore people are Chinese the Chinese New Year closed here everything for some days and so we took the chance and went to Brunei, a small kingdom on the Borneo island which is famous for its rich oil-reserves and absolut monarchy. Only about 380.000 people living in this kingdom on an area more than seven times bigger then Singapore – so I hoped for lot of space, green woods and great wildlife. And after meeting with Kamal, a friend of mine from a seminar in Korea, I was greeted by a small capital-city next to a river with their famous water villages, calm life and great and green woods all-over. And we fully experienced the magnificient rainforests of Temburung the next day with an amazing longboat-trip, a walk on the canopy-trail 40 meters over the ground on top of the trees, and an excellent guide that showed us monkeys and all different species of plants and trees but as well explained his background from the famous headhunter-tribe and their now-a-days-life in the Iban longhouses.
After experiencing this nature adventure we went back to the capital, enjoyed a typical Brunei cinema-night and had next day a drive to the oil-field in Seria some hours away. We also visited the six-star-hotel Empire and had some great italian food in a absolut crazy athmosphere with strong rain and wind outside and a fancy italian restaurant inside on the ´end of the world´. After having a look to the water-villages on the riverside Susi and me flight back and I am very much exited about Singapore being the hub to the region and hope for a lot of more trips coming to experience more of great Asia.
