[Image Credit: Bucketlistly Blog]

Little has changed since I published my first travel post about Brunei on the internet some hundred and thirty two months ago.

Back then, the tiny sultanate was a subtle little place that flew under the radar of even the most turbocharged Southeast Asian gap year itineraries. Sights and activities were seemingly condensed within the confines of its capital centre Bandar Seri Begawan (better known as Bandar or BSB); and your standard tourist’s list would rarely stray beyond the same old roundabout of mosques, malls, museums, and markets.

Eleven years later, Brunei is still the same sleepy community it was when I first found it all those years back, and it still continues to shrug off its reputation for being “boring”, unoffended and unaffected at every turn. One typically expects cities built on oil money to be a glitzy playground of blinding metropolises (or at least, eventually find its way to become one), but eleven years on, Brunei remains a world away from its peers – and more fascinatingly so, shows no sign of wanting more.

It’s like tapping a thirty-year-old rubber tree for latex: any hopes of more, will most certainly prove futile. It makes you wonder how anybody on the internet could ever conjure a list of anything more than ten (twenty-five???) ‘Things to Do In Brunei’ when we are in Brunei- unless, of course, that list is made up of your standard slew of frivolities such as eat this, or drink that, or ponder over life at… … Even the most riveting, storied facet of this country- its royalty- is restricted to a strategic binocular’s view of the Istana Nurul Iman via a boat ride down a mangrove swamp- although, a better bet would be to simply settle for a visit to the Royal Regalia Museum, where you can slow-blink through an ostentatious catalogue of royal and state gifts. At some point, you might even start entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, Brunei is intentionally underselling itself because, I don’t know, maybe it just doesn’t want the tourism after all?

I can neither confirm nor deny the conspiracy. But, what if I told you, regardless of the theory, Brunei can actually be quite the place of visual spectacle – just, perhaps, not in the way that we imagined?

(Editor’s Note: Most of the photos you see in this post are not my own, and have been credited to their respective owners. This is because, on top of failing to immortalize better moments when I was journeying through Brunei eleven years ago, it was, eleven years ago; and I decided very early on that quality visuals were integral for my words here to reach their effect. While not my own, every image you see here has been carefully considered & picked to resonate with the spirit of my article; I hope they ignite a wanderlust in you for the true Brunei every real traveller needs to know.)

HOW I FOUND MYSELF IN BRUNEI

Picking Brunei off the map is like ordering the next most basic thing on the menu in an attempt to be adventurous.

The year was 2013, I was twenty six, and after two years of floating around Malaysia in an aimless bid to tick off all its states (a stagnated idea that I later picked up again and dusted off as a Side Passion Project for this blog), I finally decided to make something of my aspiration to travel solo for real this time and venture out to an actual proper country. I resolved that this place couldn’t be Malaysia, and it couldn’t be like Singapore. It had to be new and it had be foreign in order for it to be real; and after much picking and perusing and passing and probing, Real, as it turns out, led me straight into the arms of… Brunei.

Perhaps not the most obvious starting point on the map for most; but it was for me because, even as Brunei ticked off everything I needed for it to be real (i.e. it was geopolitically different just how I wanted); it was also, in essence, a cultural extension of Malaysia in the subtlest of ways- like an off-grid border town that never quite wanted to keep up – and that felt to me like alot of Real to be found. It was familiar yet foreign, same but different; and in that I had the perfect lazy opportunity to dip my toes into the novelty of rickety floating villages and rural livelihoods, all while safely nestled in the comforts of being in a place that felt… ambiguously similar.

In my bid to be ‘adventurous’ while surreptitiously craving for familiarity at the same time; I suppose, that, was how I found myself in Brunei.

But how- or more importantly, why– does anyone else find themselves in Brunei?

IS BRUNEI RIGHT FOR YOU?

WHAT I DID WRONG, WHAT I WISH I DID DIFFERENTLY

Second to oil, Brunei is perhaps also best known for being more than 70% jungle – which makes me wonder: every time someone wonders why anyone would ever come to Brunei, does Brunei wonder back why anyone would visit her, if they weren’t planning to peruse her nature at all?

Dominated by a green sweep of rainforests and biodiversity, countless recreational parks and reserves have since emerged from Brunei’s expansive foliage, providing ample opportunity for us to get all in on a terrain so untamed and unspoiled it feels like we must be at least a hundred miles away from civilisation. Delusively enough, some of these ecosystems exist mere minutes from the capital.

Bukit Shahbandar Recreational Park, one of the most accessible rainforests in Brunei, can be found nestled just 20km away from Bandar Seri Begawan. The Teraja Forest Reserve, albeit somewhat limited by public transport, is still easily visited via tour and rewards all trekkers at the end of their journey with a lush scenic waterfall. And of course, there is the Ulu Temburong National Park, a 50,000-hectare rainforest reserve so secluded and removed from the masses it can only be reached by a boat-and-a-bus ride – but which, even then, is only under two hours away from the city.

And yet, somehow, when you are in Brunei, it can feel like anything that is not immediately within the confines of Bandar is intentionally placed out of humanity’s reach; and so we come, and we sidestep 70% of the country, and we leave.

And then we go around and tell everyone we know that Brunei was boring.

I was one of them. I came, and I left out all 70% of her, and then I decided that she was dull because all of her best bits felt seemingly inaccessible – even as they were right there in front of me. I was brusque, my experience fraught; and my entire vision when I picked my reason to pick Brunei, was wrong. This is not a country you choose to visit just so you can strike it off some list or scratch a fraction off some map. This is a place you need to be fully commited to knowing, if you want to find it anything else but boring.

And I wasn’t. And so I made the same mistake tourists-by-the-busloads do when they, like me, find themselves in a country like Brunei: We stick to all the mosques and all the malls and all the museums that’s featured on somebody else’s list. Then, we take a token boat ride out to a token floating village and spend a token hour walking its token rickety walkways; and at the end of three days, we pack up in our hotel rooms, disillusioned; and we wonder why anyone would even want to come to this part of the world at all. Because we just spent seventy two hours here and based off everything that we just did, this country is just so
damned

Boring?

TOP 5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

SO, IS BRUNEI REALLY… *BORING*?

Brunei knows, better than anyone else, that we have more to lose than she does, every time we choose to look at her capital and judge her entirety by it. At just 100.4km², Bandar occupies but just 1.7% of Brunei’s overall landmass – and suffice to say, it is incredibly short-sighted to think that seeing 1.7% of something, give us a good picture of anything.

On all sides, the best of Brunei is just bursting at the seams to unfold at your feet- but, it demands something of you first: you have to agree to stray, away and beyond, the predictable, reserved facet of its seemingly lifeless capital. Brunei beams boldest at its most rugged, and this means that, from spotting saltwater crocodiles basking in the sun post-daybreak, to spectating in a late-afternoon hornbill feeding frenzy atop trees, to witnessing a flying fox colony at dusk – or even catching a wild orchid burst into bloom (they literally do!!), you first need to take your feet off the beaten track and commit to going beyond the surface of Bandar Seri Begawan.

Brunei is the kind of travel that culminates in dirt under fingernails and mud on boots; not so much in luggages filled with souvenirs and chocolates for everyone back home. If you find yourself hankering after the latter (which isn’t a problem per se), just know that Brunei will not be a fruitful kind of travel for you; and that, after hitting up all the mosques and museums and malls and markets, you will ultimately find it, at the end of the day, Boring.

But, for everyone else who come to venture beyond, to seek lesser explored landscapes and lightly treaded paths, then expect Brunei to be one of the most unexpected oases you will ever discover in your lifetime. Trek elusive wildlife, stumble upon hidden waterfalls, stay with indigenous families in traditional longhouses nestled deep within the rainforest. This is Southeast Asia’s very own baby Amazon; and here, each step we take away from the capital leads us deeper into a world seemingly untouched by humanity, where canopies of towering trees and a labyrinth of rivers and tributaries converge to form a fragile ecosystem unparalleled by any across the region.

And when all is said and done, you will scratch your head wondering how anyone could possibly have taken in any of this and found it boring at all.

But of course they hadn’t.

They just never left the capital at all.

---

Enjoy Brunei. I know I should have.