Bandar Seri Begawan. I’ve never been to a country where you can see everything there is to see in about 3 hours and 10 minutes.
Here are the 2 famous, exquisitely beautiful and ornately decorated mosques.
We took a trip to the Sultan’s Palace, but the gate is as far as you can go (although harassing the guards is fun).
Then our motley crew went to Brunei’s one tiny drip of nightlife (it’s a dry country), the 24 hour coffee-shop on the main street.
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10% of the entire Bruneian population (about 40,000 people) live in Kampong Ayer, a water village in Bandar Seri Begawan that sprawls along both sides of the Brunei river. A settlement for over 1300 years, Kampong Ayer is comprised of tens of villages, each with floating schools, mosques, stores and houses, and linked by miles of wooden footbridges.
You would think that with so much water around, they wouldn’t need a fire station.
Late lunch on a lazy afternoon in Kuching: Sarawak laksa and kopi ‘c’ peng.
It hit all the right notes.
Waves rushing towards Tanah Lot temple complex, Bali.
This temple was worth the maddening crowds, 40km bike ride, and the injuries resulting from my falling from said bike and biting the dust, hard, on the way there.
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Nusa Lembongan, Bali. In the evening, the tide goes so far out you can hardly see the water, leaving these boats in the dust.
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Funny story: I took an opelet from the ferry port in Parapat up the the bank: the only other passengers were an old Indonesian lady and her full plastic bag of very lively fish.
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Why yes, thank you: I DID enjoy my frogs-legs served in a metal pot with a lot of chilli!
Probably won’t be eating it again, though. And it doesn’t taste like chicken, no matter what anyone else tells you.
