BORNEO!! First stop…Brunei!

Let me tell you a little about Brunei.

Borneo is an island made up of part of Indonesia, part of Malaysia, and a small Sovereign State, called Brunei. Most people haven’t heard of Brunei unless they’ve passed through Bandar Seri Begawan Airport in transit, and even then seem to know precious little about it. I personally didn’t have a clue, and all I’d really heard before arriving was that it had recently adopted Sharia Law (and this had usually been accompanied with a concerned look and a warning to be careful-more about this later).

I guess we can all be forgiven as Brunei is a country of only 416,000 people, and is actually tiny at a mere 5,765km² in area. To put this in perspective, that’s a population about the size of Bristol and Bro and I just drove almost the length and width of the country in a few hours (more about this later too!).

When we got here we were told by a few people we met also staying at the hotel that “there’s not much to do here: We’ve done most of it in a day”. They were totally wrong though. Yes, from a tourist perspective there’s not a huge amount to do in terms of ‘sight-seeing’, but aside from the ancient virgin rainforest on its doorstep, there is so much culturally to absorb yourself in and just exploring the back-streets and stepping away from the tourist trail is worthwhile. There’s so much I want to share with you about this country, I don’t know where to start! So my next few blogs are going to be a bit about what we’ve done and a bit about what we’ve learnt.