Road-Tripping

On Tuesday we hired a car as we’d been recommended it by a local (you may have guessed by this point that we chat to practically everyone we meet). So after an unsuccessful attempt to hire one through Avis, our super-friendly hotel manager said that he’d sort it (Nb. We’re staying in a hotel as the only hostel in BSB was full of school-children…this is not a place geared up for back-packers!). So it appears ‘sorting it’ meant him calling up his mate who quickly gave his car a spring clean and dropped it off with for us within the hour. It still had change in the pocket and pens in the glove compartment. So rather dubiously we signed our lives away and set off on our exciting road trip! Apart from the main city area of Bandar Seri Begawan (BSB to locals), the inhabited part of the country is mainly a series of small towns (about 5 in total), dotted along one long highway that runs along the coast (the rest of the country is rainforest). So we were assured we wouldn’t get lost (of course we still managed to, to the extent that we accidentally stretched our 9pm curfew to 10.15pm by driving in circles around BSB, but they were luckily very lenient about it). So we spent the day exploring beaches, little towns, and bigger towns, we found a beautiful lake which someone had recommended to us, a short rainforest walk, and a visit to see some traditional Iban (indigenous) Long-houses. We also stopped by the Empire Hotel which is a super swank hotel resort built in the Bruneian Boom-time for a whopping US$1.1 billion. It costs up to $1400 per night to stay in one of their suites, and is grotesquely over-the top and garish, but also quite impressive (in a mind-blowing, how-and-why-the-hell-did-they-build-such-a-monstrosity) sort of way. We popped in for a cheeky $5 cup of tea just for an experience, feeling like imposters as the doormen let us in to the grand entrance way in our sweaty backpacker clobber.

I wouldn’t say our day was spectacular in any sense of the word. The towns are fairly featureless, we mainly saw highway, and nothing blew us away, but it was a fun experience, and when you’ve been tied to public transport for a while, hiring a car is satisfyingly liberating. We also reminded ourselves that the reason we didn’t get to see anything spectacular is that it’s all locked away in that beautifully inaccessible rainforest, exactly where it should be, so that thought is somewhat heart-warming.