Day 17 (22/01/2011) Brunei - BSB

We had a few tours booked for today through the hotel and got picked up around 13pm. This way we were able to make up the missing sleep from the day before.

First we went to the water village, which is one of the original landmarks of BSB. To protect themselves from animals in the forest they build a whole city on water before the country discovered oil.

We continued with the boat on the BSB river to a point where Proboscis monkeys live. These animals are very quick and it was very difficult to get some decent pictures. Our tour guide was fabulous and explained many thinks around us. Overall very interesting, but nothing adventures happened so far.

After approx. two hours we changed transport and a new tour guide brought us to a few mosques in BSB, unfortunately it was praying time, so we couldn’t enter them. He showed us as well the palace of the Sultan. Most of the royal family lives there and has 1,200 rooms available. We also visited the Brunei Museum and a little bridal shop. We actually could try on a traditional bride costume against a small fee…I let it be that time...

Soon we finished and got back to our hotel, where we started planning our next tour to Kota Kinabalu. We had three options.

1.       Bus, which takes 8 hours and starts at 8am

2.       Bus, boat, boat, bus and starts at 6am and we might arrived around 4pm

3.       Plane, takes 25 minutes and starts at 7:40

Considering all options and prices we checked online for last minute plane tickets with a few airlines. Luckily we found two comparable cheap ones, but unfortunately we couldn’t book them online. So I did the only thing I could think of, logging into the skype account of my dearest family member (THANK YOU :)) and started calling the airlines. Only one airline was able to sell the tickets via phone, so we will be flying with Royal Brunei Airline tomorrow.

After this rather difficult task we went to the food stalls at the opposite of our hotel and had a actually very nice dinner.

Getting back, we tried to catch some early sleep, as we had to get up around 4:30am to get a cab to the airport.

All in all I would say Brunei is a beautiful country and defiantly worth a visit, but not for many days as it is just too quite. There are a few things that we probably would have done with a little more time yesterday.

So, that’s it for now again:) Read you soon.