Brunei Stopover

Brunei was the first stop in our holiday, so we were really ready to relax. The flight in was about 8 hours from NZ, transiting in Brisbane. We must have got one of the older planes because our movie screens crashed every 1/2 hour or so which made for a frustrating trip.

On arriving at the Empire country club we were blown away by the sheer magnitude of the reception area, which included an entrance way about 5 stories high with elaborate gold painted pillars - you could fit a rugby field in there! The staff were all super polite and treated us really well - even when we couldn't work out how to turn off the air conditioning - all the electronics in the room were controlled from a panel by the bed.

The room itself was impressive, in the lagoon area which was about 5 minutes from the reception - and they provided buggys in case the walk was too much, which we declined to use but seemed to be put to service by many of the other guests. Our bathroom was large and all in marble and all the other mod cons you would expect, and we had a nice view of the South China sea from the balcony. The lagoon at the bottom teams with ravenous little fish that were great fun feeding, and immediately below our room was one of the many pools in the hotel.

The main pool area was surrounded by a man made lagoon with volley ball net, and kayaks for hire. The was also a swim up pool bar which seemed a bit redundant as they do not serve alcohol anywhere in the hotel so we decided to use this time as a bit of a detox before heading into our holiday proper, and we had some ice cream and fruit shakes from the bar instead. Apparently they have some sort of exercise class on most mornings at the country club, they had Yoga on our first morning but we got up too late to catch it.

On the first night we arrived there was a dramatic tropical rainstorm, with lightening lighting up the entire wall of windows in reception and rain bucketing down outside. The next day turned out to be brilliant blue skies, which meant we spent the entire day poolside and got our first sunburn of the summer.

Both mornings we took full advantage of the fantastic hotel buffet by taking in the newspaper and books and eating for about 2 hours - it was the most interesting buffet we have ever seen, with a huge variety of asian and european foods, as well as tropical fruits and salads. As the country is Muslim there is no bacon but they did a very nice beef substitute.  After the buffet we took our bloated bodies down to the pool to sleep the effects off!

On our second day we were due to fly out in the afternoon so we took a short tour of the mangroves and the water village, which was convenient as they dropped us off at the airport afterwards too. The boat took us out about 1/2 an hour down the river, and on the way we saw a baby crocodile by the river, as well as some monitor lizards sunning themselves. They also point out other city landmarks on the way in and from the water so it's a good way to get a concise city tour.

The boat drivers had the most amazing vision, as they could spot wild life in the trees from a great distance as we were speeding by, then pull up to a few meters away and we still couldn't spot them straight away. The main animals we were looking for were the probiscus monkeys, which are only found in Borneo. Fortunately for us we saw a large group of them surprisingly close to some houses with a large male and some babies and got to sit in the boat and watch them for a bit.

The second half of the tour was the water village. This you can do by yourself, just get a water taxi across and walk around, but it was nice going into one of the houses - it belonged to our water taxi driver, and was all decorated up for a wedding. Inside we had some Chinese tea and yummy little sweet Malaysian snacks. Gian used their bathroom and on coming out goes - "thats a very efficient toilet" to the guide - I didn't know what he meant at the time, but apparently the toilet is just a hole in the ground which opens straight into the water. Not very nice considering you can see people fishing not far from the houses, but I guess thats how they've always done things.