I arrived quite late at night in Brunei, and thought that I was an obvious target for scammers when it came to the taxis. I got money out the bank, and asked someone who looked a decent enough guy, how much I should expect to pay in the taxis. I still think I paid a bit much, but I needed to get to the hotel, and I had no idea how far away it was.
When I arrived at the hotel, there was a nice charming guy on the reception who was very helpful. The room was pretty cool; it came with tea, coffee etc, and the phone book had all sorts of random information in about Brunei, as well as how to eat healthily and keep well etc! It was a bit weird having it in a phone book! There was first aid in there too!
I slept quite well, and got up early so that I’d have plenty of time to explore town. The breakfast was a bit plain and the coffee was foul, but it was food, so I ate it! I got advice about where to get the bus into town, and managed to catch it okay. I felt a bit underdressed as I was wearing one of my new dresses which was a bit showy! I felt good in it, but thought that maybe I was being a tad inappropriate in a Muslim community.
I arrived, with my little map, and was wandering around looking for something to do. I found a market, but there wasn’t much of interest there; it was mainly dried fish and fresh garlic etc. I then found some guys who were hovering around the place on small boats. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but I managed to get a ride around the floating villages and saw monkeys jumping around the surrounding areas just in the trees and on the ground.
There were lots of beautiful mosques which I could see from the river, and it was a really beautiful day with the sun shining very brightly. It was a very peaceful day and I really enjoyed travelling along in my private boat, waving at random locals who were waving at me!
I wandered around, looking for something to do. I found a lady who was able to guide me to the mall, where I did quite a bit of shopping! I found some new shoes, and a purse for mum, and various other supermarket items. The lady was really friendly and we chatted a bit about my insecurity about wearing not enough clothes and she’s said that they wear that sort of thing too, so not to worry about it. She said I did a good job of getting around on the buses as even a local herself, she didn’t know which buses ran where!
In the shoe shop I needed to pop out to the bank to get out some more cash, and when I popped back into the shop and announced ‘Whoops! Sorry I took so long, had to run out to the HSBC one!’ I realised that I was on the wrong floor, and therefore in the wrong shop! So I did a quick look around the shop, and then sheepishly went off to find the right floor, and the right shoe shop! Whoops! One of my many embarrassing moments!
I popped into a coffee shop for a quick drink, which turned out to be rather expensive. I had thought that I’d make up the difference by using the loo, as my bowels still being rather annoying. Even more annoying than my bowels was the lack of toilet roll so I had to wait until returning to the hotel!
I did however find a DVD shop which was selling many DVDs at only £1.20!! Bargain! And some of them were three or four movies per DVD; including all the Lion King movies, and some recent films like ‘24: Redemption’ and some other good films! I won’t ever be bored!
I managed to get to the airport okay, and had a meal before waiting ages to board the plane. As always I was a bit scared about the plane crashing, but I survived the flight okay. Even when we had to stop for refuelling in Dubai and a man was getting questioned for about 20 minutes about why he didn’t look like the man in the photograph in his passport, and he had a questionable absence from the UK for over 5 years where he was being trained up for something or other. Another man was getting in trouble and having a bit of an argument with staff about them trying to charge him extra for having too much baggage on the plane. I was so nervous about getting called up and charged for my extra baggage which had been transferred to London directly from Bangkok, where the kind man let me get away with an extra 8kg! Thankfully when I did get called up, it was only to change my ticket of where I would be sitting!
I arrived safely in London, where it took me a bit of time to get used to the change in traffic and the way of life. It felt strange to be back. I arrived at a ridiculously early time in the morning, and then had misplaced my code for collecting my train tickets, so had to wake Shonagh up and ask her to get them off my emails. It was a bit of a faff but eventually I got everything sorted out. Then after a train journey to Newcastle, I was home!
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