The chronicles of Thomas

I flew into Brunei on the morning of the 12th of January. The flight had already taken sixteen hours and I was lucky enough to have a seven hour stopover there. Its a shame I didn't take any pictures of the airport because words cant express how depressing a place it was. It was tiny and brown. You could see it all in about twenty minutes if you really took your time in the two shops that were open. They were in the process of fixing the air conditioning so it was a little warm too. Fortunately the tourist board arranges free hour long tours for people on stopovers. This seemed like a good way to kill some time so I signed up for one. We had to check out our hand luggage and I've now got a Brunei stamp in my passport. The tour party has about twelve in it and we all piled into a minibus and set off. We drove us round the sights of Brunei without stopping or slowing down by the interesting bits. This made it rather difficult to take photos and so I appoligise for the poor photography. The tour was narrated by an overly upbeat tour guide whose job it was to explain why Brunei was so great. She seemed very nice, and some of the buildings were impressive, but the place all looked a bit shabby. I was expecting something a little more grand from such an oil rich state. Apparently there are more than three cars to every man woman and child, education is free and government jobs come with wonderful benefits like free houses and cars. However, to my eye all the money seems to be spent on showcase public buildings, or buildings in which the sultan uses. The rest look very ordinary by comparison. Because everyone drives we didn't really see any human activity, which made the place seem really soulless, kind of like Milton Keynes. Having rushed through the tour of the more interesting things that Brunei had to offer we then had plenty of time to spend at a food market that was in the later stages of packing up for the day. As none of the tour group planned to visit Brunei nobody had any Brunei currency to buy anything. So we all just milled around for half an hour until we could go back to the minibus. I would have gone back sooner but I was worried that the tour guide would be upset that I wasn't enjoying Brunei as much as she was. Eventually I decided to have a wonder out of the food market to see if there was anything else of interest nearby. There wasn't, but a nice man stopped his car to offer me a lift. He presumed there was something wrong because I was walking, and nobody in their right mind would walk in Brunei. Brunei as a whole was a bit like its airport. An hour was more than enough time to spend there. I killed the rest of the the time talking to my tour group until the bus headed back to the airport where I endured another two and a half hours of dullness before I boarded my plane.