Of the more than 20 countries I've visited, Brunei would certainly be the
last I'd go to again. One reason is the oppressive sense of
intolerance brought about by the folks who inhabit this building, the Religious
Affairs Ministry in the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan.
They keep a pretty close rein on everyone in the country, whether they
share their religious views or not.
Surprisingly, only two-thirds of the population are Muslim, with 13% Buddhist
and 10% Christian and another 10% of indigenous beliefs. Perhaps
the Christian population is swollen by the number of oil workers from the
UK and places like the Phillipines, and the local Chinese probably accounts
for the Buddhists. Around 15% of the permanent population is
Chinese, and even if their families have lived in the country for hundreds
of years they're still not citizens; if they want to travel then they're
issued with International Certificates of Identity. It's official
government policy that the majority Malay Bruneians hold all of the top
posts in the country, and no matter how skilled a Chinese Bruneian is,
they will never be promoted above a certain level while working any place
where the government has influence.
Democracy is not a priority in Brunei - the sultan is an absolute monarch,
so there are no elections and no functional political parties.
The sultan decides who serves on his advisory panels, which include the
council of cabinet members, the religious council and the privy council.
The press is very restricted and never criticizes the royal family, which
is no surprise since journalists can be imprisoned for up to three years
for reporting "false news". Criticism of any kind isn't tolerated
- while I was there a British guy I worked with and his wife were thrown
out of the country with 24 hours notice after it was discovered that they'd
played a game of "hangman" with "Bloody Bruneians" as the phrase to be
guessed!
Of course it's an ill wind that blows no good, and it's certainly true
that visitors to Brunei don't have to worry about theft or violent crime. |
Tourists aren't high on the list of desirable visitors for most government
officials, perhaps because of the criticism they would probably voice and
which might spill over into the local population. Although
noises are occasionally made about wanting to increase tourism, in fact
little promotion is done and recently several of the main attractions have
been eliminated, rather than added to. For instance, the previous
sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin had an extensive collection of Winston Churchill
memorabilia and also built a large aquarium to display tropical fish from
the area. However, both of these displays were done away with
and replaced with the much less interesting Constitutional History Museum,
which locals call The Big Mac because of its shape and the ketchup-colored
trim under the bun! As you can see from the car park, empty
except for the rental car I was using, it's hardly the sort of place that
packs the crowds in! The only things I remember from the museum
were a very baroque looking coach used for the coronation of the sultan,
and a photograph of the current sultan as a 13 year old boy just before
his circumcision. He was smiling, so perhaps the ceremony hadn't
been explained to him very well!
Another reason why people don't come is that Brunei is a very small place,
with only 370,000 inhabitants as of 2005, and less land area than the small
American state of Delaware. There's just not a lot to see here,
so it's hardly surprising that it's not on the top of anyone's list of
"places to go before I die". Nevertheless, there are a few
things worth seeing, and for certain people like naturalists it might be
something of a paradise. Although the Churchill museum and
the aquarium are gone, there is a National Museum on the banks of the Brunei
River at Kota Batu, with a Malay Technology Museum nearby; however, I didn't
have time to visit either of them. |
The same family has ruled Brunei for six centuries and once wielded influence
over most of Borneo and parts of the Phillipines. However the
arrival of the European colonial powers led to a major decline in their
power, with the "White Rajah" James Brooke and those who succeeded him
swallowing more and more territory, including a chunk in the middle of
Brunei which led to the current ridiculous situation where the country
consists of two non-contiguous blocks of land! It's likely
that Brunei would have been swallowed up entirely except for the discovery
in 1929 of large oil deposits in the remaining territory.
The oil income allowed the sultans of Brunei to consolidate what little
power they still had, and today there's little doubt who is in control.
Given the place's history it's surprising that the current sultan was reluctant
to become independent from Great Britain, a step finally taken in 1984.
While I was there the sultan celebrated his 48th birthday, which led to
the annual ritual of constructing ceremonial arches and displays to celebrate
the event. There's a lot of emphasis on strengthening the sultan's
legitimacy, a little leaflet handed out to incoming foreign visitors tells
them not to criticize him because local people love him so much.
In 1962 a coup was masterminded by local rebels opposed to the unification
of Brunei together with the neighbouring territories of Sabah and Sarawak
into a Malaysian Federation. Indonesia attempted to invade
in order to support armed opponents of the sultan's government who were
attacking government facilities. In the end, British and commonwealth
troops defeated the Indonesians and the rebels; however sultan Omar Ali
Saiffudin decided to stay out of the federation, preferring to keep the
oil wealth under his own control. |
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And here's the current sultan, who usually goes by the name Hassanal Bolkiah,
although his full name is actually Yang Maha Mulia Paduka Seri Beginda
Muda Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah. Here you see him
with his two wives; it's mandatory that every shop and office in the country
displays photos of this royal menage a trois. It seems
somewhat kinky to have one wife dressed in exactly the same military-style
uniform that the sultan himself is wearing, but I guess it's better than
having her in a French maid's costume! The sultan apparently tired
of this wife, who was formerly an airline hostess and divorced her, but
in 2005 he married a Malaysian TV newsreader, choosing to have the wedding
in Malaysia rather than Brunei.
The royal family ran into quite a bit of trouble around the turn of the
new millenium, with an American beauty queen accusing the sultan of imprisoning
her as a sex slave in his palace, and then the sultan's brother Jefri had
to skip the country after losing a huge chunk of state funds.
It didn't help that one of Jefri's acquisitions was a super-yacht called
"Tits" which had two tenders called "Nipple I" and "Nipple II". |
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| There's
some very attractive architecture in Brunei, chief of which is the Omar
Ali Saiffudin mosque in the heart of Bandar Seri Begawan, which is usually
abbreviated to just "bandar", the Malay word for "town". The
replica of a royal barge in the pond surrounding the mosque is used for
events such as school children reading from the Koran, with both boys and
girls participating. |
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| Like several of
Brunei's main buildings, the mosque is lit up at night. It
was designed by an Italian architect and built in 1958 using Italian marble
and granite from Shanghai. The golden dome is 52 meters tall
and is visible from most of the city. |
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| Right
next to the mosque is Kampung Air, which in a quirk of the Malay and English
languages translates as "water village". Thousands of houses,
together with schools, shops and mosques are built on stilts embedded in
the Brunei River, which keeps the people cool in the very hot and humid
climate. It might look like a slum, but people actually choose
to live here and there aren't too many slums whose inhabitants all own
cars, which they park on the opposite river bank. |
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It's not just the Omar Ali Saifuddin mosque which stands in luxurious contrast
to Kampung Air; on the opposite side of the river you can see Istana Nurul
Iman, which is the palace where the sultan lives.
The royal family has a well-deserved reputation for financial and other
excesses, but they're able to get away with it because there's enough oil
money to be extremely wasteful and yet have plenty left over to "trickle
down" to the remainder of the small population. Education up
to university level is free, housing is heavily subsidized, there are no
income taxes and the government pays for muslims who want to make the pilgrimage
to Mecca. |
| Here's
a closer view of Istana Nurul Iman, which is the largest residential palace
in the world with 1788 rooms, 257 bathrooms and a floor area of 200,000
square meters (2,200,000 square feet). It cost $US400 million
to build, but that was no great worry for the sultan. At the
time I visited Brunei he was estimated to be the richest man in the world,
with $US40 billion in his savings account. A few years later
he was overtaken by some computer geek called Bill Gates. |
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| The
current sultan built this mosque in Kiarong to celebrate his silver jubilee.
It's officially called "Jame 'Asr Hassanil Bolkiah", the Hassanil Bolkiah
mosque. It's even more spectacular than the Omar Ali Saifuddin mosque,
and well worth a visit |
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| It's
also lit up at nighttime. |
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| Here's a photo which
shows almost the whole oil industry from start to finish - a "nodding donkey"
outside the fence pumps oil from the ground, an oil refinery in the background
burns off excess hydrocarbons during the distillation process, a petrol
station retails the end product and happy consumers use the petrol to make
the world a better place. Royal Dutch Shell has exclusive rights
to operate the oil fields and they're by far the largest employer in the
country. Incidentally, you can see the use of Arabic characters
on the tall sign outside the petrol station; most of the road signs in
Brunei are both in Arabic and Roman script. |
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| Oil was the only
reason I came to Brunei, staying for a month down in Kuala Belait in 1994
in order to help install radio systems on the offshore oil rigs.
Shell operates these Sikorsky S61N helicopters to transport workers to
and from the rigs from the airfield at Anduki. |
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Here we are arriving at one of the many oil rigs.
The religious leaders exert much less influence out here than on shore.
Although each rig has a muslim prayer room, the videos labelled "romance"
in the lounges were much more along the lines of "smut". On
one of the service ships the captain was even soaking up some rays while
lying down in the middle of the heliport in speedos - I got told off while
on shore for wearing shorts in the intense tropical heat!
Oil
contributes over half of the GDP of the country, and overseas financial
investment from the oil wealth makes up almost all of the remainder.
Despite ongoing noises about diversifying into other areas, little real
effort has been made to create a sustainable economy. |
As well as the oil rigs, there are a large number of boats and ships dedicated
to providing services. Each ship does a different task, like
painting or engineering work such as x-raying the pipes in order to find
corrosion. The radio systems I was doing the software for were
used not just for oral communication, but also to send and receive faxes.
The guy on the right-hand side of this photo is Haji Affendi, by far the
nicest Bruneian I met - and also the most religious. The term
"Haji" is a title rather than a personal name, it refers to someone who
has made the "Hajj", or pilgrimage to Mecca. Most of the Bruneians
I worked with were unmotivated, happy to lazily drift along on government
handouts, but Haji Affendi took the job seriously and was also a very nice
guy. |
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| Brunei
is too far south to be badly affected by typhoons, but they sure get some
spectacular storms, with torrential rain and amazing lightning.
When a storm comes in the ships leave the rigs, but some time after I'd
returned to New Zealand we heard that one of the ships with our radio system
had gone down during a storm, smashed against the rig. Apparently
they'd tried to use our radio repeatedly to get help, but without success.
It's a little strange, since the normal emergency communication is done
on different equipment. |
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| Here's
an unusual event I stumbled upon - a Gurkha bagpipe marching band!
The Gurkhas are an ethnic grouping in Nepal, they've served for many years
in the British army, and they still serve in that capacity today in Brunei,
along with other British troops. The government pays for them,
which suits everyone very well. It was the Gurkhas who held
off the rebels during the 1962 coup attempt, waiting until British, Australian
and New Zealand reinforcements arrived at Anduki from Singapore. |
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I'd been looking around at various places for pitcher plants, which I'd
heard are quite common in Borneo.
As it happens, this satellite station was the only place I saw them, and
not just large ones like this, but a much smaller variety as well in which
the pitcher wasn't more than one or two centimeters long.
Pitcher plants digest insects which fall into the liquid inside the container
you see here. The plants do this to obtain nitrogen, which
is a very rare commodity in water drenched areas like tropical jungle.
The soil in such places is usually very poor, which might seem surprising,
since there's so much wildlife there. |
| Here's
a view of the town of Seria. It gives a pretty good sense of
what Brunei is like - a beach which nobody uses because of the religious
outlook, a narrow strip of inhabited land and then vast areas of jungle
reaching to the Malaysian border. Oil, which has done so much
to destroy large areas of the planet, has had the opposite effect here.
Nobody can be bothered doing hard physical labour like farming, so less
than one percent of the country is cultivated. |
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The abundant areas of untouched forest are one of the few reasons why I
can imagine returning to Brunei. This particular scene is on
the Belait River, near where we were staying in Kuala Belait, which I always
thought of as a "Belait on the landscape".
At the
time I visited I wasn't as deeply involved in wildlife photography as I
am now, but Brunei might be where that latent interest first received a
large boost. I took quite a few photographs of birds
like kingfishers, as well as dragonflies and other insects - none good
enough to put up here, though. I visited a couple of nature
preserves, including Tasik Merimbun, which has the largest lake in Brunei.
There are other facilities such as the Kuala Belalong Rainforest Field
Studies Centre, which mostly caters to scientific researchers.
In the eastern part of Brunei, tours go into the mangrove forests to see
proboscis monkeys, so named for the huge noses sported by the males.
There are even tours into the rainforest at night, which is a major pastime
for me nowadays when I'm travelling. |
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These
are the days of lasers in the jungle