We arrived here, beaten and tired, this morning after spending the night camped beside the road just on the Malaysian side of the border with Brunei. Yesterday was a 130-km marathon to get out of the pleasant, well-run but really expensive mini-state of Brunei.
Brunei is a strange little place, an accident of history. Like many other tiny states around the world, it is a monarchy that resisted assimilation into larger states around it, refusing to join the Malaysian Federation in 1962 since it rather sensibly decided that it didn't want to share its oil wealth with a lot of poor Malaysians.
Ministates around the world seem to survive in three major ways. One is to be a tiny island or group of islands so far from anywhere that you're more or less left alone, like Nauru or Kiribati or Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Another is to be a tax haven or duty-free zone, like Andorra, San Marino, Monaco and Liechtenstein in Europe, or the Cayman Islands and a few others in the Caribbean. And the third way is to become fantastically wealthy, either through oil (Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain) or trade (Singapore, Hong Kong).
Brunei belongs in the fantastically wealthy oil category. Shell, the sole producer of oil in the sultanate (Elf Aquitaine is here too, but produces only natural gas), seems to own Brunei. All the gas stations in the country are Shell, and even the official "Welcome to Brunei" signs at the Sarawak border crossing sport conspicuous Shell logos. Between the onshore oil fields at Seria, in the west of the country, and the offshore Champion oil and gas field, Brunei is set for many more years of petroprosperity. The Sultan of Brunei, although recently supplanted by Bill Gates and Larry Ellison as the world's richest man, is still fantastically wealthy. Splitting oil profits 50/50 with Shell, he earned over $2 billion dollars last year. Even after his brother squandered $10 billion dollars or so as head of the Brunei investment fund (move over, Nick Leeson!), he still has a cool $25 billion or so to play with.
With only 380,000 citizens, that wealth goes a long way. Rather like many Persian Gulf oil sheikhdoms, it goes towards importing a lot of people from poorer countries (India, Pakistan and the Philippines) to do the hard work and to defend the place (several thousand Nepalese Gurkhas form the backbone of the Brunei Armed Forces).
The place looks wealthier than neighbouring Malaysia, itself the richest large country in Southeast Asia. There's a well-maintained expressway running the length of the country's coast along which shiny new BMWs, Pajeros, Land Cruisers and Land Rover Discoveries race at Formula One speeds. No-one walks or rides a bicycle, and the buses run almost empty; the car is the only real means of transport for any self-respecting Bruneian. The suburbs of the capital, Bandar Seri Bagawan (BSB) are full of large new houses set in leafy gardens. Prices in restaurants and shops are comparable to Canada or Europe. Everyone seems to carry a mobile phone.
The public works lavished by the sultan on his people's spiritual welfare are opulent. The current sheikh has built a huge mosque at great expense to beautify the capital, outshining the vast mosque bequeathed by his father. The smaller mosques dotting the country all look freshly renovated and well-maintained, and Friday prayers are better attended than in many countries in the Arab world, resulting in traffic jams as people triple-park their cars outside the mosques. In the Brunei Museum, the sultan's priceless collection of masterpieces of Islamic art are on display, guarded by crack Gurkha troops. For those less piously inclined, there is what is supposed to be the world's largest amusement park outside BSB in which the sultan's subjects can ride for free every day of the year.
Another benefit of oil wealth is that, unlike in neighbouring Malaysia, there is little economic pressure to cut down the entire rainforest and plant oil palms. More than 70 percent of Brunei is still covered in primary forest, and wildlife protection is taken more seriously than in Malaysia. Marine turtle eggs are actively protected, and hunting is completely banned. Brunei is supposed to have wonderful opportunities for jungle trekking and wildlife watching, but, being Brunei, they are priced far beyond the budget of the average backpacker. We had to content ourselves with short wanders along the deserted golden sand beaches of the northern coast and through the coastal forests.
Behind the prosperous facade, there are a few slightly less fortunate folks. Some of the cars parked outside suburban houses are cheap Indian-made Tatas. (All together now: "Awww, isn't that terrible?") A few older houses, roughly nailed together and sporting rusty tin roofs, can be glimpsed from the road. According to the owner of our campsite, a lot of the cars and houses are bought on credit, and ordinary working Bruneians aren't all millionaires. Still, it's probably a much better country to be in the lower half of the income scale than almost anywhere else in Asia.
The one thing that seems to be lacking in Brunei is any sense of joie de vivre. On weekends Bruneians and expats alike flock east and west to Labuan and Miri in Malaysia, where they drink, dance, shop and keep hostess bars in business. Brunei is a dry country (in terms of alcohol, certainly not in terms of rain), and the streets of BSB are deserted by 9 pm. There are a few movie theatres, but not much else in the way of culture. It's perhaps not a horrible price to pay for prosperity, but it might get a bit claustrophobic after living there for a few months.
At any rate, it's the sort of place that compulsive visa stamp collectors like Joanne and I go. Brunei was the 57th foreign country that I've visited, and Joanne's 33rd. We both still have well over 100 countries to go, so it's unlikely that we would spend a second trip on Brunei (unless it was to work for a fantastically high salary!). Another day, another micro-state. It was rather a relief on the pocketbook to get back to Malaysia!