I had never even heard of Brunei when I began planning my first mega world trip in 2017. I wouldn’t even have been able to tell you what continent it was located in. I had no idea where it was on the map, the currency they use, religion, capital city, or what the people would be like or what they would look like. It was all a big mystery. Once I began doing my research in Asia, and once I began organizing everything, the trip was all set and this mysterious country was about to be explored, though I found myself to be one of the few foreigners in Brunei and quickly realized that it’s not really a popular tourist destination.

I left the first part of my 2017 Asian trip in July and at that time I was missing four Asian countries, Brunei, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I was determined to tick Brunei off my list and ended up back in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for the fourth time, a place that I always seem to pass through for a few days, and booked a flight to Bandar Seri Begawan, a flight that took just under two and a half hours, flying directly. Brunei is just a tiny piece of land completely suffocated by Malaysia in every direction with a has a reasonably low population of about 465,000.

My first impression of Brunei was positive. I had spent the earlier few days in the city center and also took a trip to the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque, the most famous place to visit in Brunei, a place that dominates all of the Brunei tourist brochures and one of the nicest mosques that I had visited in any part of the world. Besides that, there was not a lot to see in the city. The most popular spots, after the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque, were Jerudong Park and the Istana Nurul Iman. The population of Bandar Seri Begawan is only about 28,000, so taxis are fairly limited and the city is spacious. It’s a cheap place to visit with a lot of nice street food markets, mostly serving Chinese food and the weather is also nice and sunny.

It was great ticking Brunei off my list at long last, kept until the later part of my Asian countries because I had absolutely no idea how to get there, and more importantly clocking up more of Asia, some of the Asian trips even stretched all the way back to 2014, so it was nice to make more progress. Two trips to Indonesia followed in 2017, though Afghanistan and Pakistan would have to wait until things settled down and until I could I could get complete approval to visit, eventually happening in 2022 with Pakistan and 2024 with Afghanistan.