I really wanted to go to Brunei just to see what it was like being in the richest country in SE Asia in terms of HDI (apart from Singapore). The reason why its so rich is because its tiny and because they were lucky enough to find oil, so the Sultan of Brunei is now one of the richest men in the world because of this. There is literally nothing to do in Brunei apparently apart from a few things in the capital but even thats pretty dire. I spent one day there and that was more than enough. It was weird walking around and seeing a country with money that it doesn't really know what to do with - so the city looks exactly like any other asia city but clean and new and sparkly and there's not a single old run down looking building anywhere, and the roads are so wide with little traffic and people driving big new fancy cars.

I walked to the big famous mosque which was actually really beautiful, and walked inside to find a group of men sitting around doing nothing. So one of them gave me a black floor length gown to wear to cover myself up and gave me a tour. Then he said that his friend had a boat and could take me on a tour of the floating village on the river for relatively cheap so I said ok. His friend's boat was painted blue with the chelsea flag on and we saw other boats dedicated to football like a man u one. I've seen a few floating villages in Asia before but the one in Brunei, Kampung Ayer, was SO different - about 50,000 people live on the water and all the houses look like proper houses, big painted fronts some with flowers in the window, they all have electricity, tv and clean running water, there are so many schools built on the water (picture) as well as police stations, fire stations, mosques (picture below), petrol stations (because everyone gets around by boat). And the area is huge with new houses built just in the 90s. We also saw the sultan's palace which is bigger than Buckingham palace and the Vatican, proboscis monkeys in their natural habitat (the ones with the big noses) and had lunch on a floating restaurant. I managed to get rid of my guide, who kept trying to make me have dinner with him, and went shopping and got an early night at the hostel.