Brunei: The Beaches

Because we pretty much did everything there was to do on our first couple of days in Brunei, on our last day we rented a car with a driver (it cost us BND70 – about $55 – for 5 hours) and at 1pm, after checking out of the hotel, we went off for our beach hopping trip.

The drive there was pretty easy…

The roads were great…

And in less than 30 minutes, we were at Muara Park (and since I know a nice playground is a rare find here in Manila, I took a few pictures in case any Foreign Service folks are thinking of bidding for a post in Brunei).

And after crossing the park, we were at Muara Beach…

The soft white sand was a nice change from the Philippines (where we mostly deal with crushed coral), but the view of the beach reminded me a lot of the US east coast beaches (except with much finer sand, like we have in Rio). 

The one main difference?  The water wasn’t just lukewarm like Caribbean beaches (or super-cold like east coast beaches), it was hot like a hot tub.  As in, we would get up to hit the air and refresh ourselves, because even though it was a hot day, the air was cooler than the water. 

After an hour at Muara Beach, we hopped back in the car on our way to our next destination, Meragang Beach.  And we were hit with this…  Yep, construction work going on at the beach (looks like a house is going up) and there was dirt on the whole beach front.  Needless to say, we didn’t stay.

So we continued on to what quickly became our favorite beach in Brunei: Berakas Beach!

The water though still warm, it wasn’t nearly as hot as Muara Beach (my only guess for this is that is probably due to rivers near Muara Beach, which are likely making the water warmer?  What do I know?).

I could have stayed here all day…

But we had one last stop…  Jerudong Beach!  That was a disappointment though…  There was a wet market about a 100 feet from the beach, so the whole place stunk.  To make things worse, there was garbage all over the sand (plastic bags, bottles, rest of food, everything…  I didn’t even take my flip-flops off…)

I took strategic pictures showing the water, instead of the trash strewn around (though you can see a little bit of it on the picture above), then we took off.  We really didn’t want to get into the water, so back we went to Berakas to shower.

On the way back to Berakas, we stopped by at Tungku Beach, in hopes of finding a shower (there was nothing), but we did take a few good pictures!  This seems to be the place for ATV riding, there were groups riding them everywhere (lots of dirt roads here).

Going back to Berakas to use the showers was worth it though, we encountered monkeys on the way back in to the park!

After showering, we headed back to Gadong (the area where we were staying) and killed a few hours eating yummy food at the night market, catching a movie, then grabbed our stuff at the hotel to head off to the airport for our 2am flight.