Yesterday, a few friends (Aylwin, Alvin, Tania and Iqbal) and I went on a day trip to Brunei… Personally, I’ve never been to Brunei before although I’ve been in Miri for close to 4 years now and it’s just about 2 hours drive to Bandar Seri Begawan which is the capital of Brunei. So this will be my first trip there… just to look see look see…

Anyway, I got up early on Saturday morning, did a bit of laundry, got changed, got my passport ready and waited from my friends to come and fetch me… We were planning to drive there with Alywin’s car and Iqbal as our official tour guide (since he’s a Bruneian).

At around 9:20am, we started our journey and upon reaching the Immigration Dept at the border, I got into a little fix… I brought my International Passport but I forgot to bring the local one (”dokumen perjalanan terhad”) that I used to enter into Miri from KL… So, the officer at the department was asking me where is my local one and when was the date that I enter into Miri.

In my heart… I was thinking “I’m doomed ~~” liao… hahaha…

That means we gotta drive all the way back to my house and take the local passport and that means I gotta pay the extra RM20 toll But thank GOD! after further talks with the officer; in the end he just ask for the actual date that I enter to Miri and I quickly called my housemate who was still sleeping (i think) and asked him to look for the details. Thanks Sze Fu!

So, having the ordeal with my passport settled, we continued on our journey. After about 45 minutes of drive, we reach a place call Tutong and we visited Iqbal’s grandparent’s restaurant where they serve the infamous “Pulut Panggang”. I must say that it was very very tasty… pity I forgot to take some snapshots of it. If you’re driving to Brunei, I’ll recommend you to stop by and enjoy the “pulut panggang”. Anyway, after a nice breakfast we spent another hour or so driving before we reach Bandar.

I’ll save you the minor minor details about what we did throughout the day but to sum it all up… we had really really nice and satisfying lunch at Escapade Sushi Restaurant in Gadong, we went to the Mall and visited a few more IT shops cause Aylwin wanted to look for a laptop backpack and we passed by the Empire Hotel which unfortunately we didn’t make a stop cause I was too tired and I needed another reason to make a second trip anyway… hehehe…

One thing I noticed is that generally most Bruneians are very courteous on the road… they actually slow down when they see pedestrians waiting to cross the road and pedestrians actually acknowledge and thank the driver for slowing down. Not that we don’t have that here in Malaysia but I guess it’s pretty rare.

So after an entire day of shopping and visiting to various places in Brunei… we headed back to Miri in the evening feeling really satisfied and a trunk load of stuffs we bought from Brunei… I bought a tupperware load of Mentos Minis for myself… Couldn’t resist it as it’s cheaper compared to Miri. TTFN.

Cheers~!

Me at Escapade Sushi with Aylwin and Iqbal

The rest of the gang at Escapade Sushi (Aylwin, Iqbal, Tania, Alvin and Teck Wei)… check out the food we ordered on the table.

The Sushi and Sashimi Party Set… really good stuffs!