Brunei

I arrived at Bandar Seri Begawan airport on a Tuesday morning and the first thing I noticed was the silence. Not the silence of emptiness — the capital has half a million people — but the particular silence of a city that has never been overrun by tourism. No tuk-tuks competing for my attention, no postcard sellers, no hostels advertising happy hours. The immigration officer stamped my passport with a precision that felt almost ceremonial. Welcome to Brunei.

The Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque is the kind of landmark that actually earns the word iconic. I’d seen photographs, but photographs don’t prepare you for the scale of it — the marble dome rising above the Kampong Ayer water village, its reflection stretching across the artificial lagoon in the early light. The water village itself is something else entirely: 39,000 people living on stilts over the Brunei River, connected by wooden boardwalks and water taxis, with mosques and schools and clinics all suspended above the same brown water. It has existed for six centuries. I walked through it for two hours and nobody tried to sell me anything.

Then there is the rainforest. Ulu Temburong National Park, accessible only by longboat through a maze of mangrove channels, contains one of Borneo’s last truly pristine primary rainforests. I spent an afternoon on the canopy walkway — swaying, slightly terrifying, utterly silent except for hornbills and the distant percussion of unseen waterfalls below. Brunei’s oil wealth and small population have meant almost no logging, almost no agricultural conversion. What remains is some 70 percent of the country still covered by jungle. In 2024, that feels like a miracle.

The food is where expectations quietly rearrange themselves. Ambuyat — a stiff, gluey paste made from sago starch, eaten by twirling it onto a bamboo fork and dipping it into various sauces — is the national dish and bewilders most visitors on first contact. Give it time. The laksa in the morning markets near the waterfront is exceptional: richer and spicier than its Sarawakian cousin, served in bowls that cost less than a dollar and taste like they took years to perfect.

When to go: March through October offers the driest conditions for Ulu Temburong. The monsoon season runs roughly November to January, when the longboat trips into the national park can be disrupted. Ramadan brings shorter restaurant hours in the capital but also the extraordinary Ramadan night markets along the waterfront — worth timing a visit around.

What most guides get wrong: They present Brunei as a novelty — the smallest country in Southeast Asia, the one that bans alcohol, the one where everything closes early. That framing misses the point entirely. Brunei is what much of Borneo used to look like before the palm oil industry arrived. Come for the rainforest. The mosque is magnificent, the water village is genuine, but the jungle in Temburong is irreplaceable — and it still exists because this small, quiet, overlooked country decided to keep it that way.