Tasek Lama

I was in the centre of BSB, near the government buildings and the Royal Regalia Museum, when someone told me about Tasek Lama. Twenty minutes on foot, she said. I didn’t believe it — not primary jungle, not within walking distance of the capital. But I followed the road uphill past the residential neighbourhood of Bukit Sari and the trees thickened and then the city sounds dropped away and I was at the entrance to a forested park that felt nothing like an urban nature reserve. The canopy was continuous overhead. A monitor lizard crossed the path without concern. The temperature dropped by several degrees in the space of fifty metres.

Tasek Lama translates roughly to “Old Lake”, and the reservoir at its heart is modest in size but remarkable in context — still water reflecting the primary forest that crowds its edges, the sound of water trickling from somewhere unseen above it. A series of walking trails extends from the reservoir uphill into the forest, some marked with concrete steps cut into the earth, others narrowing to single-file paths where the vegetation presses in from both sides. I chose the trail that climbs to a small waterfall and followed it for forty minutes until the sound of running water got louder and then there it was: a modest cascade over dark mossy rock into a pool clear enough to read the stones beneath it.

In the mornings, the park fills with joggers and walkers from the surrounding residential neighbourhoods — civil servants, retirees, mothers with children, groups of young men who have driven here before work. The coexistence of this urban-recreational use and the actual wildness of the forest is one of the stranger things about Tasek Lama. People do their workout beneath a canopy that harbours hornbills. Someone was doing tai chi by the reservoir while a family of long-tailed macaques watched from the trees above, the youngest one dangling upside down by one arm with the theatrical ease that only monkeys can manage.

What I found most remarkable, though, was simply the quiet. The city was down there — the mosques, the government buildings, the waterfront — and up here was just the dripping of water and the ventriloquism of unseen birds. Brunei’s commitment to its forest cover is a political decision, and Tasek Lama is where that decision becomes personal: anyone in BSB can walk here in twenty minutes and find the forest still present, still dense, still doing its work completely indifferent to the city it borders.

When to go: Tasek Lama is open daily and most pleasant in the early morning, when the forest is coolest and the light comes in low through the canopy. Weekday mornings are quieter than weekends. Wear shoes with grip — the trails get slippery when wet, and wet is the default in Brunei.