Tutong
"The lake is so black and still it looks like a gap in the world rather than a body of water."
I came to Tutong on a Tuesday with no particular plan, which turned out to be the right approach. The town itself is modest — a riverside settlement with a small commercial centre, a few coffee shops, a market that runs in the early mornings — and serves primarily as the gateway to Tasek Merimbun, the largest natural lake in Brunei and one of the strangest bodies of water I have encountered anywhere in Southeast Asia. Getting there requires a short drive through agricultural land: rice fields in various stages of their cycle, vegetable plots, kampung houses set back from the road under fruit trees that were dripping with something — rambutan, I think, though I couldn’t stop to look.
Tasek Merimbun is a blackwater lake, which means the water is the colour of strong tea — tannins from the surrounding peat forest staining it dark through geological time. Standing at the edge, I watched my own reflection appear in the surface with unusual clarity, the way mirrors work: the forest behind me, the sky above it, all inverted in the still black water. A monitor lizard the length of my arm moved silently along the far bank and slid into the water without disturbing its surface. The lake is designated a ASEAN Heritage Park and I had it completely to myself.
Back in town, the riverside evening market offered something I hadn’t encountered in the capital: pandan leaf preparations everywhere. Pandan-flavoured rice, pandan leaf cakes, bottles of pandan extract lined up on a condiment stall. This is a district that grows pandan commercially, and the smell of it — green, sweet, slightly floral — was in everything, including, improbably, the coffee. The laksa at one stall came garnished with a knot of fresh pandan leaf that I wasn’t sure whether to eat or treat as decoration. I left it in the bowl and drank the broth directly.
The Tutong River itself is worth an hour if you can find a boatman willing to take you upstream. The mangrove corridor narrows quickly outside town and the birdlife becomes immediate: kingfishers, herons standing in the shallows with absolute patience, and twice the unmistakable sound of a hornbill somewhere in the canopy. The river smells of mud and vegetation and something else I couldn’t name — the particular composite smell of an ecosystem doing all its work at once.
When to go: April through September is the best time to visit Tasek Merimbun, when water levels are lower and the boardwalk around the lake is fully accessible. The morning market in Tutong town runs daily from around 5am and is worth an early start.