Shamballa Cruising Yacht Club: Oil and Gas Country

We decided to go by ferry boat from Kota Kinabalu to Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei. The route goes along the coast of North Borneo into the South China Sea stopping in Labuan for a few hours then on to Brunei. The ferry was a fast, enclosed boat so we could only sit back and look out dirty windows at the passing scenery; no going onto an open deck with the wind and sea around us.

Our Ferry

The island of Labuan is a duty-free special zone in Malaysia and seems to exist solely for the oil and gas industry. The harbour was full of service boats and oil and gas platforms.

Labuan ferry terminal

Oil and Gas country

After a light lunch and a quick walk around the streets, we got on another ferry for the short trip to Brunei. This was a new country for me and I almost was not let in. When in Sumatra, my Australian passport had gotten wet and the photo on the main page became quite fuzzy. The immigration officials in Indonesia and Malaysia didn’t seem too bothered by this but Brunei officials would not accept this passport. After many phone calls and about an hour wait, the officials decided that they would accept my other passport. So I am travelling on my US passport for awhile.

Brunei was a great example of how a country so wealthy can be so poor. Brunei ranks the 4^th wealthiest country in the world by GDP; 90% of this wealth is from oil and gas. Yet this wealth is in the hands of a few, mainly the Sultan and his family. There are some magnificent buildings, flash houses with half a dozen cars outside (Brunei has one of the highest car ownership in the world) but there are also many poor houses and poor infrastructure outside the cities.

Lot of bling in public spaces

A very strange roundabout sculpture - Mad hatter's tea party, perhaps?

The main mosque in BSB

The other end of the scale - Kampong Air or Water Village

Business seems to depend on who you know. When we tried to purchase bus tickets, we were told to go down the street and look for a man called Danny, who is easy to spot as he wears lots of jewellery and colourful shirts. There was no office or business front for the purchase of intercity bus tickets. When we met Danny and Bob indiscreetly alluded to the Sultan’s wealth (as Bob was one of those who helped find the gas in 1973, he joked that he ought to ask the Sultan for a small donation towards our boating habit, as a fellow yachtie he would surely sympathise and donate to a good cause). Danny said the Sultan was an okay guy and showed us a picture of himself with the Sultan.

That aside, Danny was quite a character. He was wearing Australian paraphernalia so we got into a great conversation about Australia with him.

Danny

The country has sharia law; there is no alcohol and there is death penalty for such offenses as blasphemy, adultery, sodomy and extramarital sexual relations . There are no open elections and no effective opposition There is an extensive secret police working hard to ensure the nations "stability". We were warned not to talk about the Princes or discuss politics while there.

The sultan has declared himself infallible and lives in the worlds’ largest family residence; 1788 rooms, 18 elevators, 5 pools 257 bathrooms, 44 marble staircases and 2,152,782 square feet (200,000 m²) of floor space. His younger brother, Jefri, went on a bit of a spending spree a few years ago while he was the country’s treasurer and blew about $14.8 billion on fast cars (about 5000 fast cars), a whole harem of fast women (sex slaves), nine jet planes (747, Airbus, etc.) and a few hundred paintings, a truckload of jewels, 500 hotels and mansions around the globe, 5 yachts, one called Tits with tenders called Nipple 1 and Nipple 2 and a network of companies, trusts, financial instruments and secret accounts with the sole purpose of hiding all the loot.

Our reason for stopping in Brunei was to return to another place Bob had worked, the beach at Tutong. We hired a car for the day and drove out to Tutong. The area had changed quite a bit in 40 years, as expected, but we walked on the beach and Bob told his story of a close encounter with a crocodile there.

Bob on Tutong Beach

The next day we went to Miri, another oil and gas town just over the border in Sarawak. We just had an overnight stop here to break up our journey south. We went up Canada Hill to see The Grand Old Lady. This was the first oil well in the area drilled in 1910.

The Grand Old Lady

A petroleum museum was also on the site. This had been a very nice museum with lots of information about geology and the petroleum industry plus interactive science displays for school children. Sadly no maintenance on the museum had been done since the Minister opened it 10 years ago. None of the interactive displays worked. The entire museum had an awful clawing musty smell. Half of the lighting was broken or not turned on so that we could hardly read the static displays. I got quite annoyed that a once great little science museum, a place where school children could come to learn and be inspired, was so badly neglected when the oil companies made such huge profits from the area.