Bridge building

This is close to the Muara ferry terminal in Brunei. I was at the bus station just before 8am to get a local bus to the ferry terminal. I guessed that a bus might leave on the hour (there’s no timetable) and it did. After a change of bus in Muara town I got to the terminal about 9.20am. Too late for the 9.30am ferry which had already boarded but very early for the next one. I thought it was at 11.30 but I’d read the timetable wrongly and that was boarding time for the 12.30pm ferry. So a long wait. And I couldn’t find the ticket counter for that ferry company as it wasn’t with all the others and the directions I was given consisted of a vague wave of the arm and ‘over there’. So I got a ticket for the 1pm ferry.

My grandfather may have been a sailor, but I’m definitely not. I dosed myself up with the travel sickness tablets I’d bought yesterday and boarded the boat. It was small – passengers only – and had the air conditioning set to freezer temperatures. I glued my eyes on the horizon and thankfully it was calm all the way and I was fine.

After an hour and a half I arrived on the Malaysian island of Labuan. I’d read that Labuan island is the ‘Las Vegas’ of Sabah and that it’s an ‘airport shopping mall on a tropical island’. I couldn’t see it! Ok the place is duty free and there were quite a few shops selling alcohol and chocolate near the ferry terminal but other than that it was a small, industrial town by the sea. I went for a walk around and came across a small garden with three monuments. One marked the take over of the island by the British on behalf of Queen Victoria, one marked the liberation from the Japanese by Australian troops who landed on the island at the end of WW2 and the final one marked the death in an air crash of the leader of the Japanese troops on the island during WW2. I thought it was an interesting combination to have together.