Brunei Pub

Thursday night here is like Friday night in NZ, its the weekend!! But what to do when in Brunei there is not a place in sight that retails alcohol due to the law? Malaysia sells alcohol, in fact its 15 mins drive from Tims house to Sarawak province so we did a little border hop on Thursday night. For us Tim told me about the best chicken wings in the world being sold over the border and we thought we'd have acouple of beers too.
So we parked the car 500m from the border and stamped the passport and walked over the line into Malaysia with a huge throng of Bruneians. You literally step across the line and the street is full of "pubs" in the middle of the jungle. Pubs meaning, tarpolin and corrigated iron rooves to keep the rain off and plastic tables and chairs on a dirt floor with big floodlights, TV's and fridges. These places are on both sides of the road and run for about 300m each side, then its back to plain road and jungle before you reach any sort of village of size 1/2 an hours drive away. So we sat down, had acouple of Carlsbergs each, $1/bottle and tucked into acouple of baskets of the "best chicken wings in the world," and they were pretty good. At 10pm the border closes so we joined the rush back across the border to Brunei and drove home following some pretty topsy turvy, swervy drivers. I don't think there is a single breathaliser machine in the whole country.
It was quite refreshing going to the pub, rather earthy in comparison to the gold laced, fluro lights image Brunei projects. Cheap night too, $2 for beer, $5 for chicken wings and 53c a litre for petrol.