Miri to Brunei

Mid semester break arrived, and presented the perfect opportunity to travel around Borneo. First stop was Miri. Miri is located in Sarawak (same Malaysian state as Kuching) and is a small oil rich town on the northern coast of Borneo. We flew in at night and left the next afternoon so there is not much to report about the town itself. There are some natural attractions in the vicinity of Miri, but in the one day we spent in the city, we ran out of things to see and do pretty quickly.

We decided to catch the bus from Miri into Brunei (which is about 3 hrs away). This proved to be a little more difficult than expected. To catch a normal public bus we would have had to catch three separate busses, changing at various towns along the way, so instead we opted for a private bus. This also wasn’t easy. The private bus (PHLS Express) leaves from a deserted bus station on the outskirts of town. We had to catch a public bus from the city of Miri to a shopping centre called E-mart. From there we had to wander around for a while to try and find a bus station.

We thought this would be an easy thing to do, but having no luck we turned to asking the locals. Even they did not seem to know of a bus terminal nearby. Luckily, after much mucking around, we found a taxi driver who knew what we were talking about and pointed us in the right direction.

After about a 10 minute walk, we could see the bus terminal, a huge deserted terminal in the middle of a paddock, with only one bus parked there. After getting on this bus, the ride to Brunei’s capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, was painless and we arrived there in no time at all.