Bandar Seri Begawan audiotours

Bandar Seri Begawan is the capital of one of the wealthiest nations per capita on earth, and the city wears this wealth in specific and sometimes startling ways. The Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque, completed in 1958, rises gold-domed and marble-clad from an artificial lagoon in the centre of the city, its reflection arranged by whoever designed it to be as photogenic as possible. The Istana Nurul Iman, the Sultan's palace on the Brunei River bank, holds the Guinness record as the largest residential palace in the world at 1,788 rooms, though visitors see none of it except the grounds during the three-day open house period each year at Hari Raya.

Kampong Ayer, the water village that stretches 8 kilometres along the Brunei River, has been inhabited for approximately 1,000 years and is the true ancestral heart of what became Bandar Seri Begawan.

Around 30,000 people live in the 2,000 houses raised on stilts above the river, connected by a 36-kilometre network of wooden walkways and served by water taxis called tambang. It is often described as the Venice of the East, which is an understandable comparison and also an inadequate one: Kampong Ayer predates Venice's most famous period and operates with its own logic that has nothing to do with European analogies.