Pantai Jerudong Fish Market

Brunei has a long coastline, and there are many public beaches (pantai in Malay) along this coast.  We are fortunate to live a mere 5 minutes' walk from a beach here, so we don't often bother going to any of the other beaches as they're all pretty similar (and 'ours' is always deserted!)

However, we have recently discovered that Pantai Jerudong - about 15 minutes' drive west of us - is the base for many of the small fishing boats that ply their trade off the Brunei coastline, and it also has an excellent fish market.

I suspect the place is very busy first thing every morning as the local restaurants come to stock up, but we went at about midday on a public holiday so it was pleasantly quiet.  There were several fishermen around mending their nets...

and drying their washing on their boats!

Inside the market itself we enjoyed wandering around marvelling at the variety and beauty of the fish on display.  Well, I think they're beautiful, although I can see that many people might think otherwise!

I was more than a little surprised to see sharks for sale...  look at these baby Hammerheads:

Perhaps these are used for the controversial shark-fin soup?  I certainly didn't purchase any. 

We don't often cook fish, and I didn't have a clue what most any of these fish were.  I suspect I need to find a friendly English-speaking stall-holder to talk to one of these days.

Or perhaps I'll just come another time and buy some of the fish that were cooking on this barbecue.  They smelled very tempting!

And I wasn't the only one who thought so...

Even if I didn't come back for the fish, the adjoining fruit and veg market would be enough to tempt me back.  Lots of stalls selling fresh local produce at good prices - what's not to like?

Bananas (pisang), as you can see, were plentiful!

As usual there were many things on the fruit and veg stalls that I simply couldn't identify - all of the above for example!

Several stalls were also selling these hanging decorations.  On closer inspection I saw that they were made from phone-cards - clever! 

Brunei doesn't have quite the number of size of markets that you might find in other south-east Asian countries (Thailand and Vietnam for example) but it's exciting to find one that's used by locals and sells fresh local food.