Ulu Temburong National Park protects some 50,000 hectares of primary Borneo rainforest and lets visitors into roughly 100 of them. Brunei's first national park, gazetted in 1991, covers about 40 percent of the Temburong district, and nearly all of it is left to scientists and to the forest itself. The reason it is still standing is money: while Sarawak and Kalimantan were logged and replanted with oil palm, Brunei lived off offshore oil and never built a timber economy. The strip that is open to visitors sits where the Temburong and Belalong rivers meet, beside a university field centre where researchers once counted around 400 species of beetle in a single tree. Its centrepiece is the canopy walkway: aluminium scaffolding towers bolted into a ridge, climbing about 50 metres above the forest floor and linked by narrow plank bridges at the top.
Getting there is half the day. Since the 30-kilometre Sultan Haji Omar 'Ali Saifuddien Bridge opened in March 2020, the capital is less than half an hour away by road, but the last stretch has not changed: a narrow wooden longboat driven up the shallow Temburong by Iban boatmen who read the rapids by eye. Then come hundreds of steps through the trees and the towers themselves, open ladders caged in wire mesh that you climb one person at a time. At the top the forest becomes a surface — green ridges running to the horizon with no road, roof or clearing anywhere in them, mist lifting out of the valleys after dawn while gibbons whoop somewhere below and cicadas grind at a volume you feel rather than hear. Most days end in a cold cascade sliding over black rock, which is exactly what the climb back down earns you.