Miami -- Heathrow -- Dubai -- Brunei

From the time we boarded our taxi outside the Hotel Victor in Miami to the time another taxi delivered us to our hotel in Brunei's capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, nearly 33 and a half hours had passed.  Our flight to Heathrow took only eight hours as we took a slightly different route to the one taken when we flew to Miami from Heathrow more than two weeks ago.  We waited at Heathrow for five hours, where the sun shone just as brightly as during our recent holiday in Britain, changed from Terminal 3 to 4, collected our baggage from the Virgin Atlantic flight, and boarded a Royal Brunei plane.

The latter took us over Belgium, Germany, Austria, Romania, the Black Sea, Turkey, Iran, and over the Persian Gulf to Dubai.  After refuelling, our plane took us on to Brunei over the Indian Ocean, India, the Gulf of Thailand, Indo-China and the South China Sea.  We are now almost home.

Brunei is a nice little place.  The friendly taxi driver.  The very helpful hotel staff.  The friendly young Thai Muslim female students who wanted to practise their English with us.  The shopping mall merchants who gave me too much change and told me to keep it.  All these things leave us with an excellent impression of this country, the 54th country I've ever visited.

My relative, Ilkka, whom we visited in Finland last month, has followed our progress on flightradar24.com, and supplied these two images of part of our flight path into Brunei.

The night market