Monday’s are for Content

Except this week. This week was quite different. Over the weekend I realized that I probably need to extend my passport. Looking through all the stamps I found my visa extension date…12 days ago. Man does time fly out here. And I hadn’t thought once about my extension. The way a Social Visa works is that you have 60 days when you first come into the country and then you can extend up to four times, or six months. I think the reason I hadn’t thought about it was because all the interns around me left their passports in Bali, with our visa agent, or had their extensions already completed. It’s dangerous to leave your passport somewhere else but the immigration in Labuan Bajo can be very difficult and sometimes corrupt so it’s kind of a lose-lose situation. If you do overstay, as of May 1st, the charge tripled and is 1 million idr for every day you are over. So for me, by the time I would contact someone, I would owe 12 million (~$800). Yes I know, I’m dumb.

Saturday was the day I discovered my overstay so of course I had to wait until Monday to talk to someone about it. I was recommended to get to Bali ASAP and deal with it there. So, on Sunday night I bought my ticket to leave the next morning. Apparently I only return to Bali on little notice. On Monday morning I headed to the airport for my 9:35 am flight back to Bali. As per usual, it didn’t leave until two hours later. Not a huge deal as long as I got to the visa office before it closed. Upon making it to the shop I was prepared to pay for my stupidity and leave the country if necessary. To my surprise, they had a deal for me. It’s not exactly the most kosher thing but what is here in Indo. As long as I followed the protocol exactly, they could help me. That meant I only had to pay 6.5 million but I did need to leave the country and start over with a new social visa. This actually made things easier for me because I needed to leave the country at the end of July for a visa run since I would be here a total of seven months.

I needed to buy a ticket to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during a certain time of the day in order for them to help me. I wanted to get it all over with as quickly as possible so that I can get back to diving. I tried to buy my ticket on my phone while I was at the office but for some reason was unable to. I thought nothing of it and decided I would do it later. The next task was to go print tiny pictures for my new visa. Not as easy as going to FedEx or Walgreens. I ordered a Go-Jek (scooter taxi) and set off with two places they recommended me to try. The first place, didn’t exist. It led us to an intersection with no stores. The second was a big store and I had the guy drop me off. I asked around the shop and they no longer did pictures and couldn’t tell me a place that could. *sigh*

I decided to head to the atm and get to another interns house and borrow her scooter to make this all easier. As with my usual debit card luck, at the atm was where I realized my card had yet again been locked. I hadn’t recieved the email allowing me to confirm I had made the last transactions. I had left my American sim card in Bajo, which meant I had no way of contacting my bank. I also only had 12,000 idr (not even $1) on me, which would get me to Pronoia (our intern Villa) but nowhere else after. Andjela, the cool one with the drone and my savior, called my bank and had them unblock it. She now is fully able to steal my identity and knows everything about me because she needed to pretend to be me for the bank. She also was kind enough to let me sleep in her bed (and bother her holiday) for the night while she was in Ubud.

Once I was able to get money out, I needed to head up to Seminyak to drop a friends computer off to get fixed. Normally, it’s a 30 minute drive on a scooter but there was so much traffic. I made it 5 minutes before they closed. After the long day, I finally sat down for my first meal. Boy I would much rather have sat at a computer all day to do content!

Today, I had to meet the agent two hours before my flight, to get all the proper documents, and then get to the immigration office for my clearance stamp. Once I had that, I could go to KL. I am unable to meet with them tomorrow becuase the office is conveniently on holiday. If I stayed another day in Bali, I would continue to be charged so I chose to roam around Malaysia for a day. On Wednesday, I will meet with the visa agent before 11am to process my new one but am unable to fly back until 9pm that night to ensure everything is processed. Then, I will have to stay another night in Bali because there won’t be any more flights to Bajo until the morning. I will be very excited when I can get back to diving and continue my divemaster. Which I will explain in the next blog but I figured this one would be comical for those of you who know about my luck.

Pro Tip #1: Don’t overstay your visa
Pro Tip #2: Maybe don’t travel with me. Or if you do, you’ll have plenty of time to laugh at my bad luck. Don’t worry nothing bad ever seems to happen to those travelling with me

I think I should write a book. Any title suggestions? How about “Everything Not to do While Travelling” or “Why Not To Travel with Me”