Indonesian visa extension

So,we needed to extend our Indonesian visas in Denpaser. Easy enough we thought. Loads of people do it don’t they? Shouldn’t take too long we thought. WRONG! So the story begins with us buying a visa on entry so we can extend it after 30 days. 10 days before they were due to expire we were dossing about in Ubud doing the Yoga and such stuff to fill our time and we thought about moving to Sanur to renew the visas so I looked up the address online and found where we had to go. Easy I thought. Was it open weekends as our visas were due to expire on a Saturday. A quick Google found it was not, or was it on official holidays. So I looked up their holiday dates and being the end of Ramadan found out that the immigration office had awarded themselves 10 continuous days off starting well before our visas expired. PANIC! How did we not foresee this. I guess not being Muslim you would have no idea that this would be a public holiday period. So a quick confirmation with our hotel owner who was a Hindu (so did not think to warn us when we mentioned it at breakfast) we grabbed his motor scooter and whisked off to Denpaser to try and find out what our options were as you can not do it online. Well we arrived early enough but it was mayhem, with people queuing everywhere and no indication of what the process was. Anyway, foreigners have their own section (I know, why have a foreign section in an immigration office) so we took an automatic ticket and waited and waited until we were called to the counter to tell us we had to fill in an application form, which contained questions we could not answer so we made the answers up hoping they could not check them. Later we were summonsed back to the counter to be told we had produced the wrong size of photocopied documents and would have to do them again. ARGHHH!

16 days to get 30 days extra for this stamp

Eventually on our 3^rd visit to the counter they accepted the documents and took our passports and told us to come back in 13 days! So we had no passports and our visas would have expired so we were staying in Bali illegally.

So we went back after the 13 days to wait in a queue again to be called into an office to be finger printed and photographed and interrogated by the immigration officials with intense probing questions such as what is the purpose of your stay and do you like David Beckham of Manchester United? (a bit behind the times I think)They then released us and relieved us of a large sum of money and again told us to bugger off with no passports or indication that they were going to grant us a visa extension to come back in 3 days.

So, as we needed our passports back after 16 days of being without them we went back to the office (again) to queue up (again) with no one telling us what was going on (again) to wait and wait(again) to eventually be called to the counter to be told our visas had been granted. The clerk at the counter looked so pleased for us (and with himself for being such a generous guy) as by now we must have looked like trick ponies with all the hoops we had jumped through as he handed them over and we had to sign a dubious looking book with no explanation why we were signing it. (I think we just donated to their next works outing to see David Beckham play maybe?). Anyway we got the visas so done high fives outside the building and drove off into the sunset armed with another 30 days.(even though we only had 26 days left on it when we got our passports back) Hooray for bureaucracy!