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I wrote this article back in May..2 visa runs ago...nothing much has changed since...lol
Yesterday I did my usual (every sixty days..must exit Indonesia) visa run. This time I did not have the time for a holiday, seeing I just had one to Perth recently, so I flew across to Singapore (1 hour and 20 minutes flight from Jakarta).
I love Singapore, it is so clean compared to Jakarta, the road from the airport all the way into the city (about 20 minutes to half an hour by cab) is just stunning. It seems as though every square foot of free space has been very lovingly tended by a meticulous gardener. The flowering plants are breath-taking...and the trees are exquisite....it's like taking a ride through a beautiful botanical garden...and this is all the way into the city.
The journey to Singapore is a whole nother story. I wonder if I will ever get used to it.
I wanted to spend the whole day in Singapore so I booked the 8.30am flight from Jakarta, which meant leaving home at 5.30am for the hour long ride to the airport.
Security at the airport is very tight so you have to be there at least two hours prior to departure.
Of course the street security guy was snoozing somewhere or on another street doing his dinging of the lamp post to signal the 5 oclock hour. The boom gates were still down and the cab I ordered the night before could not come down my street.
I got a call from the cab company at about 5.10am asking me to either find the security guy or walk down to the end of my street to get into my cab. Oh what to do, what to do...lol
Seeing I wasnt taking any luggage, I told the caller to tell the cab driver to wait at the end of the street and I would walk down to where he is. Good start to the day.
The trip to the airport was not too bad, peak hour traffic was still another hour or so before it got too congested, the only thing that was different this time is the toll fees have all gone up. There are a total of 4 toll booths between my house and the airport and the toll fees just jumped from 3,000 Rupiahs to 5,000 Rupiahs per booth. So, what else is new....everyday something goes up in price...inflation here is through the roof and nobody even notices any more. But the traffic was running very smoothly so the trip was not as harrowing as it usually is...this is good, right?
Wrong.... I got to the airport much earlier than I expected and the check-in counters for my flight to Singapore were still closed....another 15 minutes they told me....just wait another 15 minutes they will open the counters.
Here is Indonesia they have such a thing called "jam karet" which translated in English is....rubber time...or flexible time. They can stretch it any way they want and usually it is never stretched in your favor....lol.
But that's okay, the queue was short and I got my boarding pass.....airport tax just went up another 50,000 Rupiahs since my last exit....now instead of 100,000 Rupes...we're up to 150,000 Rupes.....inflation again.
Next ordeal is going through immigration....I always hate this part because they always want to interrogate you....why were you here, are you living here, working here, do you have your visa papers....meaning, if you pass me 10,000 or 20,000 rupiahs tucked neatly inside your passport, I will stamp your exit straightaway, no questions asked.
To be fair, more times than not, I've been able to go through without the usual interrogations....they have cracked down quite heavily on this practice recently....but I still get nervous every time I go through....these guys are always so mean looking and tend to pick on women if they are travelling alone.
The worst experience I had was about 5 years ago, I went home to Perth and came back to Indonesia via Bali instead of straight to Jakarta. I spent a few days in Bali to attend a wedding and flew up from Bali to Jakarta. So I immigrated in Bali and came through to Jakarta on a domestic flight. You go straight through when you arrive domestic because there's no immigration to be done.
What I didnt notice at the time is, when I went through immigration in Bali, they did not stamp my passport or my arrival card. So when I had to do my exit out of Jakarta, I got caught without an arrival stamp on my passport and on the arrival card. Two airport officials promptly escorted me into a very tiny little office (tiny....meaning the only thing it had room for is a large desk, one chair behind the desk and two chairs in front of the desk and nothing else...that's how tiny the room was) and they sat me down on one of the two chairs...one guy went and sat behind the desk and the other sat on the chair next to me....AND...they closed the door.
At this stage my Indonesian was still very limited and I couldnt understand hardly anything they were saying to me or to each other, and neither spoke English. But I was able to work out what they were talking about....sure enough, there was no date of entry stamp on my arrival card, and no date of entry stamp anywhere in my passport. (It has taught me to ALWAYS check my passport since then.)
I tried to explain to them in my best or worst Indonesian, that it was not my fault the immigration officer in Bali did not do his job, I took it for granted that when they let me through, everything was in order.
The only proof I had of my arrival in Bali are my luggage tickets. When you check luggage in, you get these tickets (which have all the details...flight number and date) which are supposed to be taken from you when you claim your luggage, they should verify the ticket number against the number on your luggage tag...to make sure you are not leaving with someone else's luggage...but of course this is Indonesia...who does that??
So I still had my luggage tickets stuck to my one year return ticket back to Perth....was this proof enough?....nope....it would have been if I had passed over (very discretely of course) a couple of 100,000 Rupiahs.
Even though I was really scared at the time, I thought...what can they do to me? So I re-iterated that it was not my fault, it was the immigration officer in Bali who did not do his job, and if they wanted to pursue this, I have the number of the Australian Embassy conveniently entered into my mobile phone address book and I was happy to call them and wait till they got there to sort things out for me.
This sort of thing used to happen regularly to visitors with business visas, these officials at the airport seem to think we are all loaded with cash and we would gratefully hand over a few thousand rupiahs just to make things go away....and most of the time it is exactly what expats do...it is much easier to pay your way out of a situation than to stand there and argue with them and ultimately miss your flight.
I dont know what possessed me, but I got mad and decided I was not going to let them get away with it this time...(I get stupid when I lose it.....I dont think about the easiest way out....I get pig headed and defiant...one of these days it will bite me...lol)
When I mentioned calling the Australian Embassy, these two guys started yabbering to each other, one of them started writing some crap on one of the pages in my passport....dont know what it was going to achieve...just the luggage ticket number and date....and he stamped it and they walked me back to immigration and asked the officer there to let me straight through.
When I was a few feet away, inside the departure area...my knees almost buckled under me...I felt sick....but in the end I was glad I didnt let them get the better of me. I thought if we continue to condone the practice, they will continue to do it...and I didnt want to be a part of that. Things are difficult enough being a foreigner here, corruption is one of the worst things we have to deal with every day.
I have digressed AGAIN...from my original story about my visa run to Singapore.....lol.
Okay, so now I'm at the departure area at Jakarta International airport with less than an hour before departure.....need to go to the toilet...did I remember to bring my purse packs of tissues?....yup....cos as usual.....even though it is an International airport....there is never any toilet paper anywhere.
There's three cubicles with normal western toilets...minus the toilet paper....and one cubicle with the traditional squatter toilet.....must get a photo of one of these and post it for future reference....lol.
These squatter toilets fascinate me....they never have toilet paper but there's always a faucet and a plastic container with a handle which holds about a liter of water (rough guess) which they use to wash themselves afterwards......but....what do they use to dry themselves with after washing? Do they pull their undies back on while they're wet?? And try and imagine how they actually wash themselves while trying to balance on the squatter bowl???....using their hands to clean themselves????.....
I've been here a fairly long time but this is something I have yet to find answers to.....lol
The flight to Singapore was okay...I still hate flying...and 1 hour and 20 minutes always seems more like 3 hours to me. Breakfast did not look very enticing....looking forward to having a nice big yummy lunch in Singapore so I can wait....also...I read IloveCat's article about the praying mantis eating her mate's head while mating and that was enough to put me off breakfast at least....lol
I've eaten all sorts of foods on my many trips to Singapore, this time I was hungry so I thought I'd be a little adventurous and try something new and completely different. I went to one of those market type food halls and after walking around to all the different stalls (decisions, decisions) finally settled on a stall selling some strange looking lunch sets.
Sets are where you get 3 or 4 containers...one with soup, one with rice, one with meat, and one with vegetable or some other culinary delight...even though it is hard to tell what exactly it is.
My set was very unusual, they were ceramic pots rather than plates... inside the pots where metal containers of the same height as the ceramic pots..2 round pots about 4 inches tall...like flower pots I guess is the closest thing I can compare them to....and 2 shorter pots about 2 inches tall.
One of the 4 inch tall pots held plain steamed rice...the other had a funny colored greeny/yellowy soup with what looked like watercress and bits of dried salty fish.
One of the two inch pots had a very smooth custard (not the sweet custard we all know and love so much)...this is just plain custard...not sweet or salty....just the egg mixture that's been steamed in the metal container and placed in the ceramic pot...maybe to keep them hot, I dont know. The other two inch tall pot had a round burger type patty made of ground pork, but it was steamed rather than fried so it looked a funny greyie colour but was garnished with slivers of julienned ginger.
What you're supposed to do (I was told) is you scrape the steamed rice to loosen it, pour a little of the soup and stuff on, then scoop a spoonful of the custard on, and then a piece of the patty with the ginger.....then you put a whole heap of chopped chillies, soya sauce, and chopped shallot leaves, scoop this portion up in one of those funny chinese spoon and straight in your mouth.
It seems like hard work, but I have to say....it was really something. The flavors were so distinctive even though it was all mixed together and the DODGY looking pork patty was really tasty. It took about an hour to finish the whole meal, but very enjoyable.
I had another 3 hours to kill before I had to make my way back to the airport, so I went to one of the big shopping plazas and did a little bit of shopping.
I found a pet store and of course I just had to buy some treats for my cats. I found packets of dried catnip and a couple of wooden balls with stoppers.....you put the catnip in the ball, put the stopper on....it has a hole just big enough for the aroma to come out but not so for any of the catnip. I wondered if my Indonesian cats even know what catnip is.
(When I got home, I gave them the wooden balls full of catnip.....and no, they did not think much of it at all.....strange, huh? Cats are supposed to love this stuff but my cats didnt react to it at all....they didnt even want to play with the balls....very strange.)
The day went by fairly quickly, soon it was time to head back to the airport. I got there at 2.30pm, checked in only to find that my 4pm flight was delayed for one hour...meaning I would get back to Jakarta right on peak hour traffic and it would take me longer to get home from the airport to my house than from Singapore to Jakarta.
I asked if there was an earlier flight, and there was one leaving at 3pm but because they close the gates 30 minutes before departure, I was too late. So I begged and I pleaded and I begged some more (no pride whatsoever....lol) and she was kind enough to at least go and ask one of the Supervisors if I could get on it.....there was a few seats available....the plane had not left the tarmac....so the Supervisor got me a boarding pass, told me to run like hell to the departure lounge..(Singapore airport is HUGE!!!....) and by the time I got there I was so out of breath I thought I'd pass out....lol. But I made it and beat the traffic and finally home safe and sound.
This is typical of my visa runs I have to do every two months....will I ever get used to it?....probably not....lol
Welcome to Jakarta.
