Another Trip - Visa Runs

A commonality among expats living in Southeast Asia is the dreaded (for most of us, most of the time) visa run. Check in on one of the numerous expat forums and it’s a certainty that you’ll find at least one thread about visa runs. For the expat who is living on a tourist visa this can mean going out of the country at least every one to three months. For expats with different types of visas, the time frame becomes considerably longer.

For those of us living on a limited budget, the visa run can be a financial hardship – one of those costs that we don’t always factor into our living expenses. Expats in Thailand can leave the country by land and therefore use a bus – generally the cheapest mode of transportation. For those of us in Indonesia, the visa run generally means leaving by plane; a relatively expensive experience even in these days of budget airlines.

Additional expenses are food, a hotel room if you need to be out of the country for at least a day, visa fees, and occasionally the gratuity (otherwise known as a bribe) for immigration officials.

Besides the financial burden, the visa run often is a physical/emotional trial. I’ve often had somewhat uncomfortable exchanges with immigration officials, and the memory of those times tends to stay with me so that I tense up anytime I have to come back into Indonesia.

I still vividly remember an encounter 8 years ago when immigration pulled my whole family into an office in the Ngurah Rai airport, told us that we were entering illegally (it was my first time in Indonesia without a KITAS and I wasn’t aware that I needed to have a return ticket out), and threatened to deport us immediately. I explained the situation as calmly as possible to the immigration official who was quite hostile while my wife and kids were in tears. After a bit of a discussion, I offered to immediately buy tickets out for the whole family, but at that point in the discussion, this was not acceptable to the immigration fellow. No, we were going to be sent out immediately. At this point, he stormed out of the room, and another official came in (the good cop, bad cop routine). He was friendly and sympathetic; he tried to calm down my wife and kids; he offered me a cigarette and some coffee. Once we were all relaxed somewhat, he told me that he’d love to help us since he was a family man himself, and if I could help him some, everything would be fine. When I inquired as to how much help he needed, he replied that the money in my wallet would be sufficient. We ended up settling on $250 (five of us at $50 each, much cheaper he assured me than buying some airline tickets and having to fly all the way back to Singapore. Well, I learned an expensive lesson about being prepared for immigration after that incident.

This trip everything was in order (as it always is now), and I breezed through immigration and customs.

In another few years when I am retired and no longer on a company’s employee list, I’ll have to go back to the dreaded visa runs on a regular basis. But there’s a new immigration law in Indonesia that may eventually benefit me so there’s always hope.