DIA, Jakarta trip, extending a tourist visa
Thanks for the heads up on DIA. Signed up a month before my trip, and spent many hours culling the wheat from the chaff. Ended up setting 4 dates, with a couple of backups. Had a few who just told me to call them when I got into town, and they'd come over to my hotel room. Since I was looking for a new experience, these I crossed off my list.
Ended up doing three dates, and finding one that seems very well suited to me. Imagine my surprise, over a month in Jakarta, with exactly 0 visits to HT, Blok M places, etc.
I had originally planned on heading over to SIN for a couple of days, but once I found a nice companion, nixed that idea. I decided to find out what it would cost to get another 30 day tourist visa extension. The hotel quoted me 750k rupiah for the service, plus the 250k the extension costs. I imagined that it would be pretty easy.
Of course, I was wrong. I would have been hard pressed to do it without a friends help. Went to the immigration by the old city hall. Got the forms that are only in Bahasa. About 4 pages to fill out. You have to get your passport pages photocopied (entry stamp and main page). Buy a red folder, and a stamp for the form.
Hand in passport, forms, folder, photocopied pages. Come back in 4 business days. Get folder back, go to cashier, pay 250k. Take folder back to other window. Come back the next day to pick up passport. Have to now take it to get the new stamp photocopied and give the copy to the desk.
A big pain in the ass. I'm sure there are travel agents that can do this service for a lot less than 750k. Given that I spent about 2 hours at immigration. 3 round trip journeys, and a ton of paperwork, it won't be something that I want to repeat in the near future. The only consolation is that the lines for all the Indonesians getting passports looked way worse. The place was always packed.