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Ode to the fly
When you visit Australia you can expect many interesting things, surprisingly gorgeous nature and animals of all sorts. Unfortunately amongst these animals bugs are inevitable, flies to be specific. In fact, there are over 30,000 different kinds of flies in Australia, all of them equally annoying. They are everywhere and come with their whole family. These uninvited buzzers can really ruin your nice camping trip or social picnic. They absolutely love the face, looking deep into your eyes, romantically blow your ear and lick your lips like a lollipop. The one arm salute is a well known fly repellent, but only helps for a second. Supermarkets offer a wide range of fly sprays, sticky traps and charming headnets. The last one might be the only thing that actually works, but of course nobody wears them for the obvious reasons. These…
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Extend an Indonesian 60 day visa
Bureaucracy has reached it’s unexpected low point when we went to the immigration office in Yogyakarta the extend our 60 day Social Cultural (Budaya) Visa. Our visa would expire on Friday so we thought going to the immigration on Monday would be early enough. The visa costs enough and every day we wait would be a day longer in Indonesia. There are many places in Indonesia where you can extend your Visa, just search google maps for ‘imigrasie kantor’ and look for a class 1 office. This is our experience: Monday We read online about what we need and gather all documents. Copies of our passports and visa, a printed (fake) ticket and we would fill in the form upon arrival. At the hotel we think about changing our (not to short) shorts into long trousers but, ahh this city doesn’t…
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Money theft: bad things happen…
Unfortunately we’ve ended our travels through Malaysia with another big disappointment. For our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Medan we planned to take our bags with us as carry on luggage, butwhenwegetto the check in they say we can’t so we check in our bags anyway. It all happens so fast, we forget to take out our money we hid in our toiletries bag an hour before… When we arrive in Sumatra we drive to our accommodation and there we discover our money is gone. Our bag is still locked, nothing is damaged but the money we put in our toiletries bag is gone… € 400.00 worth of foreign currencies is stolen from our bag during handling at the airport. We just can’t believe it! And even the old Zimbabwean banknote of 20 billion Dollars from before the micro inflation…
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Applying for a 60 day visa Indonesia
Because our stay in Indonesia will be longer than the regular 30 days for which you get a visa upon arrival, we need to apply for a 60 day visa in advance. This Social Cultural (Budaya) Visa can later be extended at any immigration office in Indonesia for about € 25.00. When we get to the Consulate of Indonesia in Kuching on Borneo the office is very crowded. The long queue at the reception takes about 20 minutes where we get a application form and a number. We can sit down and fill in the form. We’ve brought our printed (fake) ticket from Jakarta to Amsterdam and US Dollars to pay for the fee. When our number comes along we’ve only been there for five minutes so we are very surprised. The waiting area is totally full with people so…
