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I firmly believe that you learn more, save more, and get a much better feel for the place you’re living in when you make the efforts to process your own tourist visas.
Sure, you can pay a tidy fee to an agent and it’ll afford you more time on the beach or the pub, but you’ll be in a bind when that process goes wrong, or you don’t understand certain subtleties that you’d otherwise be clearer about had you gone through the visa application process yourself.
That’s my spiel for DIY travel.
So I’m going to lay out quite clearly the simple process for extending your standard 30-day ‘visa-on-arrival’ tourist visa for Indonesia, more specifically in Bali, since that’s where I did mine.
Visa-on-arrival – if you’re currently in Indonesia, you already know that the visa is provided for you at a cost, once you arrive into the country. You can of course leave the country and return, paying the visa costs again, or just extend it.
What you need to apply for the visa extension
- Your Passport
- A photocopy of your main passport page
- A photocopy of your current Indonesian visa.
- A record of your flight itinerary showing your exit from Indonesia
- Cash fee: Rp250,000
- 6 days without your passport during processing
The Process of visa extension
Make your way to your immigration office and ask for the form for your tourist visa extension.
You’ll receive a yellow folder (at least mine was yellow in Bali) into which you place all the required items detailed above. Fill in said form and submit it along with everything else (except for your cash) and they’ll take it behind the counter for a short while, give it the once-over to ensure you’ve got the essentials and call you back up to the counter.
They’ll give you a receipt which you must keep very safe and bring back with you 6 days later to pick up your passport + newly extended visa.
It’s at pick-up when you make your payment for the service.
It’s really very simple indeed.
Getting to the Visa/Immigration Office
I’ve marked on my travel map the immigration office in Bali (it’s right beside the Ngurah Rai airport), along with many other points of interest as mentioned in other articles. To get there, drive towards the airport on the main road that leads up to it. When you’re nearly there, the road swerves to the right, with the option to go straight ahead – go straight ahead.
There’ll be signs for cargo and freight services, but you’re on the right track. If you find yourself reaching a mini-roundabout, you missed the earlier turn off, but all is not lost. Take a left at the roundabout onto a small lane. At the end of the lane, you want to turn right, but you must follow the one-way traffic system and instead turn left and u-turn.
To find the immigration office (kantor imigrasi) drive on until you come across a nice bright blue building on your right-hand side; u-turn at your next opportunity and immigration is the building immediately before that blue one.
Points to note
- It doesn’t matter if your current visa is due to expire on a day that falls within the 6-day period that the visa extension is processed. They will still accept your application.
- Indonesian Imigration Website
- All of this information contained in this article is correct to my understanding at the time of writing – 22nd April 2010. Please feel free to update or comment using the section below.
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