Thursday, December 31, 2015

Things have not gone well as far as my visa extension is concerned. In fact, it has gone horribly. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I always have poor luck when it comes to such things.

I mentioned that the immigration office was closed on the day I went there the first time. I waited the weekend, and on Tuesday I went back. It was open this time, but, as usual, no one at the immigration office seemed to have the smallest clue about what to do. It’s the same old story. It’s their job as immigration officers to issue or deny visas. They accept applications for visas and then issue them or deny them. So you’d think that when you go in there on visa-related business, they would know what to do. But it felt like they’d never done it before. Several men crowded around my counter and they all grabbed my passport and babbled and argued endlessly. They seemed to be completely confused about what to do.

It’s not like I’m a novice at this. I’ve gone to more immigration offices and applied for more visas than I can remember. The pattern is logical. You show up early in the morning. You take a number or wait in line. The clerk gives you an application form. You fill out the form and then hand it in along with your passport and whatever documents they require. There is often a checklist to tell you what documents to prepare: photocopy of your passport, one or two pictures, a copy of your airplane ticket, etc. Once you hand in your application package along with your passport, you are given a receipt and are told to return at some point in the future, usually in the afternoon of the following day. NOTHING like this occurred here.

As I said, the immigration officers all crowded around my counter and engaged in long and complex discussions about me. The debate would die down and men would drift off. But then another officer would show up and pick up my passport and flip through it, and the conversation would start again. I tried to move the process along by asking questions, but I was ignored every time. I expected the confusion to eventually end and for someone to give me the standard application form. I even asked for the application form several times. But that never happened.

The man I was dealing with started to tell me about the requirement for a sponsorship letter. I knew about this, of course. Indonesia has this horribly annoying rule that for a visa extension, you have to get an Indonesian person to write an official sponsor letter. It’s the only country I’ve visited in my life that has this system. For a student or business visa, it makes sense. In those cases, you have to supply documents from the school or the business. But it’s silly to require a tourist to produce a local sponsor. After all, this sponsor takes legal responsibility for your activities in the country. A tourist is visiting for a short time, and it’s unlikely that a tourist would know any local people at all let alone someone that would feel comfortable writing an official letter to the government taking responsibility for you.

But that’s the rule here. A small industry has sprung up around this rule in the touristy parts of the country. If you go to Bali, there are lots of agencies that will do this for you for a fee. They do all the paperwork and supply the sponsor letter and go to the immigration office. You don’t have to do anything but pay them. Needless to say, there are no such agencies in Tanjungbalai. Luckily, I had met Rea, and she had agreed to sponsor me.

I assumed the immigration office would supply me with a form, and Rea would simply have to sign the form. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. There was no such form or even guidelines. I was told that I needed a sponsor letter, but they were unable to tell me what the sponsor letter should say or how it should be formatted. We were sort of stuck for a while in our negotiations, but then something very funny happened. A man from Malaysia just happened to be there that day submitting his application for a tourist visa extension. He was married to an Indonesian woman, so it was apparently easy for him to figure all this out. The immigration officer opened this man’s file folder, removed his two official sponsor letters, photocopied them, and then gave me the copies. You have to think about that for a moment and let that sink in – particularly from a Canadian point of view. These letters had all of this man’s official personal information – name, address, date of birth, ID numbers, signature, occupation, and on and on. Yet, the immigration officer had no qualms about photocopying it and then giving it to a random stranger. It would never happen in Canada, of course. And if it did, the person would scream bloody murder. But here, it was fine. The Malaysian man knew it was happening, and he was fine with it.

I was confused right out of the gate because I was handed not one sponsor letter, but two. Everything I’d read or heard up until that point had talked about one sponsor letter. But I was handed two samples – two photocopies. I asked the immigration officer about this. Did I have to get two sponsorship letters? If so, what was the difference between them? But I couldn’t get an answer. I had no choice but to hope that Rea could read the two letters (they were in Indonesian) and figure out the difference between them.

Rea was a huge help. She met me at the Samsung store even though it was her day off. She used the store’s equipment to make copies of my passport and my original visa. Then she used the store’s computer to type out the sponsorship letters and then print them. Completing them involved buying some kind of official government tax stamp – one for each letter – pasting that stamp at the bottom and then writing your signature over them. The stamps cost 6,000 rupiah each (sixty cents). On the negative side, Rea continued the Indonesian trend of not answering any of my questions. I asked her multiple times about the difference between the two letters. But she never replied. I also asked her where she bought the tax stamps and what they were for. But she never replied. I’m not saying that she didn’t know or that I didn’t understand her answer. She just said nothing. And this happens all the time. I can ask the same question four or five times in a row complete with sign language, but people just look at me or look somewhere else and say nothing. I start to wonder if they can hear me at all.

Then came the big day – Wednesday. It was a complicated day for me because I’d also arranged to meet a new group of students at 1:00 p.m. for more English interviews. I was a bit concerned about that, but not overly so. The immigration office opened at 8:00 a.m. Even if everything went horribly wrong, I’d still have at least four and a half hours. Based on past experience, I’d be handed a form, fill it out, hand it in, get my receipt and be gone. Even if there were a big line-up of people ahead of me, it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. How could it?

I don’t even know if I have the strength to mention everything that went wrong. There was just too much. And none of it makes any sense. It’s one of those stories where people will think you’re lying or exaggerating or misunderstanding. But what happened is exactly what happened. I arrived shortly after 8 a.m. There was no one else there. No one. I was the only person other than the immigration officers. This made me happy. There was a long counter with three sections. Three immigration officers would sit there – one at each section. When I showed up, two immigration officers were at their desks. The third desk was empty. One immigration officer waved me towards the empty desk and indicated that I should sit there. I assumed that the officer in charge of visa extensions worked there. He just happened to be away from his desk. So I happily sat at the chair in front of that part of the counter. But then the second immigration officer – an older man – saw me sitting there. And he waved at me in a somewhat angry fashion and indicated that I shouldn’t be sitting there. I should sit in the waiting area in one of the thirty or forty empty chairs.

This annoyed me right from the start. More than anything, I hate making mistakes. This immigration officer was chastising me for having the nerve to sit at the counter without the third immigration officer actually being there. And normally, I wouldn’t do that. But the other immigration officer had told me to sit there. One tells me to sit there. The other one gets angry and tells me to go away and sit somewhere else.

Well, I got up and sat down in the waiting area. These chairs in the waiting area all sit facing the long counter with the three sections. I sat down there to wait. And TWO AND A HALF HOURS LATER, I was still sitting there and still waiting. Nothing had happened in that time. No one had talked to me. No one had given me an application form. No one had issued me a number. I had gotten up on several occasions to ask what was going on and what I should do. They all just tapped their watches to indicate that I had to wait and told me to sit down. I tried to find out what was going on. Why was I waiting? Was there a problem? But in that typical Indonesian fashion, all my questions were ignored. Two and a half hours of this, and my stress levels started to rise. I started to worry about my appointment at 1 p.m. As I said, I hate making mistakes and that includes being late or cancelling. I did not want to be late for this appointment with the students, and I didn’t want to cancel. I didn’t even know how to cancel. Who would I contact? How?

After these agonizing two and a half hours, a man suddenly started calling out to me. He wasn’t one of the three immigration officers at the counter. He was just standing in the doorway behind them. He waved at me to come over. When I got there, he held out his hand impatiently. He wanted my documents apparently. I didn’t know who he was or why he wanted the documents, but I handed over the sponsorship letters from Rea, the photocopies of my passport and visa, the photocopies of Rea’s ID, and my passport. In return, I got nothing. I tried to find out what this man was going to do with my documents. What would happen next? Did I have to fill out an application form? But he ignored me and just disappeared. For TWO MORE HOURS.

Two hours later, I was still sitting there wondering what was going on. This man had taken my passport and documents and disappeared. No one spoke to me. No one had given me an application form. I had gotten up and asked questions and tried to investigate, but everyone either told me to wait or just ignored me.

Words can’t express how stressed out I was. I don’t mind waiting. I really don’t. It’s not a huge amount of fun to sit in an immigration office for four and a half hours, but I can amuse myself almost anywhere. And it’s interesting to look around a place like that and watch all the people coming and going and trying to figure out what was going on. There’s a lot of activity. A lot of daily routines. And a lot of characters. So I can relax and just watch everything. But in this case, I didn’t know why I was waiting. I had no idea what was going on. Everything was out of my control and I was clueless. And the clock was ticking.

What made the situation worse was that I didn’t want to come across as the typical angry foreigner demanding service and getting impatient. I like being the nice guy. I like being the quiet guy who won’t cause trouble, who doesn’t get angry. And I’d done everything I could to avoid becoming that guy. I’d come as early as possible in the morning. And I’d sat quietly and patiently for four and a half hours. At what point are you allowed to start becoming a squeaky wheel and getting upset? Normally, I wouldn’t even get upset after four a half hours. I’d sit there all day waiting quietly if that was what it took. But this time, I had a big group of students planning to meet me at 1:00 p.m., and I didn’t want to let them down. It wasn’t just me being inconvenienced.

Things got even more tense because we were clearly into lunchtime. A man had even gone on the intercom and announced that they were closing for lunch and everyone had to clear out. Luckily, by this point another person had shown up to get a visa extension. This man was from Singapore, and he was married to an Indonesian woman. They were experienced and he said that only the people who were there to get new passports had to leave. We could stay. So this man from Singapore and me just sat there in a vast empty immigration office, both of us wondering what was going on.

At long last, I was told to go into the next room to have my picture taken. I had told them multiple times that I had tons of photographs with me. I could give them a photograph – an actual photograph or a digital file on a flash drive. But their system demanded that they take a picture of me with their digital camera that was attached to a computer. It was just a little Canon Powershot from years ago sitting on a cheap tripod on a desk. They pulled out a chair and told me to sit down. A moveable red background was placed behind me. Then they told me to relax. They told me that several times and used strange body language. It seemed like how relaxed I was affected how the camera operated. I have no idea.

In any event, fifteen minutes later I was still sitting there staring at this camera just a foot or two away from my face. What a comedy of errors. It could not have been worse if the Three Stooges were trying to take my picture. The camera mount on the tripod was broken, so the camera kept flopping over and they had to put it back in place. The camera kept shutting off and they had to turn it back on over and over and over. The USB cord was loose, and they had to adjust it and wiggle it and push it back in over and over. Beyond that, they didn’t seem able to get it to work with their computer. This guy sat there at the computer moving his mouse around and clicking and clicking and clicking for what seemed like forever. I have no idea what he was doing or what the problem was. He had to call over several other people and they all hunched over the computer and fussed with the camera and adjusted all the cables. Meanwhile, the camera kept turning off and on and the long zoom lens kept zooming out at my face and then retreating. The whole time, I’m frozen in place, staring at the camera lens trying not to blink, trying not to look away. They might have one shot and one shot only at getting this picture. I didn’t want to be looking away when they finally get the thing to work.

Did they eventually get my picture? I have no idea. I never heard the camera shutter make a clicking sound. I never did see the computer screen. I was just told to go away and wait. Again. Wait for what? I have no idea. Then a man in a colorful and garish T-shirt started to interrogate me. He was standing at the computer with the camera, and he had the pile of my documents. And he didn’t like anything about me apparently. A big problem was that Rea’s ID had a Medan address, not a Tanjungbalai address. That’s a differenty city. It’s nearby, but it’s different. So he said that my sponsor had to have a Tanjungbalai address. If my sponsor had a Medan address on her ID, I had to go to the Medan immigration office.

He also said I had to give them a plane ticket. He knew I had come by ferry. And he knew that I was leaving by ferry. But he said I had to have a plane ticket. My passport was also a big problem apparently. I had gotten a new one while in Taiwan. I got it at the Canadian embassy, of course, and it’s no different from any other Canadian passport. But it said it was issued in Taipei. This made him suspicious. How could I be from Canada if my passport was issued in Taipei? Despite working for immigration, he didn’t seem to know how passports worked. He flipped through the pages of my passport and saw stamps from many different countries. He didn’t like that either. He asked me why I had been to all these countries and what I was doing. He didn’t appear to believe anything I said.

Time was passing, and I hinted that if at all possible, I really had to leave soon. Could we, perhaps, just put this whole thing on hold? I could return the following morning. This man jumped all over that. Why did I have to leave? What was I doing? I told him that I was meeting some English students. They wanted to interview me for their school project. The garish T-shirt man didn’t like that, either. He asked me where I met these students and how I knew them and where we were going and on and on. Some other periods of waiting and confusion ensued. Apparently, they were going to let me return the next morning, but they had to give me an official receipt for my passport – something to show the police in case they stopped me and asked to see ID. But everyone was gone for lunch, so getting this form was difficult. Finally, after I let some of my frustration and anger finally show, I was given this permit and I was free to go. I rushed to my bike and unlocked it. And then I raced back to the hotel at top speed. I’d already sent messages to a couple of the students to tell them that I would be a few minutes late. I got back to the hotel at exactly 1 p.m. I ran up the stairs to my room and dropped off my bag. Then I dumped some cold water over my head to cool down, put on a clean shirt, and went down to the lobby. It was 1:08. That wasn’t too bad considering the horrible morning I’d had.

And, of course, the students didn’t show up until nearly 3 o’clock. They were nearly two hours late. I had to sit in the lobby for two hours waiting for them.

Indonesia is going to be the death of me.

12:30 p.m.

This is now later in the day. I returned to immigration this morning. I’m exhausted, so I don’t think I can do justice to this visit. However, here are the basics: I showed up just after 8 in the morning like before, and, like before, the place was pretty much empty. Just the Three Stooges were there sitting at their counters doing nothing. And there were five or six immigration officers in the other room all drinking tea and telling jokes and stories and laughing really loudly.

My problem was that I didn’t know where to start. There was no system. I never dealt with the men at the counter, so they knew nothing about my visa extension process. There was no desk to go to, no office to visit, no number to take. I was just standing there without any clue what to do. I sat down for a few minutes to catch my breath and let the sweat on my body evaporate from the bike ride. I hoped that while I was sitting there, someone would realize what I was there to do and then start the process. But, of course, nothing happened. If I didn’t start knocking heads together, I’d be sitting there for another five hours.

So I got up and went to the nicest and youngest of the Three Stooges. He kept asking me what I should do. I had to tell him that I didn’t have a clue. He worked at immigration, not me. The dude had seen me there and talked to me on my first visit. He’d also seen me there for the full five hours the previous day. I told him that the visa extension process had not been completed yesterday, and I needed to talk to someone about the next step. This smiling man actually got up and went into the other room to investigate. I saw him talk to a couple of people there. Then he returned to his desk at the counter, and….. said nothing and……. did nothing. He just ignored me. I kept waiting for him to make eye contact or wave at me or say something. But he didn’t. I then waited for someone from the other room to approach me, but no one did. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I got up and went back to him and asked him what had happened in the other room. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before. Finally, I got out of him that I had to wait. Go sit down and wait. Maybe 30 minutes, he said. Wait for what? Wait for who? That he couldn’t say. Just wait. That is the slogan of the Tanjungbalai Immigration office: Just Wait. Sit and wait.

So I sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. After what felt like a long time, the guy with the garish T-shirt from the day before – the guy who fancied himself a crimebuster – tapped me on the shoulder and indicated that I should follow him. I thought that this couldn’t be good. And I was right. He brought me upstairs to an official room, and he sat me down at a desk in front of another man in a uniform. Now the two of them started to interrogate me. Who was I? What was I doing in Tanjungbalai? Question after question like they’d just arrested the biggest criminal in the country. They had all my documents in front of them and they kept flipping through them and then focusing on this or that detail and having long discussions among themselves. They made phones calls and I heard my name mentioned over and over. Other men came into the room and looked at me. They took pictures of me with their cell phones and said they had to send the photos to the central office for their records. They made more copies of my passport and my visa and handed them out to these men. Another man came in and sat down. They introduced him as the head of the local city council. They said he wanted to know what I was doing here, and they gave him a photocopy of my passport. They said that I had to get a letter from the city council through this man in order to get a visa extension. This was in addition to the sponsorship letters from Rea.

They also told me that I had to have a ticket out of the country. They wouldn’t give me a visa extension until I paid for a ticket on the ferry in advance. I explained that I had no idea exactly what day I wanted to leave. And what if I wanted to extend my visit for another 30 days? (This guy from Singapore had been extending his visa for 3 years.) Or what if I bought the ticket and they didn’t give me an extension? In all these cases, I’d just lose the ticket. It was like throwing money away. The immigration guy said that I could just buy an open ticket. I told him that was nonsense. There was no such thing. I said that I could demonstrate that I had thousands of dollars with me – more than enough to cover my expenses. I could show them that. I said that my friends had come here and extended their visa no problem and they just had to write a letter saying that they were leaving by ferry. But this garish T-shirt man was extremely unfriendly. He just said NO, NO, NO, and NO to all my suggestions. Everything was a rule with this guy. They had rules. He made it sound like I was trying to break the law in Indonesia or ignore the rules. I really didn’t like this man. He was the worst kind of official. He didn’t care about anything but the rules. And he was going to apply every single rule to the fullest extent no matter what.

Now he said that my sponsor, Rea, had to come to the immigration office to be interviewed. I felt terrible about that, but I had no choice. I sent Rea a message and asked her if she could come to immigration. She said it was fine, but it would take her about thirty minutes to get there. While we waited, they asked me more questions. I explained that I had stayed in Tanjungbalai for different reasons but mainly because I liked it here and it was a great place to take pictures. That was my hobby – photography. The man didn’t believe me, apparently. He asked me to show them my camera. I said that it was at the hotel. He asked me to show them pictures that I took. I pulled up a whole bunch of pictures on my phone. Even my hobbies were under suspicion.

When Rea showed up, she came into the office upstairs and they started asking her questions. They kept trying to get her to say that she was my girlfriend. She insisted that we were just friends. Then they tried to get her to say that she was my guide. Again, she said no. We were just friends. She told the same story that I had told them, that I had gone into the Samsung store when I arrived and Rea helped me get a SIM card for my phone. So we’ve been friends since then.

They were speaking in Indonesian, so I didn’t really know what was going on. But, to my intense surprise, they took out my passport and handed it back to me. The reason? It was too early to get a visa extension. My visa expired in 12 days, but they could not give me an extension until there were only 7 days left. I was flabbergasted.

Why did no one say this before? I’d been to their office on multiple occasions. I’d spoken to everyone there it seemed at length. They’d filled out reams of paperwork on me. They’d made photocopies of everything over and over and over again. They’d sent me out to get sponsorship papers. They’d photographed me for their computer records. I had spent FIVE hours at their office on the previous day going through the steps of applying for a visa extension. They’d asked my sponsor to come in for an interview. They’d asked a city councillor to come in and interview me. And after all of that, after three long brutal days of bureaucratic stupidity, THEN they tell me that this was all pointless. I had to come back on January 7. And they just handed me my passport like it was nothing. The stupidity of this is beyond reckoning. The Tanjungbalai Immigration office is filled with the dumbest people on the planet.

I wasn’t really angry, but I wasn’t happy either. I told the guy with the ugly T-shirt all about how I’d spent five hours in their office yesterday and no one told me anything or did anything. I told him that I was a tourist on a holiday, but they were treating me like a criminal. I told him that out of all the countries I’ve ever visited, Indonesia is the only one that asks for this ridiculous sponsorship letter for a tourist visa. And I told him that if I’d know it was going to be so difficult to get a visa extension, I wouldn’t even bother. I still might not even bother. I’d just go back to Malaysia and forget about seeing more of Sumatra. Who wants to go to all this trouble and expense for just a 30-day extension? Every other country would give you at least 60 days. It’s no wonder that tourism in Sumatra is dying. I told him that Indonesia has a reputation among foreigners of being a very confusing and difficult country to visit because of the visa problems.

In the end, there was nothing I could do but leave with my passport in my hand. I’d spent days and days and days on this tourist visa extension. And at the end of it all, they just said I had to come back later. And, to make matters worse, I would have to do everything all over again. It’s not like my application package was just put in suspension. I’d have to get new sponsorship letters, for example. And I’d have to buy my ferry ticket in advance without knowing for sure when my visa will expire or if they will even give me an extension or if I will change my mind and want to stay longer. Plus, the guy explained that to pay for the visa extension, you have to go to BNI bank and pay there. And then it somehow goes into the “system” and you have to get a stamp on another official form. That is so unbelievably primitive. You can’t even pay for the visa extension at immigration. You have to go to a bank and then get an official form and stamp from them. It’s insanely ridiculous.

At the end of it all, I only have myself to blame. I didn’t really need to get a visa extension. I could easily have done everything I wanted to do in 60 days and then just left as normal. But I decided to hang out in Tanjungbalai. So it’s my own fault for being lazy.

Tags: Sumatra Part 01