Thursday, March 10, 2016

7:00 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

My quest to renew my tourist visa has not gotten off to a good start. I arrived in Siantar too late on Tuesday to make it to the immigration office. That was my fault for not taking the issue seriously. I should have left at 6 a.m. from Perdagangan, guaranteeing that I’d arrive in Siantar with enough time. But I didn’t. And yesterday, I rode the nine kilometers out of town to the immigration office and arrived to find the place closed. Wednesday was a holiday of some kind and all government offices were closed.

This was particularly frustrating because I have a clear memory of checking for holidays when I planned this little expedition. My visa expired on Thursday (today), and I checked for holidays in the week leading up to today, and I saw none. But I must have screwed up, because there really is a holiday. I checked online again, and there it was listed clear as day: March 9 is a national public holiday. It’s a Hindu holiday celebrated mainly on the island of Bali, but the entire country observes it.

My heart sank when I approached the immigration office. It looked largely like the one in Tanjungbalai. It was the same type of building and had the same color scheme. But something didn’t look right. The gate was just partially open, and there were no vehicles visible anywhere. I also didn’t see any people. I rode my bike through the narrow opening in the gate and went to the front doors. I was mentally crossing my fingers that the place was just always rather empty and that it was still open. But the doors were locked. I pushed my bike around to the back of the building to see if there were any people around. I needed to find out what was going on. If the office was closed for several days in a row, I’d be in real trouble.

Around back, I found a bit more activity. The main entrance actually seemed to be back there, and the door looked to be open and unlocked. And there were some motorcycles parked back there with some young men lounging in the shade. I locked up my bicycle and went inside the building. It looked empty and dark and dead, but I was still hoping that something good would happen. I saw just one man standing inside a dark office to the left. The information counter and all the other counters were dark and untended. I called out to this man, and he came to talk to me. He was a maintenance worker of some kind and he didn’t speak much English. However, he picked up a desk calendar and showed me the date March 9 in bright red lettering—indicating a public holiday. I asked about the next day, and from his answer, I understood that the office would be open as usual on Thursday.

It’s 7:15 a.m. right now, and I plan to get on my bike and go back to the immigration offices at 8:00 or so. Anything could happen. It’s generally not wise to try to extend a visa on the very day that it is expiring. It’s particularly unwise when you are required to provide sponsorship papers, and your papers are somewhat untested and irregular. You should also not eat leftover fried snacks for two days straight beforehand. That diet has caught up with me, and I’m suffering from stomach problems. Hopefully, they are just temporary ones and I haven’t picked up yet another infection. In any event, I don’t dare to have any breakfast. That might kick start a disastrous series of events and stomach cramps while I’m on my way to the immigration office or processing the paperwork.

My wasted trip to the immigration office yesterday was amusing because it was downhill the entire nine kilometers. That’s great when you are going somewhere. You can just coast along. However, it also means that you have to ride nine kilometers uphill to come back. Luckily, the gradient wasn’t very steep. Still, I had dressed up for immigration by wearing long pants, and I was sweating badly and overheating on my return trip. As I turned the pedals in first gear and crawled my way back to the Tamariah Losmen, I had plenty of time to think about the nature of life in places like Indonesia. And the reality can be summed up in one word: traffic. Traffic, traffic, traffic. Nothing but traffic and blaring engines, honking horns, and black clouds of exhaust. It starts long before the sun comes up and continues all day until long after it is dark. It just never stops. Perhaps that is just my perspective since I am always somewhat on the move. I’m always going somewhere even if I’m staying in one town for an extended period. Perhaps for the local people, it isn’t as oppressive. Maybe they deal with the traffic once in the morning to go to work or school and then once at the end of the day to go home. And between those times, they are sheltered from it.

And, when I think about it, it really isn’t that different from places like Taiwan and Canada. In fact, there is almost certainly far more traffic in Canada than in Indonesia in terms of volume and numbers of vehicles. But it operates differently. The thousands or tens of thousands of massive trucks in Canada are on the highways, not blasting through residential streets blowing their horns and causing chaos. And the rest of the traffic tends to be quiet cars. Here, all of the traffic goes down the same streets, and it consists largely of extremely loud trucks and extremely loud motorcycles. Add to that the narrow streets, the poorly maintained streets, the lack of working traffic lights, the potholes, the crazy assortment of other vehicles and the businesses that spill over into the streets, and you’ve got a loud mess.

1:00 p.m.

A few hours have passed since I was thinking about traffic. Since then, I hopped on my bike and went down to the immigration office. The news from there is both good and bad. It was certainly an emotional roller coaster ride. You just never know what is going to happen in these situations.

The smart thing (perhaps) to do would have been to go to the immigration while there is still a week left on your current visa. That is even what some immigration offices expect you to do. Then if something goes wrong, you still have enough time to get out of the country or get more documents or jump through whatever hoops they require of you. I ended up going to the immigration office on the very day my visa expired, so I had no wiggle room.

The experience started with the 9-kilometer bike ride to get there. It was an easy ride. It was still quite cool in the morning and most of the trip was downhill. I just had to coast. I was very happy to see that the immigration office looked to be open. There were lots of people milling around in front and many, many more in the back. The back area of the immigration office appears to have developed into a kind of commercial space. There is an outdoor bathroom and several little restaurants and cafes. You can buy food and drinks and sit around and wait while your documents are being processed.

A security guard waved me toward an area where he wanted me to park my bicycle. I locked it up and then went inside. Things appeared to be a bit more organized than in Tanjungbalai. There was, for example, a specific counter where you had to go if you were a foreigner. Tanjungbalai has no such organizational level, and you just walk in there and stand around completely lost. A somewhat friendly youngish man greeted me at the “Foreign” counter, and he asked to see my passport. I tried to soften the mood with a bit of chitchat about how I had come here the previous day and they were closed for the holiday. I also joked about how far away they were from the city itself. But this man wasn’t biting. He stayed businesslike. I think, in hindsight, that was because his English was limited.

I had all the necessary papers ready to go – copies of my passport, visa, extension stamps, ferry ticket, sponsorship letters, and sponsor ID. I wasn’t sure, though, if I really needed the sponsorship papers. Sometimes the more you give, the more trouble you invite. So I was kind of holding them back to see if they were even required. For all I knew, this immigration office just gave you visa extensions without asking for a sponsor. But this man zeroed in on the extension stamps from Tanjungbalai and started asking about the sponsor for those extensions. I decided it was time to cut him off at the pass, and I produced my new sponsorship papers from Al’s wife. I wasn’t sure that these would suffice, but I hoped they would.

This man took all my papers and my passport and told me to sit and wait. This, at least, was familiar. I had become adept at waiting during my many days at the Tanjungbalai immigration office. After some time had passed, I heard my name being called, and the man had returned to the counter, this time with a much younger fellow in tow. This youngster was a student and intern and the local English expert. He was there to interpret. The upshot was very bad news. The man had presented my papers to his boss, and the boss said that they could not issue me a visa extension. Since I got an earlier extension from the Tanjungbalai office, I would have to return there.

When the man said this, I saw my life flash before my eyes. What a nightmare. Forget that the immigration officers in Tanjungbalai seemed to think I was a criminal mastermind and that they had promised to make my life very difficult via the police if I dared to ask for another visa extension. Forget that Tanjungbalai was two or three days away by bicycle. Forget that I had a new sponsor and that my old Tanjungbalai sponsor had disappeared. (I’d been sending Rea messages for days and days, and I’ve received nothing in reply. I don’t know where she is.) Forget all that. The real problem was that my current visa expired today, on March 10. There was no possible way I could get to Tanjungbalai today and apply for an extension. So if the immigration officers there were my enemy in normal circumstances, how much more difficult would they make my life if I arrived with an expired visa AND a new sponsor from a completely different town? I just shudder at the thought.

I kept my cool while I chatted with this immigration officer. It wouldn’t have been wise to tell him his job or call him an idiot, but that’s exactly what I wanted to do. What he was telling me just made no sense, and I’ve certainly never heard of this rule before. If you are a tourist, you are by definition traveling around the country. So you would get your visa extension in one city. Then you would travel across the country and arrive somewhere new – possibly thousands of kilometers away – and then you’d go to an immigration office to apply for your next extension. It’s completely unreasonable to expect you to go all the way back to the first immigration office. It makes absolutely no sense. But this man wasn’t listening to my arguments. A rule was a rule and his boss had declared this to be a rule. In a way, this is how bureaucratic nightmares perpetuate. The rules come from the top down. And you can’t fight them at the ground level. You can’t argue against them because the rules come from higher up. In this case, I was twice removed from the rules. I was speaking through this young interpreter. He was just telling me verbatim what the immigration officer was saying – that I must return to Tanjungbalai – and the officer was just telling him verbatim what his boss had said – that I must return to Tanjungbalai. I can argue with the young interpreter for hours, but it would make no difference. These two guys were at a lower level and did not see themselves as having any power to bend the rules or even see reason.

My only hope was to beg for mercy, and my opening salvo was to say that I could not return to Tanjungbalai. I said that it was impossible. And it was. I said it was too far away. It would take me two or three days to get there by bicycle, and my visa expired today. I tried to argue the common sense angle as well – that it was silly to imagine that a tourist could return to the same city for every extension – but the common sense approach wasn’t making any headway. For some reason, my “It’s impossible” line struck a cord with the man. He started to unbend a little bit, and he said that he might be able to do something for me, but he would have to speak to my sponsor – Al’s wife. I was already on Messenger with Al, and I quickly sent him a message asking for his phone number. I should have gotten it earlier, I suppose, but I hadn’t. Al didn’t respond for a long time unfortunately, and I started to get worried. I tried to call the number on Al’s Facebook page, but the call didn’t go through. I got a recorded message that probably said that I didn’t have any call credit. I never use my phone as a phone. I just use it as an Internet browsing device. With no reply from Al, I took a chance and tried to call Al using the Messenger voice system. My call actually went through. The connection was horrible, but I managed to convey to Al what I needed, and he quickly messaged me his phone number or his wife’s phone number.

I gave the number to the immigration officer, and he called and chatted with someone. I found out later that he was talking to Al’s wife, and she told the officer that I was in Indonesia to write a book. I was traveling around taking pictures and getting information for a book. I don’t know why she said that, and I hoped it didn’t get me into further trouble. I think she should have just told the truth – that I was a tourist. I was here for tourism. What’s so bad about that? I have a tourist visa. I’m getting an extension on my tourist visa. So why was there such a huge concern over what I was doing in Indonesia? Isn’t it obvious from the nature of the visa? I thought that if they believed I was writing a book, then they’d require a business visa or some kind of special journalism visa. Whatever the best answer was, the process seemed to move forward after the phone call. I was asked to fill out a form. I did so. Then I was asked to fill out a second form, which was identical in nearly ever respect to the first form. I never understand why these places require so many forms when they all have the exact same information. Once the forms were filled out, I was asked to hand over the fee of 355,000 rupiah. I gladly did so. I figured that once I had paid, I was almost guaranteed to get the extension. I can’t imagine that they would easily give back the money once they had it in their grubby little hands.

At no point was there a discussion of how long things would take. But now that I had filled out the forms and paid, they gave me a receipt for my passport and told me that I should return on Monday. That made no sense to me either. Today is Thursday. It was early on Thursday morning. All the hard work was done. Now all they had to do was put a stamp in the passport. But for some reason that would require four days to accomplish. At the very least, I thought they could finish by Friday afternoon. Why not? And since I could pick up my passport at the crack of dawn on Monday morning, clearly nothing happened to my passport that day. Whatever process they followed, it would all be done by Friday afternoon. Then my passport would sit in a drawer two and a half days until I got it on Monday morning. If it was ready when they opened on Monday morning, why can’t they just give it to me on Friday afternoon? But that’s how these things work.

The result is that my 30-day extension will only give me about 25 days. It will date from today – the day my current visa expires. And so when I pick it up on Monday, 5 days will have ticked by. There will be 25 days validity left. I don’t think bureaucrats ever look at things from the point of view of their clients. They do things so casually – like tossing out the “rule” that I would have to go back to Tanjungbalai – without knowing how much trouble it causes. For them, it’s no big deal to have me return on Monday to get my passport. It’s the rule. But it costs me five days – five days of sitting around and waiting.

Of course, I can’t really be upset. It’s my own fault for being different. A typical tourist would never stay this long. And a typical tourist wouldn’t be restricted to bicycle travel. Also, the end result is that I have been allowed to stay here for months as a tourist. It’s highly unlikely that an Indonesian could go to Canada and do the same thing. I always try to keep that in mind. Of course, the Canadian system would probably be consistent and logical. The system here is total mayhem. They seem to just make up the rules as they go.

Anyway, I now have a few days to hang out in Siantar. It’s not really that bad a thing. I’m in a fairly comfortable hotel. The room is extremely hot, unfortunately, and I can’t open the windows because there are no screens. All the mosquitoes would come in. But otherwise, it is comfortable enough. There are worse places to be stuck.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01