Somewhere along the way, this visa run stopped feeling like bureaucracy and started feeling like an actual vacation. If you missed the earlier posts: This link follows our time in Western Australia and this link covers our first days in Bali.
Part 2 picks up just before the monkeys attempted to improve their hat collection.
The Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary was another highlight of our time in Ubud.
Bali had been on our travel wish list for decades.
Back when we were teenagers, we used to hear stories about travelers renting one-dollar huts on the beach in Bali and living on almost nothing. At the time, this sounded less like a vacation and more like a financially realistic life plan. Those famous one-dollar beach huts no longer exist, and admittedly our standards have risen slightly over the years, but Bali still manages to feel surprisingly affordable.
One of the less glamorous realities of slow travel is that eventually a country politely asks you to leave for a while.
Our Indonesian visas were expiring, so we had to leave Sorong, in far eastern Indonesia, and fly to another country while immigration processed our new visas. Since Sorong is not an international airport, this meant first flying all the way to Jakarta or to Bali before we could even begin the actual “leaving the country” part of the trip.
Singapore would have been the easiest option, but having already been there several times, we decided this was our chance to explore someplace new. We chose Western Australia and flew into Perth for what would become a ten-day visa run adventure.
The tricky part was timing. Indonesian immigration estimated six to seven business days to process the visa. Estimated being the key word there. We had to decide how long to stay, when to buy return tickets, and how much faith to place in government paperwork moving efficiently. In the end we bought the tickets and hoped optimism would prove to be a sound travel strategy.
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