Thursday, October 17, 2024
8:41 a.m. My Room at the House
Port Dickson, Malaysia
(2,671 words)
I was writing the other day about just how tired I’ve been and how difficult everything has seemed lately. Almost every aspect of my life has been a struggle. Well, that theme continued yesterday with a vengeance as I tried to complete my application for my e-visa for Indonesia. What a nightmare that was and still is.
The problems started because Indonesia seems to have introduced two new requirements in their online e-visa application process. I don’t know why countries keep making these things more difficult and more challenging and more onerous. The first change is that they now require a PDF of your passport in addition to the JPEG. Uploading a picture or a scan of your passport is normally not a big problem. You can use your smartphone to do it. You just need to be a bit careful so that you line it up properly in the frame, light it properly without major reflections, and make sure the file size is small enough. But the vast majority of people can handle that. However, who knows how to get a PDF of their passport? I’d venture a guess that few people can do this easily if at all. I certainly didn’t know how to do it. I was just sitting here and staring at my passport and looking at all my camera and computer gear and wondering how in the world I can use all this equipment to get a PDF. And I couldn’t think of anything. What is the normal way of doing this? Does anyone know? It’s certainly not common knowledge.
In the end, I learned, as I mentioned earlier, that you can use Google Drive to do it. If you open Google Drive on your phone, you will see a camera icon. And if you click on that camera icon, it will open up the camera app on your phone from inside Google Drive. And once you do that, you can take a picture of your passport (or anything else) and choose to save this picture as a PDF. I doubt that 1% of the world’s population even knows about this possibility. So I did this, but then I ran into a problem because this PDF has to be saved in the cloud on Google Drive. It can’t be saved to your phone. Therefore, the system has to upload the picture to Google Drive first before you can then download it to your phone and then upload it to the Indonesian immigration website. And in my case, the PDF would not upload. All I got was the spinning wheel of eternity saying that it was trying to upload. And I have no idea what the problem was. I tried everything I could think of, but the PDF never got saved to Google Drive. I have no idea what the problem was, but I did the only thing that any of us can ever do: reboot everything and try again. I restarted my phone and tried again and again and again and again. Each time, the PDF failed to upload. Finally, on perhaps the tenth attempt, it uploaded. I don’t know what the problem was initially or why it finally worked. But after a long time, I finally managed to get it done.
The other big change is that they now also require you to upload a PDF of your flight out of the country. I don’t think I had to do this the first time I applied for the e-visa. And this requirement introduces a variety of problems. The main one is simply having such a flight. In my case, I had no intention of flying at all. I was going to take the ferry to enter Indonesia and take the ferry again to leave Indonesia. Despite that, they still require you to provide proof of a flight. I think it is a bit of a formality, but you still have to do it.
The second problem is that even if you plan to extend your visa and stay in Indonesia for an additional 30 days, bringing your total time to 60 days, you have to provide a flight that falls within the first 30 days. The logic is that your initial e-visa is valid for only 30 days. Therefore, your flight has to fall within that time period to satisfy THAT visa’s requirements. The system doesn’t take into account that it’s possible to extend your visa and stay longer. They put you in the position of booking a flight that you don’t even want. And even if you do want to fly out of the country, they force you to buy two flights. You have to buy one flight just to satisfy the visa requirements within the first 30 days. But since you can’t use that flight anyway, you have to buy a second flight that you will actually use.
Of course, there are multiple ways of dealing with this problem. One way is to use a company that offers a service of selling you a temporary flight just to show immigration. There are many of these companies on the Internet. Essentially, they allow you to rent a ticket for a certain number of hours or days. And it can cost from $10 to $20 depending on the company and the ticket. I’ve only done that once in my life, and it worked, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. And for a trip to Sumatra, this type of rented ticket doesn’t make a lot of sense. You can actually buy a ticket on Air Asia from the city of Medan to Kuala Lumpur for around $30 to $40. And if you can buy a real ticket on a real flight for $30, why pay $20 for a rented, temporary ticket? You might as well just buy a real ticket. And then there is the possibility of maybe cancelling that flight and getting Air Asia credit. They will never refund you your money, of course. But it might be possible to book this Air Asia flight and then use it to get through immigration and then you can cancel it and get online credit for a future flight. You never know if you can actually do this or not. It depends on the ticket and the jungle of rules and restrictions that airlines apply. But I did manage to do this once before, and it worked out well.
The final way of dealing with this problem is to simply create fake documents. It’s possible to take an old flight booking and then edit it on a laptop. You just open up the PDF of an old flight confirmation (the booking, the boarding pass, or itinerary) and then change the dates and times and flight numbers to match a real flight in the future. You just don’t officially book or pay for that flight. You essentially create counterfeit documents. I’ve done that many times in my life. It’s what I usually do, in fact. I find that this request for a flight out of any particular country is usually a formality. It’s just a bureaucratic box that needs to be ticked and no one is that worried about it. They aren’t going to look too carefully at any documents you provide, especially for an online system. They just need to see something so that they can tick a box. And in this case, it’s just the computer ticking the box.
The problem here is that I would normally do this on my laptop. I know how to alter a PDF on my laptop and save it as a new PDF. But I had no idea how to do this on a smartphone or tablet. And I ended up spending hours trying to figure this out. It was another frustrating experience as I did Internet searches for information and downloaded app after app after app. It was impossible to figure out in advance which ones could do what I needed and which couldn’t. For every one, I had to open an account and create a username and password etc. And then I would test the app and discover it couldn’t edit a PDF, only view them. Or, as I discovered, every PDF app puts the editing feature behind a paywall. The free version of the app will let you view PDFs and do simple things. But if you want to make changes to the PDF, you have to pay for the premium or pro version. In the end, I got so fed up and frustrated and stressed out that I just paid for a 1-month subscription for one of these PDF apps. I used that app to make my PDF. It cost $10 for the month. And then I will eventually just cancel the subscription. So it cost me $10 to make the PDF that I needed to upload to the Indonesian immigration website.
After that, however, things really went nuts. The e-visa system for Indonesia is extremely confusing and full of bugs and glitches. A lot of people complain about it. And in my case, I completed the application and submitted it, but at no point was I given an opportunity to pay for it. When you go through the system, you fill out one page, and then you click on the NEXT button to go to the next stage. And they show you a big graphic that illustrates all the steps. And one of the steps is the PAYMENT stage. Once you fill in the entire application and upload all the documents and everything looks good, you click on the NEXT button again, and I assumed you would then go to the PAYMENT screen. But you don’t. In fact, the PAYMENT option never showed up. My application was submitted, and I even got an email from them saying that my application had been received. But I still hadn’t paid for it. And I knew that didn’t make sense. You have to pay for it in order to get it. But there was no option to pay. It was insane.
There is a place in your account where you can see a list of your visa applications. And I thought that perhaps I could go to that list, see my application, and somehow click on something there to pay for it. But my visa application wasn’t listed. It didn’t exist online or in my immigration account. I got an email from Indonesian immigration saying that my visa application had been submitted and accepted. However, this visa application wasn’t listed anywhere. It was simply gone. And in the email I got from them, they showed documents from my OLD visa application from one year ago. In fact, I got an email saying that my visa application had been approved already, and they gave me a link to download it. But all I got was an error message saying that the website didn’t even exist. Online, I could download the visa for my old application from last year, but my new application wasn’t listed. They were sending me emails today about a visa application from one year ago! And my new application had simply vanished.
I worked on this for five hours yesterday, trying to figure out how to do all this and how to fix the problem. The problem, of course, is that in the modern world, there is no option of actually contacting anyone. It’s all done by computers automatically. And once the computers make a mistake, it is practically impossible to go back and fix it. You’re just stuck. In the end, I decided to start from the beginning and submit a brand new application. There was nothing else I could do. So I carefully went through the whole process again. And I looked carefully for any opportunity to actually pay for the visa. But, just like before, it didn’t exist. There was no payment step, no payment screen, and no payment opportunity. All you could do was fill out the application and submit it.
But this time, something different happened. In the first few seconds after I submitted the new application, it appeared in the listing in my account. My old visa application from one year ago had vanished. It was no longer there, which was weird. But the new one was there and visible. And I knew from a bunch of online research that you can get to the payment stage from this window. What you have to do is click on the visa application number in this listing, and THAT will take you to a payment window. Nowhere in the website does it tell you this. You have no way of knowing about this. It doesn’t happen automatically either. At no point does the system bring you to a payment window. The only way to do it is through this hidden secret way. It’s like discovering a shortcut hidden deep in a video game.
And it worked for me. I clicked on the application number, and that brought me to a payment window. I paid for the visa with my credit card. It cost 515,000 Indonesian rupiah, which is about $33 US. And that was a relief. However, then things went wonky again. I had now submitted a new visa application AND paid for it. BUT after that, it disappeared. When I went back to my Indonesian immigration account, the new visa application was gone. The old one from a year ago was there again. It had returned. But my new one, the one I had clicked on to pay for it, had disappeared completely.
And then I got an email from Indonesian immigration saying that my new e-visa application had been approved. And they gave me a link to download it. But that download link brought me to the OLD application, the one that I had used from one year ago. So even though I had successfully submitted a new application and paid for it and had it approved, I couldn’t download it, and I couldn’t even see it. It wasn’t listed anywhere online.
I worked on this for a long, long time, but there was no way to fix it. But as I was working, I discovered that way down at the bottom of the immigration email, there was an embedded file. This wasn’t the download link but a document that was actually part of the email. I opened that document, and to my relief and amazement, it was a copy of my new e-visa. All the details matched my new application. It was the new approved visa.
So at least I had a digital copy of it that I could put on my phone and print out to show immigration. But I’m still worried about it because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist online. The main advantage to getting the e-visa is that it can be extended online. But in order to extend it online, you have to be able to see it and click on it. When a visa is listed in your immigration account, it has a bunch of sections, and one section is a clickable EXTEND VISA button. You click on that button to extend it for another 30 days. But if your visa is not listed in your account, it’s not possible to extend it. So now I’m stuck. And I’m worried that when I show up at immigration and hand over my e-visa, they will scan the code and nothing will come up on their computer. I have the digital visa document, but that is just a piece of paper. There isn’t an online record to back it up. And there’s nothing I can do about this now. All I can do is follow through on my plans to go to Indonesia and hope it all works out. It’s just more stress in my life that I didn’t need.