VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
In this episode of the podcast, I just tell some simple stories from my daily life here in Banda Aceh. Things have been a bit of a struggle with all the blackouts and the Internet coming and going and places being closed. The biggest Planet Doug-style adventure was certainly getting the 30-day extension for my tourist visa. Just when you think you’ve experienced everything the Indonesian immigration department can throw at you, they come up with something new. The people there are exceedingly nice and they bend over backwards to help me out, but it’s like the staff and me have to join together to defeat the vagaries of the system.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome back to the Planet Doug podcast for Sunday, December 7th. It’s almost 11:00 in the morning here in Banda Aceh, Sumatra. I’ve been here for just about 3 weeks, I guess, though it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I’ve been here a long time, and yet I haven’t really done that much. But then when I go back over the days like one by one by one, it’s like, “Oh, okay.” Now the days start adding up. It’s like, “Okay, that’s why. That’s why.” And I can see where the time went, but it doesn’t really feel like a lot has been going on. But a lot has been going on. So yeah, I just thought I’d fire up the podcast and tell some stories about what I’ve been up to. I think in the last podcast I ended with a story of going on a road trip down the west coast of Sumatra to this offshore island and then on the ride back from that island it started to rain on our drive back and I think that was the signal for the heavy rains to start. It felt like it started raining that afternoon and then it just didn’t stop raining for a very long time. A week, 10 days. I don’t know how long it was. I don’t think it was really that long, but somehow the rain beforehand and then the heavy rains leading to all the flooding and the landslides and the blackouts, all of that happening just made it feel like it went on for a much longer period of time. And in fact, right now, Banda Aceh, as far as I can tell, is still experiencing blackouts. It’s hard to get a grip on everything, like to get a handle on everything that’s going on. Again, because I’m a foreigner and I don’t really have access to the local grapevine, so I never really know what’s happening. Even when I was staying at a different hotel back then and then the power went out because of the heavy rains, there was a citywide blackout. The entire city lost all power and that full blackout I think lasted about 24 hours, something like that, and at that time that meant the internet was gone as well. So even though the power went out and there was heavy rains I still had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until the power came back and I could get back on the internet and then I heard all the stories about what was really happening, the heavy rains all across Sumatra, across Thailand. Malaysia experienced flooding. I mean there was flooding everywhere. And then here in Sumatra there were landslides and power lines went down, like all the towers carrying the power lines. When the landslides came down, tons of those towers came down. So, they had to put up these towers, re-string the lines, get the power up and running, and all of this was going on. And I really didn’t know the extent of it until much later. And then I could get on the news. As far as I was aware, in my local neighborhood in Banda Aceh, there was some local flooding. I could see cars going down some residential streets and then you’d see the water spraying out from the tires, you know, in both directions because the road was flooded. Some houses were flooded that were low-lying, things like that. But I thought that was kind of the extent of it. I had no idea how severe it was up in the mountains, the coastal areas, much farther south around Padang, places like that. So yeah, buildings, like rivers were going over their banks, flooding villages and cutting into the banks of rivers. So buildings were collapsing into the rivers. There was a lot of damage and a lot, like a loss of life as well. Somewhere between 800 and a thousand people died here in Sumatra, I think, during the flooding and the landslides. But again, I was pretty much unaware of the severity of everything that was going on. But ever since then, the blackouts seem to have continued because as I go about my day-to-day life here in Banda Aceh, I’ll leave my neighborhood, like my current hotel has had blackouts. The power will disappear for a few hours and then come back. But I thought the grid was back basically. But then I’ll go to another section of the city to go to a museum, to go to a store, shoot some video, do whatever it is I’m doing. And I’ll find that entire section of the city will have no power. But the only reason I know that is because out on the sidewalks, you’ll see all those little Honda generators. I don’t know if they’re Honda or not, but I think of them all like that Honda-style personal generator that you might have at your house back in Canada or something like that. Anyway, all these businesses have their own generators and they put them out on the sidewalks, then run the cord into the business just so they can keep the lights on and that sort of thing. So, I’m out there going around the city doing my thing and suddenly I’ll hit a neighborhood where you hear that roar of generators and all up and down the streets there’s generator after generator after generator out on the sidewalks and that’s my only sign that oh there’s a power blackout in that neighborhood and it feels like they’re moving them around the city, like this area will have a blackout and then it’s moved to this area and they’ll get power but this neighborhood doesn’t have power. And it just seems to move around the city. And with my luck, it feels like every time I try to go somewhere, I go to the neighborhood where they’re having a scheduled blackout, which means no mobile internet. I don’t know why that would be the case, but mobile internet has vanished for me in many ways. And I was shooting a video about using the Touch ‘n Go, like the Malaysian e-wallet Touch ‘n Go. The video is all about can you use it in Indonesia? And then I did a lot of experimenting, going to as many places as I could, paying for my meal, buying credit for my smartphone, doing whatever it is I want to do, buying a ticket for a museum, and trying to pay with Touch ‘n Go. But in order for that to work, you have to have mobile internet. And over and over, I would make a deliberate effort to go somewhere just so that I could use Touch ‘n Go. And then I travel across the city. I go to this place and I go up to the window or I hop in a Grab car because I wanted to use an example of taking a Grab car but paying for it with Touch ‘n Go and then I can go to the camera. It’s like wow nothing can be easier. You can use Touch ‘n Go to pay for your Grab car here in Sumatra. And then I try to do it and it won’t work. It should work. The technology is there but without mobile internet it doesn’t work. Same thing with restaurants. There I always develop a set of my favorite restaurants where I want to go and then or a local coffee shop and I think oh I’ll do a Touch ‘n Go segment there and I travel all the way to this restaurant or coffee shop and I place my order and I get my coffee and I’m all excited that I’m going to use Touch ‘n Go and then of course it’s like there’s no internet and the restaurant won’t have Wi-Fi either. So then I have to pay in cash and the only reason I went there was to test Touch ‘n Go, but I can’t even do a test because there’s no internet. Anyway, this has been the power blackouts, the lack of mobile internet has been yeah causing the usual problems here on Planet Doug.
And part of the frustration for my lifestyle here is again being a foreigner, you’re out of the loop and you never know what’s really going on. And my brain I really latch on to cause and effect. If something goes wrong, like there’s no water, I like to know why. I mean, I can live without water. I plan for a life without running water because you never know when the water is going to disappear. You never know when the internet is going to be here or not here, when electricity is going to come and go. I can deal with all of those physical hardships, but there’s a mental aspect as well where I want to know why and I can never find the answer. So, even here in my hotel room, this is a much more comfortable hotel, a much more reliable hotel than where I was before. But the internet just comes and goes all the time, both Wi-Fi and mobile. But I wish I knew why. Like the mobile internet will disappear or it will be really really slow and unusable. And it could be because the world of mobile internet is down, that my Telkomsel SIM card, like Telkomsel my mobile internet provider is having trouble because of the flooding and the landslides. So maybe they’re the source of the problem. It could be that this room is situated that I’m blocked from the towers by cement walls. Like when you stay in one of these hotels here in Indonesia with thick thick cement walls on all sides of you, depending on where your room is located, you could have super fast mobile internet or if your room is at the back cut off from the towers. The same hotel, one room will have super fast mobile internet and another room will have zero mobile internet because you’re blocked from the antennas or something. So I don’t know. Is it this room? Is it the hotel? Is it Telkomsel? Is it the blackout? I never know what’s causing the problem. And if you don’t know what’s causing the problem, you don’t know when it’s going to stop. Like you’ve got no mobile internet, but you don’t know when it’s going to come back. You have no electricity, you don’t know when it’s going to come back. No water, you don’t know what’s causing the problem. Therefore, you can’t guess at when it might return, you know. So that’s been my life here the entire time that I’ve been in Banda Aceh. And it gets compounded too because I find here in Banda Aceh even more than the rest of Sumatra there’s an irregularity to people’s lives. Like I depend on local shops for the most part. I eat my meals at the tiny place around the corner run by a family. I get my mango juice from the little fruit stall that’s across the road. I get my fried bananas at this little stall on the corner and I look forward to those treats. You know, I’ll be walking across Banda Aceh to go somewhere and I plan my route so I can go by my favorite fried banana stall and I’m so excited about it and then they’re closed and they’ll be closed for three days in a row and then they’ll show up and then they’ll disappear again. My little food stall across the road, I’m, you know, I’m starving all day because I haven’t gone out. I couldn’t be bothered to go out and get something to eat and I’m planning ahead. Okay, at 3:00 I’m going to go get my es campur at my favorite little spot across the road. I go outside, they’re closed, and I don’t know why. Like, nobody has regular hours. And this is one of these things that’s a little bit of a double-edged sword because this chaos, this irregularity of life is what I enjoy about Sumatra. I love that because you never know what’s going to happen. Every day is an adventure. So, I love the chaos, but at the same time, it means you’re always unsure of what’s going on. You have no idea what’s going to happen, what’s going to be open, what’s going to be closed, when they might reopen. You just never know what’s going on. Even if you talk to local people, you can have something you’re thinking about. You can ask five different local people. You are going to get five different answers about what is going on and you really have no clue and you live in this world of just lack of information. And then here in Banda Aceh, it’s a little bit stricter when it comes to the rules of day-to-day life. So Friday everything closes. I think in a place like Bukittinggi or Tanjung Balai on Friday the holy day of the week for Islam, you know the going to the mosque for prayers. It’s a big deal and a lot of businesses will close for certain periods of that day. Here in Banda Aceh, they tend to close for the whole day and not only the obvious places, like there’s an Indomaret right across the road from my hotel. And even like on a Friday when all the local businesses close, you can still count on getting something at Indomaret because a big chain like that will still stay open. But not in Banda Aceh. They also follow the local religious rules and they will close for Friday prayers as well. So Fridays for me have been like a write-off. I can’t do anything. Like there’s no internet, there’s no electricity, there’s no running water and then out in the city everything is closed. So Fridays have been a little bit of a struggle as well. So that’s kind of the world that I’ve been living in. And one of the things, one of the main reasons I came to Banda Aceh was because of its history with the 2004 tsunami and I wanted to go to the Tsunami Museum. And I wanted to film it for my Touch ‘n Go video because I know that you can pay for your museum ticket at the Tsunami Museum. They have the QRIS system, the Indonesian QRIS system, the QRIS QR code, and then you can scan that with Touch ‘n Go and you can buy your Tsunami Museum ticket using Touch ‘n Go. So, I really wanted that in my video. So, I extended my video filming and I extended it and extended it and extended it because I wanted to get my museum trip on that video. And I wanted to do a Grab car Touch ‘n Go sequence as well. So I planned ahead for that. I got everything ready. I’ve got all my cameras ready. Went to bed early so I could wake up early and be refreshed. And then I get my Grab car and then take it to the Tsunami Museum. But then I can’t pay with Touch ‘n Go because there’s no mobile internet. So I might as well, normally I would just walk to the museum. The only reason I took a Grab car was cuz I wanted to pay for it with Touch ‘n Go. But then I ended up I couldn’t do it. So that was kind of a wasted effort. I get to the museum. The gates are open. There’s people everywhere. There’s this big group of security guards and souvenir shops and everything. So I walk inside to go to the Tsunami Museum. And I go up to the, I’m on my way to the ticket window and two men come up to me. And they spoke in Indonesian, of course. One man came up first and I assumed he was telling me the museum is closed but I couldn’t figure out what he was saying. So I was kind of trying to figure out from him okay why is it closed? Is this temporary? Will it open in 1 hour or tomorrow? And we couldn’t really communicate. And another man came in a more senior uniform I guess. And then he also in Indonesian tried to explain to me what was going on. I couldn’t understand him either. And then I went around the corner and there’s the ticket window shut closed. The whole museum was closed. And as far as I could tell, people were telling me it’s because of the blackout that they don’t have power. And for a normal like a small business, they can fire up a generator because all they’re running are the lights. And I did some research into this, but for something like the Tsunami Museum with the heavy-duty air conditioning, the multimedia displays, the computers, the lighting, they need a lot more power and they can’t run the whole museum on generator power. They have like emergency generator backup, but they can’t really open to the public because their systems just won’t allow it to operate on a generator power source. So, I was like, okay, nothing I can do. So, I’m trying to find out, okay, when should I return? And one person told me the afternoon. Just come back in the afternoon. We’ll be open in the afternoon. Another person told me it will be open the next day, so come back tomorrow morning. And another person told me it’s going to take 3 or 4 days before they reopen. So I erred on the side of caution and I waited 3 or 4 days, delaying my Touch ‘n Go video cuz I really wanted that sequence. And then I did the whole thing all over again. I got a Grab car, went to the museum, no mobile internet, couldn’t pay using Touch ‘n Go. And then the museum was closed, still closed. And I talked to all the people there. And now everybody’s story was different. A woman told me that they were renovating and they’ll be open in an hour after they finish the renovating. Someone else told me, “No, no, no. Because there’s a blackout. There’s no power, so we can’t run.” Someone else told me, “No, no. They’re doing full-on full-scale renovations now and a lot of repairs and nobody knows when the museum is going to open.” So, I have no idea. Anyway, two trips to the Tsunami Museum and I still haven’t managed to go to the Tsunami Museum itself because yeah, it’s been closed and I don’t know why. I assumed it was because of the heavy rains, the landslides, and the blackouts. But now people are telling me no, no, no, they’re just renovating. So they would have been closed with or without the blackouts and the landslides and the flooding. So again, the world I live in, I just don’t know. But the upshot is I still haven’t gone to the Tsunami Museum.
My other big adventure recently involves, not surprisingly, my Indonesian 30-day visa on arrival. From the day that I arrived, there has been a problem with my visa. As I normally do when I was still in Malaysia. I went into my Indonesian account, like when you get the 30-day e-visa, you can get it online now. In fact, you’re supposed to get it online. Everybody expects you to, including Indonesian immigration and the Indonesian government. They kind of prefer it if you get everything online. I mean, you can still show up at an airport with nothing, assuming your country is eligible for this, and then they’ll have a window at the airport, and then you go get your visa on arrival at the airport. You can still do that, but the most common method now is to get your e-visa. So, you go to the immigration website, you open an account, email address, password, the whole thing, and then you apply and pay for your 30-day e-VOA online and then they send it to you as a PDF and you can just show it to them on your phone, print it out, do whatever you need to do. So, that’s what I did. And then normally after you enter the country, you go through immigration. They turn on their computer at immigration and they process you and then your visa shows up in your immigration account as used, right? You used it to enter the country and then it moves to the next stage where you are given the option to extend it because you’re allowed one 30-day extension inside the country. So, when you sign into your Indonesian account, your immigration account, you go to your list of visas and there’s your 30-day visa on arrival and there’s a little button at the end called actions. You click on that and it gives you a menu of actions you can take and one of them is extend. You click on the extend button. You apply to extend your visa and you pay for it online and then you get it and then you get an email now where they say okay here is your extension but you have to go to an immigration office to get your photo taken. That’s the new rule now. You have to extend it online and then you still have to physically go to an immigration office and then they do biometrics which in this case is only taking your photo. That’s all they do when you go to immigration and I’ve done that multiple times. I’m very familiar with the system now. So, I land at the airport here in Banda Aceh and there was some sort of a problem right out of the gate. And I wish I could tell you what the problem was, but of course there’s no way. I asked, they couldn’t explain it to me. But they were looking at my visa on arrival and at my passport and they said the passport number doesn’t match. And they were wrong about that because they do match. I’m looking at the passport. I’m looking at the visa application. I’m looking at the visa on arrival there. The, you know, my arrival form. The passport number is exactly the same in all of them. There was nothing wrong. And they said, “Oh, no. There’s a problem. There’s a problem.” And then they went over to another computer, called over some other men, more senior immigration people, and they’re all huddled around the computer. You know, they’re all like looking at me and typing it, oh, and they’re all chiming in on how to fix this problem, whatever the problem was. And then they did something on the computer and they said, “Oh, there you are, sir.” And they put the visa sticker in my passport. And everything was fine. The visa number was the same as my visa number. Passport number was the same, the dates lined up, everything was fine as far as I could tell. And they said, you know, welcome to Indonesia. And out I go. But then it comes time to extend my visa. So I start the process. I go, I sign into my immigration account. And there’s my visa. It’s listed as it always is, but I can’t extend it. When you go to actions, there’s no extend option. It’s just not there. And then there’s all these other ways. I mean, the Indonesian immigration website is really confusing. It’s scattered. The UI is bizarre. It’s weird to figure out. There’s multiple ways that you can access the extend your visa option. So, you can go to your list of visas, click on the button, click extend. That wouldn’t work for me because there was no option to extend. You can go to another list, click on it, go somewhere else. There was no extend option. Or even like in the top level menu, there is an extend button there. Like there’s all this menu, right? And there’s one of the menu items is extend. So you click on that and then it’s the most ridiculous thing ever. Even though you’re already logged into your account, once you click on that extend button, it gives you a search field and you have to put in your name and your passport number and your date of birth and then it searches for any extendable visas linked to that name, passport number, and birth date. It’s not looking in your account. Again, I don’t understand why it works that way. You’re logged into your account, you click on the extend menu, it opens up the search parameters, and then I got a message, an error message that just said there are no visas. So, I’m searching for a visa for me to extend and it says there are none. You don’t have any visas. And yet, when I go to my list of visas, there it is. I have a visa. It’s in my account. I’ve got the email. Well, I’ve got the downloaded PDF. I entered the country. They processed me. They stamped me in. Everything is done. And yet, the system was telling me that when it comes to extending a visa, as far as we know, you don’t have one. So, sorry, dude. That’s it. So, now, of course, I have to go to immigration.
Normally of course I would extend it online. Then I get an email telling me a date and time to go to immigration and all they do is take my picture. But now I have to go to immigration and try to explain to them what this problem is. And I was dreading this cuz I knew this was not going to be pleasant. Like how do you explain it when there’s even a language barrier? And I did a lot of research beforehand. I went on the internet. I’m looking for other people who’ve had a similar problem. And it turns out there were a lot of them. There were enough cases that I came across that there was an actual solution. And according to the internet, I was told the problem is my e-visa on arrival is not synchronized with my arrival record. So you’ve got your visa and your arrival record and they’re not synced. So they said if you go to immigration and just say I want to extend my visa, you’re just going to end up in a world of confusion because they’re going to try and do the same thing that I’m doing and they’re going to tell you oh you don’t even have a visa. So don’t say that. What you’re supposed to do according to the internet is you go to immigration and you say I have it in Indonesian and English that I need to synchronize my EVOA data with my arrival record and I have it in Indonesian and English. So I went there armed with this sentence. So I take a Grab car. This is kind of funny. I was going to do another sort of Touch ‘n Go thing and I took a Grab car to go to immigration and of course I was wearing a hot shirt and long pants to be dressed up for immigration. So I didn’t really want to walk all the way there. And then it turns out my Grab driver spoke quite passable English. And then I’m chatting. He was a very chatty guy, very friendly guy. And I told him about how I’m trying to pay for Grab rides with Touch ‘n Go and I’m having all these issues. And then well I didn’t tell him Touch ‘n Go. I told him QRIS the Indonesian system where you scan it with an e-wallet. It doesn’t have to be Touch ‘n Go. It can be any e-wallet. And then he said to me, “Ah, what you need to do is when you book the Grab car, you have to choose QRIS payment in advance. And if you don’t, you have to pay in cash.” So, there were a couple of times when I had mobile internet and I said to the driver, “Can I pay with QRIS, please?” And then he would say, “Oh, yes, absolutely.” And then he takes his phone and he fights and he fights and he fights and he finally turns to me and says, “No,” and I thought he was saying there’s no mobile internet, so I cannot accept payment with QRIS, so I have to pay with cash. But it turns out maybe that was the case, but I was also making a mistake that when you book your Grab car, it defaults to cash payment. So, you have to click on cash and then go to a payment window and then you choose payment via QRIS using an e-wallet. And then when you finish your ride and you say to the driver, I’d like to pay using QRIS using Touch ‘n Go, he turns on his phone, boop, there’s the code, scan it. So, it was my mistake on top of the lack of mobile internet. Anyway, so I got that figured out. And since then, I’ve actually filmed myself going somewhere by Grab and paying with Touch ‘n Go. So, I have that on video, which is nice. So, anyway, I took a Grab car to immigration. Big, beautiful building. I think it’s a brand new place. They moved recently. Really nice. I’ve mentioned before that they’re making a real push in Indonesia to make their immigration experience nicer for Indonesians and for foreigners. So, it’s a big open space. They even have their own coffee shop. They have like a nice display where you can get hot and cold water, nice seating areas, lots of windows, their own public washrooms. So, very, very nice office. Lots of people there. There were greeters there, like greeters with a sash on, you know, welcome to immigration. What can we do for you today, sir? And I go, they pointed me towards the desk where they deal with people like me. And there were four people there and none of them had anything to do except help me. There was like one man who seemed to kind of know what he was doing and then there was these two young women with him and I think they were trainees. They seemed to have no clue about anything and he was training them and then there was a senior woman sitting at a computer working. So that’s kind of what I walked into and I showed them my magical sentence that I need to synchronize my arrival record with my e-visa. I was hoping they would go, “Oh yes, we deal with that all the time, sir.” Boom, boom, boom. Synchronized. And then I can probably go back to my hotel, extend my visa in comfort, go through all the steps on my laptop or my smartphone, extend online, and then wait for them to tell me to come in to get my photo taken. That was the dream. But of course, when I showed them I need to synchronize, they just looked at me like, we have no idea what you’re talking about. Like that makes no sense to us at all. So my magic sentence did not work. And then we had to move on to the next stage where I had to explain to them what my problem was. But it was such an unusual problem. It was really hard to do. Like I have an e-visa. I entered the country. Everything is fine. I see it in my online account but I can’t extend it. There is no extend options. So of course they said ah no problem sir. We can help you. We can fix that. And what I needed to do, they told me, “Okay, can you please sign in online because I had my phone with me, of course, luckily I had mobile internet.” And then they said, “Okay, sign into your immigration account so that we can look at it.” So, you know, I signed in and I gave them my phone and then we went into this long complicated circular sequence of activities that made no sense to me at all. I didn’t understand anything they were saying. Nothing they were doing or saying made any sense to me at all. So anyway, I started to show them the problem that okay, here’s my visa. Now look what happens when I try to extend error message. Big giant error message. So that seemed pretty simple. I thought, okay, now we have a starting point. I can physically show them extend error. What do I do now? And I’m kind of at a loss at this point to even tell the story because it was so confusing and so complicated. And they told me so many contradictory things that made no sense at all. But there was one point where the senior woman got involved because the three that were helping me couldn’t make any progress. And then she came up and said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not how you do it. You have to claim your visa and you haven’t claimed it yet.” I’m like I have no there’s no such thing. It doesn’t exist. Like go into the immigration website. You can look at all the menus. There is no option anywhere for you to claim your visa. I’ve done this multiple times. It’s never been required. It doesn’t exist. Whatever she’s telling me I need to do, it just doesn’t exist. So, I think what happened was when I entered Indonesia, the immigration officials at the airport didn’t claim my visa. Like, it’s a visa and then when you enter the country, they have to do something on the computer to mark it as used. Like okay this visa they click on something it has been used to enter the country and they didn’t do that so they didn’t claim my visa it’s like a coupon for 30 days in Indonesia and once you cash in your coupon they stamp it as used again because you used it to enter the country it’s been claimed but they didn’t do that at the airport that was the mistake. So now in my immigration record, I had a 30-day tourist visa, but according to their records, I had never entered the country. So that visa has never been used yet. The computer was still waiting for me to fly to Indonesia even though I’m already here. That was the problem. But this woman told me it was my job to claim it. It was my mistake that I hadn’t claimed my visa yet. But that made no sense to me because I can’t there’s nothing I can do. I can’t claim the visa. That doesn’t exist. That option just isn’t a possibility. Anyway, so then she says, “Well, the problem is that you did it with an online account. You’re not supposed to open an account for an e-visa for like for a visa on arrival. You don’t open an account. You just get it at the airport.” So, I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, now we’re obviously miscommunicating here. No, I got my visa on arrival as an e-visa. I got it while I was in Malaysia in advance. And to do that, you open an account and then you apply. She’s, “Ah, that was your mistake. You’re not supposed to do that.” And I’m like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” It’s like, and this is the senior woman at immigration. She was the most senior person there. And I’m like, well, whatever you’re saying, that is absolutely far from the truth. That’s got I have no idea what you’re talking about. But then she says, “Okay, so because you opened an account, now what you need to do to claim your visa, you have to log out of your account.” I’m like, “Well, that makes even less sense.” But she was insistent. So, we logged out of my online account and then we did the search function and then oddly enough in this case now my visa did show up. It was like the weirdest thing. She said, “Okay, now we do the search function. And you put in your passport number, your name, your birth date, and instead of getting that error message, a screen popped up, but the screen said I was applying for a visa.” So, I showed it to the woman says like, “No, no, no, no. I’m not I don’t want to apply for a visa. I already have a visa. I’m just trying to extend it.” And she said, “No, no, no. The way it works, you have to apply for a new visa. And when you submit that, it will see you already have one and then it will offer you the option to extend it. That’s how the system works.” I’m like, you know, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But anyway, I had to sit down in immigration and go through the entire process all over again. Luckily, I’m not a complete idiot. So before I went there, I made sure on my phone I had everything like all of my documents, every photo, every document. Cuz when you apply for a visa for Indonesia, you need two copies of everything. One copy has to be a PDF, like your flight out of the country has to be a PDF and a JPEG. The copy of your passport has to be a PDF and a JPEG. And they have to fit really precise parameters in terms of the lighting and the size and the scale. The photo has to be perfect. Everything has to be like bang on or their computer rejects it. And I went through that process while I was in Malaysia. It took a long time. But I made sure that every single phone I have I have three phones. I have all my documents on this phone. All my documents on this phone, all my documents on that phone, all my documents on my laptop, I made a folder on every one of my devices, making sure I have copies of everything everywhere. So, when I was there and they told me, “Okay, you now have to fill out an application,” I had everything I needed. The average person wouldn’t they would have to go back to their hotel, get on their laptop, and get all their documents and everything, but I had everything with me. So, I sat down in the lobby and I’m doing everything all over again cuz they told me to. I’m uploading the photo of my passport. I’m uploading my profile photo. I’m uploading my flight out of the country JPEG PDF in all cases. Filling out my hotel address. Everything like you’re applying for a brand new visa. And then I got down to the end where I’m supposed to submit. I’m like, well, I went back up to the counter and said like, I don’t really want to apply for a new visa because why would I do that? I’m already in the country. And she said, no, no, that’s what you have to do, sir. So, you know, I thought this is what they’re telling me to do. And I hit submit. And it actually worked because after I hit submit, then I went back into my normal procedure, the batch application that lists all your visas. Now I had an extend button for my original visa. And she says, “See, you claimed your visa.” So you enter the country, then you have to claim your visa by applying for a new visa. And that triggers the system to give you the option to extend the original visa. I mean it was just like So anyway, I went now I had to go through the extension process, right? I had to do it all over again starting from the beginning and now I had to sit down there in their lobby area and go on my phone uploading all the documents again to do the extension. And then I got to the end, I submitted it and I got a big sign that said awaiting payment. And this is always an issue for Indonesia because the system doesn’t keep the payment window as part of the normal flow. The normal flow ends when you submit your documents and you’re done. And they say, “Thank you for your application. Awaiting payment,” but there’s no payment window. It’s hidden. You got to go searching for it. I never know where to find this thing. You basically just go roaming around your account clicking on things until you finally found a button that allows you to pay. But in this case, I didn’t really want to do that because I had a feeling that if I exited from this window, everything I’d done was going to be lost. Like it said awaiting payment and if you click on that button, nothing would happen. And I didn’t want to exit from this screen. So, I wanted to confirm that I was on the right track. So, I went back up to the counter. All four of them were there because they were all working with me on this project. And I showed them, oh, it says awaiting payment, but nothing happens when I push the button. See? See? And they took the phone and they’re, “Oh, oh.” And then they said to me, “Oh, what you have to do is go to a bank, submit payment at a bank, and then you bring the payment receipt back to us.” And I was like, “That’s the old system. I used to do that in the past, but now that everything is online, you just pay online.” Like I said, I haven’t done that for years. That’s the old system. You don’t have to pay at a bank anymore. You just pay with a credit card. So, like where is the pay online with a credit card option? Because I didn’t want to pay in cash. I only have a limited amount of Indonesian rupiah here and I don’t want to spend 500,000 rupiah in cash. I wanted to pay with a credit card. And they says, “No, no, you can’t, sir.” He says, “Well, I’ve always done it that way. I mean, I’ve always paid for my visas and visa extensions with a credit card. That’s normal.” “No sir this is a new procedure” and they said we cannot accept foreign credit cards only Indonesian credit cards are allowed so you have to go to a bank and they showed me on my screen there was like this 15-digit number was a payment code and they says okay you just go to a bank show them that payment code and then you can pay at the bank and I says, you know, I was trying to be I was very I was being friendly the whole time. I’m being very polite. I’m being very nice. These people were incredibly helpful. They spent a long time with me. In my opinion, they didn’t know what they were doing. But for all I know, maybe the Banda Aceh office has a completely different system to the rest of the country. It’s entirely possible. So, I don’t want to be too hard on them about this whole process. Maybe everything they were doing was normal for Banda Aceh. I just don’t know. Anyway, I had no choice. Like I said I would prefer to pay by credit card online and they said you can’t. You have to go to a bank. You know, we’re sorry, sir. And I was sort of hoping waiting for them at this point to say, “Okay, there’s a bank right across the street. All of our customers go there. They know about immigration.” So I thought they would guide me to the nearest bank but they says okay and so now you have to go to a bank and we’re sorry sir we cannot help you beyond that you have to do that yourself and they stood there smiling and I was like okay all right I guess I’m going to the bank and I was imagining walking into the bank with this because I didn’t have any papers from immigration I didn’t have anything all I had was this number and I was like, “Okay, yeah, you just show that number to the bank and they’ll know what to do.” All right. Well, you know how that goes. So, anyway, I finally found a bank. I mean, I was on Google Maps looking and looking and looking and most of the banks that I went to were only ATMs. That happens all the time now. You look for a bank on Google Maps. You go to that location and it’s just an ATM. You got to be very careful about that. But I finally found a bank about I don’t know 3/4 of a kilometer up the road. So I went to the bank. I go in, go up to the counter and of course I’m speaking to the woman. She spoke English, very nice woman. And I said I have a billing code. I went to immigration and they told me I have to pay here and I have to show you this number here. Can you do anything with this number? She’s looking at me like I’m speaking Greek. Like what? I was like, “No, I went to immigration and I’m paying for a visa extension, but they told me I have to pay at the bank and I have a billing code. See, see this huge number here?” They said, “I just have to show you that number.” And she’s like, “Where are the papers? Don’t you have a paper or a document? Is there anything from immigration?” And like they didn’t give me anything. They just said, “All you need is that number.” So now she’s up out of her desk. She’s going to the back office. She’s talking to the manager, talking to the supervisor. They’re all putting their heads together. They all come back up to the window and trying to get my story out of me and oh, so you’re not trying to withdraw money from the ATM. You’re not trying to change money. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is, you know, I go through the whole thing all over again and they talk about it for a long time and they eventually figured it out to their credit and they says, “Oh, so immigration like visa” cuz they went on the computer. They asked to see my passport and I gave them my passport and they typed my passport number into some computer and I guess they typed in the billing code and something came up from immigration. There was a bill waiting to be paid and now the bank it came up on their computer and like oh immigration oh and now every but it was not obvious to them what I was there to do but eventually we got it done. I handed over the 500,000 rupiah out of my dwindling reserves of Indonesian rupiah and I got a receipt from them. Thankfully they gave me a piece of paper and then I went back to immigration and I kind of walked in and all four of them were like standing there waiting for my return cuz I don’t think they get very many foreigners coming in. So I gave them the paper and they says, “Oh, okay.” Luckily, now that I had done this, the normal procedure would be to wait until you get an email because my application for an extension was finally complete. I even got an email like after I submitted payment at the bank. Bing, I got an email and that made me much happier. I finally got an email from immigration and it said we have received payment for your visa extension. So I was like ah something that finally makes sense because I’m familiar with that email. It’s the first communication I’d gotten from immigration. So, we were back on track and then I thought I’d have to wait 2 or 3 days and they would send me another email and say, “Okay, this is your appointment to come in to have your picture taken.” So, I figured I have to go back to my hotel, wait a few days. And in the past there was an issue with this where foreigners ended up waiting like as long as 10 days to get their appointment at immigration and while they’re waiting their current visa expires. So now they’re in the country on an expired visa because their extension hadn’t been processed yet. And I was worried that that was going to happen. And I hate living in fear about these sorts of things. But luckily in this case, I went back to the office here in Banda Aceh and they said, “Oh, we can take your photo right now, but you just need to give us a few minutes to get set up.” So I gave them my payment receipt and then I went down into the lobby area. Took them a long time because again, this doesn’t happen very often. I don’t think they have to turn on a computer in a special office, load into the immigration computer system, and then they have to set up a digital camera like it’s an old one. They all use the same cameras. Like every immigration office I’ve gone to, they all use this like old Nikon D5100 or something. It’s been around for many, many, many years, but it still works. It’s a good camera. And then they have to take your picture in real time and it’s inserted into the immigration database automatically. Like what I mean is they can’t take your picture, save it as a JPEG and then upload it when they have the internet. Cuz as we found out while we were there, the internet was really really slow. And computers were not responding very quickly. And they said, “Yeah.” So, in order for the photo to be taken and inserted automatically, the internet connection has to be strong and reliable. So, it took them a long time to get that set up. And then they did take the picture and then it was time to leave and they said okay your application is completed and then we will send you an email in a couple of days or whenever whether your application has been approved or not. One of the things I one thing I forgot to mention in all this story as I said they told me I had to apply for a new visa apply like upload all the documents fill out all the information passport number addresses everything phone numbers and then it triggers claiming your old visa which allows you to extend whatever But while I was doing it, all of the fields, some of not all of them, some of them were filled out automatically by the computer, but it filled them out incorrectly. So, it said like female and that was the only thing it said. Like on the line there was like female with a circle with a black dot in it. Female had been selected and that’s wrong obviously. So I was like, “Oh.” So I’m trying to click on it like, “Okay, I want to change it to male, but it’s nonresponsive. It’s all grayed out.” So I went up to the counter again. I showed it to him. Says, “It says I’m female and it’s not responding.” And he says, “Yeah, it’s because of the internet. It’s really slow right now. So our computers are not responding.” And I said, “Well, isn’t that going to cause a problem?” And then they said, “No, no, no, no. Don’t worry about it. It happens all the time. We’ll change it later.” And of course, you know, that’s going to lead to trouble, but there’s nothing I could do about it. So, I’m filling out the rest of the form. And then my passport issue date and passport expiry date were also completely wrong. The expiry date was in the past. So, I was uploading an application form using an expired passport. And I said, “Well, that’s not good.” And I went back up to the counter and said, “Like my passport details, they’re wrong, too. The expiry date, it shows my passport is already expired. That’s going to cause trouble, right?” And it doesn’t respond either. And they says, “Oh, don’t worry about that, sir. It’s going to be fine. It’s because the computers are slow right now. It happens all the time and we’ll fix it later.” It’s like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” So, I submitted my application with all incorrect information. Apparently, I’m a woman with an expired passport and there’s nothing I could do about that. And then 2 days later, I think it was 2 days after that, I did get the visa extension. I got an email and of course the email was addressed to Mrs. Douglas Ninheis. It still had me listed as a woman and it still had all the incorrect information for my passport. But so they never did change it. They never managed to fix it. But apparently it doesn’t matter. I have a visa extension. It’s for the wrong passport and the wrong person, but according to immigration, ah, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. So now, now I’m living in this state of dread that when I go to leave Indonesia, when my visa extension expires in January, I fly out of the country, I am pretty sure when I get to the airport, they’re going to try to stamp me out with my visa and they’re going to go, “Miss, oh, your passport is expired.” And I’ll show them my passport isn’t expired. And they say, “Well, this visa is invalid because it’s for the wrong passport.” I know that’s going to happen. I live in dread of that happening, but there’s nothing I can do about it at this point. It’s not like I’m going to go back to immigration and say, “Oh, oh, by the way,” you know, anyway, that’s my story about going to immigration. On the positive side, really nice immigration office, really nice people, helpful, friendly, eager to spend as much time with me as possible to get things done for me. So, no complaints at all about that. But the system itself is rather bewildering, confusing, just puzzling. It really is. And hopefully I’ll be able to get out of the country without too many issues, but that’s a problem for when I get to the airport on another day.
I hope all of those stories don’t paint my time in Banda Aceh in too much of a negative light. That’s just all the stuff that always goes on on Planet Doug. That’s just normal life, especially when you come to Indonesia because you’ve got the smartphone e-customs blockage thing to deal with the visa problems and then all of that was compounded here by just an act of nature, the huge storm and the heavy rains and the flooding and the blackouts and the lack of internet. So, yeah, it’s a bit of an unusual time, I guess. But in between all of that, I’ve been having a very enjoyable time here. I’ve had a couple of experiences that worked out really well. I spent a lot of time doing this whole testing of Touch ‘n Go in Sumatra video. I really enjoyed that. That was a good experience. And now I’ve actually moved on because I’ve downloaded a local e-wallet. I decided to try out Gojek. And inside Gojek, they have the GoPay e-wallet. And I want to experiment quite a bit with using GoPay and also record those experiences on video and try to make a Planet Doug video kind of a should you download Gojek and use an Indonesian e-wallet while you’re here in Indonesia kind of video. So that’s kind of a project that I’m working on at the same time. But in the middle of all of that, I did go to the Aceh Museum. And as I explained in the video that I worked on about that, my idea was everybody thinks of Banda Aceh in terms of the tsunami and the tsunami destroying so much of the city and the coastal areas of Sumatra. And then so many people died here as a result. So I think a lot of foreigners when they land here they would go straight to the Tsunami Museum. But my idea was well the tsunami the story of the tsunami is the loss of life and the destruction of the city. But maybe to truly understand that you should understand the people better and understand the city better. Therefore, a better place to begin is the local national history museum which here is called the Museum Aceh. So, one day I spent the entire day going to the Museum Aceh. I walked there from my hotel and had an absolutely wonderful time. I was so impressed with that museum. The setting it’s on a river has beautiful a beautiful park-like setting. It’s really nice and it has a Rumah Aceh on display, a traditional house of the Acehnese people, the Acehnese culture and that is just absolutely gorgeous. It’s a stunning building to explore. So, I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed learning about the history of the Aceh Sultanate, Aceh province and Banda Aceh itself. So, I really enjoyed that. I had a really good time visiting the museum and they had an amazing coffee shop on the museum grounds. So, I spent the whole morning there and then they closed the museum at noon and then they reopened at 2:00. But because they have this amazing coffee shop, I could spend 2 hours at the coffee shop just having good coffee, ice cream and a brownie and then going back into the museum when it reopened between 1:30 and 2. So, that was a really good experience. And even though I still haven’t managed to go to the Tsunami Museum itself, I’ve seen the outside of it and some photo displays on the outside, but it’s never been open, so I haven’t been able to go into the museum itself. But I did go to another tsunami museum called the PLTD Apung 1. And this is a really special place because the entire museum is a ship. So there was a diesel power generating station built into a ship and that ship was designed to be able to move around Indonesia because there are so many islands here, coastal cities. And if any island or city is having a power problem, these ships, power generating ships can steam to that coast, anchor in the harbor and then run cables into the city and they would produce power from their diesel generating stations and deliver it to the city. And one of those ships, the PLTD Apung 1, happened to be docked in Banda Aceh when the tsunami hit, the earthquake and the tsunami in 2004. And that ship was pushed 5 kilometers inland and then deposited on the land when the flood receded. And rather than drag the ship all the way back to the ocean, they left it where it landed and turned it into a museum. And as I found out later on, the diesel generating stations were quite valuable and they removed those from the ship, took them out and took them somewhere else so they could still use them. But the actual ship itself was left there and then they turned the interior into a museum and I went there and I was able to use Touch ‘n Go to buy a ticket to go in. And that was an amazing experience. Fascinating museum, especially for someone like me, because I think the Tsunami Museum is more about survivor stories, rebuilding, and it’s like a very symbolic, very emotional kind of museum. But the PLTD is much more technical. It’s all about the practical physics of tectonic plate movements that creates an earthquake, how that creates a tsunami. What happens when a tsunami hits land and then the actual path that the ship took across the land and how that ship itself fit into survivor stories because the ship itself saved a lot of lives because people could climb onto the ship and get out of the flood waters, things like that. So, it’s a really good museum. It was a bit dark when I went there, which was kind of funny because again, I think there was a power blackout in that area. So, they couldn’t run the museum on full power. They turned off a lot of the lights in the interior, I think. So, it was quite dark on the inside, but I still managed to look at all the exhibits and read everything. Everything was in Indonesian, but if you have your smartphone and you just turn on Google Translate on the camera setting and you can just aim it at all the displays and then you can read everything in English even though everything is actually in Indonesian. But that was a wonderful experience. Really enjoyed visiting that museum. And in fact, I went there two times. The first time I went, I got caught by afternoon prayers again because I got there too late and I only managed to have like half an hour to visit the museum and then they closed for 2 hours and I was really tired by that point. It was quite hot and there was nowhere comfortable to hang out for 2 hours to wait until they reopen. So I just left and I came back on a second day early in the morning and spent the whole morning going through all the exhibits in detail. And of course I shot a video about that. I don’t think that Planet Doug video is going to be that popular, but it’s a typical Planet Doug experience. I guess an in-depth look at the exhibits at this museum. I thought it was quite fascinating. I learned a lot there. So those are some of the good things that have been happening here in Banda Aceh on top of the problems that I’ve been experiencing.
And that is the end of my stories for now. I’ve run out of time and run out of energy. I have other things I could talk about, but I think I’ll leave it there for now. My visa expires on December 11th. But luckily, I got my visa extension. At least I think I got a visa extension for 30 days. So, I’m going to stay in Aceh Province for the next 30 days. So, I’ll be staying here throughout December, Christmas, New Year’s, and then my I think my extension expires around January 11th. So, at that time, I have to leave Sumatra and go somewhere else. And I imagine I’m hoping to fly back to Malaysia at that time.
Yeah. So, yeah, that’s what’s going on here. I’m really happy that I got the extension because I really struggle when it comes to holidays and they seem to come around so quickly. It just drives me crazy where everywhere I go, there’s a new holiday starting and I really didn’t want to be flying back to Malaysia like in mid December when all the prices go up and the hotels are fully booked and flights are fully booked and now I’ve suddenly got to deal with Christmas, New Year’s pricing in Malaysia with everybody going on holiday, everybody traveling. So, I’m really happy to be able to stay here for the Christmas New Year holidays and then I’ll be landing back in Malaysia around maybe January 9th or January 10th, something like that. I miss the worst of the holidays. And then, of course, we’ve suddenly got Chinese New Year, but I don’t know when Chinese New Year takes place yet in 2026. I’ve got to look that up. And then of course there’s Ramadan where the whole world changes for a full month for the Ramadan ceremonies and events and celebrations and closures. So we’re moving back into that time of year again. Christmas, New Year’s, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, things like that. And yeah, I’m happy to stay here for another month. Hopefully the power comes back stabilizes the internet comes back and stabilizes and I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do for the next month. We’ll just sort of see how things go. Yeah. Anyway, so that’s it. Planet Doug podcast for December 7th, 2025 here in Banda Aceh shutting down. See you in the next video.