It's hard to believe that just under 8 months ago, we landed in Indonesia and started my Fulbright fellowship. We leave Bali the day after tomorrow (Sunday), have two days in Jakarta (exit interview with AMINEF), then fly back to Hawaii early on the 27th. It seems incredible that it could really have been 8 months.
Today we took the scooter to Denpasar and picked up our passports with our exit visas which makes leaving feel very real and near (but we haven't started to pack yet, so that makes it a little less real :-)
The exit visa is a crazy difficult invention of Indonesia. If you are here on a long-term visa, like my research visa (which was good until October but is now surrendered), you have to surrender your KITAS no more than one week (which they count differently, so really it's no more than 6 days) before you leave the country. Your host institution has to write a letter releasing you from your purpose here and you give them that, plus the KITAS plus a copy of your flight information and copy of your passport. We had to come in to Denpasar yesterday to bring all of this paperwork to the immigration office (and they scared me by saying they needed a letter from Universitas Udayana that said what I was doing here, but they accepted my BRIN letter and all turned out OK). The process is supposed to take two days but we had to beg them to speed it up because today is the last business day before we leave Bali and it wasn't possible to do any earlier than yesterday (if you stay longer than one week after applying you get charged Rp1 1,000,000 per day that you overstay). It was more than a little stressful, but it all worked out.
The exit visa is a crazy difficult invention of Indonesia. If you are here on a long-term visa, like my research visa (which was good until October but is now surrendered), you have to surrender your KITAS no more than one week (which they count differently, so really it's no more than 6 days) before you leave the country. Your host institution has to write a letter releasing you from your purpose here and you give them that, plus the KITAS plus a copy of your flight information and copy of your passport. We had to come in to Denpasar yesterday to bring all of this paperwork to the immigration office (and they scared me by saying they needed a letter from Universitas Udayana that said what I was doing here, but they accepted my BRIN letter and all turned out OK). The process is supposed to take two days but we had to beg them to speed it up because today is the last business day before we leave Bali and it wasn't possible to do any earlier than yesterday (if you stay longer than one week after applying you get charged Rp1 1,000,000 per day that you overstay). It was more than a little stressful, but it all worked out.