After our first day in the Sorong marina, I received a message from Joni whom I met in Langkawi on SV Millennium. I had last seen her on Tioman Island for our girl’s reunion and it seemed she and her boyfriend had since split up, leaving her in Indonesia with no plans. I asked Kevin if I could invite her to tag along for the next 6 weeks of cruising and he said she was welcome as long as we didn’t bug him too much. So, just two days later, Joni arrived!
After picking Joni up from the airport, we went straight to the immigration office to apply for 30-day extensions on our visitor visas. Indonesia has rather ridiculous tourism restrictions for a country that’s generally a tourist hotspot. When you arrive at the airport, you only get 30 days in the country. After two weeks, you can apply for a 30-day extension, giving 60 days in total before required to leave the country. So, we went to the immigration office to file the extension, arriving at 3 pm only to be told that they couldn’t see us because the office closes at 4 pm and they needed more than an hour for the extension process.
We returned to the immigration office the next day at 11 am and were turned away again because it was too close to lunchtime. After running errands, we came back to the office at 1 pm and were finally allowed to begin the process. The immigration officer took his time entering our information into the computer system but there seemed to be an issue with my passport. I visited Bali in 2016 but according to their system, I never left! The exit stamp and many other country stamps in-between confirmed that I had not overstayed my visa by 7 years but it required another hour of IT support to fix in their system.
After waiting about two hours, Joni and I were handed invoices to be paid in cash at the post office. Luckily we had a driver waiting for us who drove us to an ATM, then to the post office, and we returned with the completed invoice. Then, we spent another hour getting our fingerprints and photos taken for their biometric data to complete the process. Finally, the officer said we were good to go but would need to come back on Thursday, next week, to pick up our passports. I pointed to the sign that said the processing time was three business days and it was only Tuesday. Unfortunately, the rest of the week was a federal holiday and the extension wouldn’t be processed until next week. I asked if we could pay an “expedited fee” with a couple of winks but it seemed this office wasn’t keen on the bribery.
So it seemed our passports would be stuck in the Sorong immigration office for some time making it difficult for us to start cruising south like we had scheduled. On top of this, we also had to plan around Kevin’s visa renewal schedule so in three weeks we needed to be near an immigration office once again. We decided the best plan would be to stay in Raja Ampat for the next four weeks, then spend two weeks getting the boat down to Komodo before my and Joni’s 60 days in Indonesia were up.
Joni and I were now tasked with getting the boat provisioned up and ready to be back off the grid. Our local driver, took us around to the various markets and stores as we checked everything off our list. We started with the two larger grocery stores to stock up on canned and dry goods and walked up and down each of the isles. I was surprised to be approached several times by local people asking for pictures. White people were a rarity around this part of the world and taking pictures with them seemed to be a kind of strange pastime.
Next, we stopped at the open-air market which was another experience. Produce stands lined the streets and the street vendors tried to get us to stop by calling Joni and me “mister”, clearly not understanding the masculine context of the word. Luckily, our driver helped us translate and negotiate prices which were already quite cheap to begin with, even with the white girl prices we were given.
Kevin, Joni, and I moved all of the groceries on board and got all the food organized then went out to dinner one last night to enjoy some restaurant-cooked meals. By the time we got back onboard, we noticed some interesting bite marks in some of the new food and packages. It seemed we brought on more than just groceries on board that day!
