As our visas were about to expire, we headed hopped onto a cab in the morning and requested to be directed to an immigration office.

The whole experience turned out to be a complete waste of time. To begin with, the Taxi driver had no idea where to go and brought us to a very official-looking building, which I found out in a while that we were at the Makamah agung, (Supreme Court). The guards must just be as bewildered as us! What are these 3 foreigners coming in here trying to apply for Visa?

In retrospect, that must have really been very funny, we were dressed like lawyers nonetheless. Nevertheless, the security guards were just as helpful, and got us another taxi, instructing the driver where we wanted to go, and we traveled up north via Jalan Hiriyam Waruk, we soon reached Imigrasi Jakarta Barat (North Office Immigration).

At first glance, it appears to be just another one of the 2-story shop houses within the vicinity. There was barely any signs distinguishing the place from the surroundings, the only clue I had was the number of people milling about on the street, I wasn’t even sure I was at the immigration office or at a lottery booth till I entered the building.

The place is a madhouse of chaotic disorganized flurry of activity. It was like entering New York’s Wall Street exchange just after the Lehman Brothers and ENRON crashed simultaneously with the only exception was that no one was yelling at each other..

Everyone was rushing about, filling forms on the move, counting and checking papers, there was a child yelling somewhere, the counters were numerically labeled, but that wasn’t to be said of the immigration staff. There was no queue signs, no ticker-tape queue number dispensers, no information display whatsoever. Other than the photocopy and photography booth, there was no queue lines, an absolute free-for-all where people just jumped to the counters to get processed whenever an opportunity arises.

It was the most disorganized, disorderly, chaotic, government office I’ve ever been into. I didn’t even know where to begin with and started asking a cashier, who actually politely but impatiently pointed out to us a counter we could go to, with the facial expression of exasperation – “you mean you don’t even know? How can you not know?”

How the hell would I know? There’s no information anywhere, no information online. The only way to know is to ask a local familiar with the procedures.

After a terse limited conversation in bahasa Indo with the counter officer, I learnt a surprising and rather absurd piece of information, it turns out that because of the vicinity of our current residence, and we couldn’t do our visa here as our current place of residence is in the East, however this office only serves the areas in North Jakarta and doesn’t serve citizens anywhere else.

This bedlam was an eye opener considering the structured and orderly systems that we are used to back home.

What the heck? Ok, I was pretty composed during this whole encounter, and considered the next move, which was to get to the right office. Again asking for directions in Bahasa, I got an address for the “West” office. The subsequent immigration office looked like a mix between a post-office and a 3rd world polyclinic, and organization was just as non-existent as the previous office.

Ok blindly conversing and querying around in terribly broken and exasperated bahasa managed to get us to an officer who spoke commendable English compared to the rest of her colleagues. Well it started off simply enough, and then the female officer kept asking for “another letter”, “another document” and I stupidly didn’t get the hint. After a few minutes she got irritated and sent us away saying that she wanted a company representative here instead of the documents that we were producing, something wasn’t quite right but I wasn’t sufficiently fluent enough to negotiate effectively with the officer.

Later in retrospect I realized that she was blatantly asking for bribes. She was rifling through my passport searching for something, and completely ignored all the pieces of paper documentation that I had, constantly repeating “lain kertas”. “other letter!”. What audacity and blatancy!

Well bribing on the streets to get into a place in one thing, but I’ve never bribed to a government official before, much less so in a government office itself. I don’t know whether I’ll get my documents approved or whether I’d get arrested, and I don’t know what’s the market rate for bribes like! I don’t want to under-bribe and not get my documents approved and I don’t want to over-bribe for nothing and they might end up asking for more.

I didn't want to risk getting arrested and left soon after that terse exchange.

There is always another solution.