Our adventure 2021
This adventure started when we sold our house at the Stalpertstraat in The Hague at the end of August 2018. We subsequently signed a provisional purchase agreement for a new-build house in Indonesia.
Rushed?
Not really, because we had already visited several new-build projects in Indonesia, the year before and we liked ‘Lavon 2′ by project developer Swan City the most. In terms of style, but also in terms of location. An hour’s drive from Jakarta, 15 km from the coastline. Similar to The Hague, city by the sea.
It therefore means that we are going to live permanently in Indonesia. So emigrate. Asha had been toying with the idea of moving there, after retirement for some time. That was actually no longer a question, but more a question of when? For me it would mean re-emigrating, because I emigrated from Indonesia to the Netherlands in 2009 and now I’m going back.
Risky (adventure)?
Not really. Quite a complicated puzzle. That is why we have tackled ‘Living the Dream in Indonesia‘ on a project basis. So phased.
The first phase involved living temporarily in a rented house. It would be easier to emigrate from a rented house, was the idea. One bedroom was sacrificed to store part of our household effects, in boxes and already packed seaworthy. Nevertheless, in the last few months before departure, we provided most boxes with an extra layer of cardboard, tensile foil and tape. Some moving boxes are even double packed: box in box. We had been working on it for months. In the last few weeks we camped in our own house between ‘walls’ of stacked moving boxes. All very tiring. In the evening you fall asleep like a log.
A professional mover was asked to come by early to have a quote drawn up for shipping our household goods to Indonesia. We quickly approved that offer. Fortunately, because immediately afterwards, at the end of March 2020, Covid-19 made itself felt worldwide. Lock-downs came into effect. World trade fell sharply. Containers got stuck in China. The effect was that the prices of containers and their shipping rose explosively. Our price for shipping was fixed by the approval of the offer. It was a pity that later it turned out that we still had to pay import duties, while the mover initially indicated that import duties did not have to be paid if an Indonesian citizen re-emigrates. Unfortunately, this turned out to only apply to certain groups of nationals, such as Indonesian officials who had been sent out and returned.
A big move like this is challenging. You not always know where a journey like this is going to take you. We just have to trust the process. And hopefully it will take us to our new house in Lavon.
But it becomes more challenging with Covid-19 going around worldwide. The advice in 2021of the Dutch government was “travel only if necessary”. So, traveling was possible, if not for the fact that Indonesia closed its borders to foreigners. As an Indonesian citizen, I was able to enter Indonesia, but Asha had to wait until the borders reopened.
Fortunately, the borders opened at the end of April 2021 for certain groups of foreigners, such as diplomats, businessmen and retirees who want to emigrate to Indonesia. So also for Asha, because he had retired on 1 January 2021. A special visa had to be arranged, a so-called ‘retirement visa’ (C319 visa). You don’t just get a visa like this. There are many conditions that you must meet. With your visa application e.g. you have to send in documents showing that your income is more than 1500 dollars per month and documents that you employ an Indonesian as a domestic help. To get a visa, especially in times of corona, it is also necessary that you engage a ‘visa agent’ in Indonesia for this. Expensive, of course. Very expensive! But then: it’s worth it. When the borders opened, Asha had a visa within a week. He too could now travel.
Phase two: moving out. I had left earlier, Saturday 16 April 2021, after our household effects had been loaded into a sea container on 6 April. When I arrived in Jakarta I had to quarantine for five days. In hotel Mercure Batavia Jakarta I had fun making home videos and fitness workouts in the hotel room. Well, what else can you do during solitary confinement in a hotel room where the windows can’t open, where you depend on your smartphone – and last but not least – on wifi for the news from the outside world. The only human contact I had was when nurses had to take corona tests.
Asha was left behind in The Hague with only a mattress, bedding, clothes and some household goods. He would leave some of that stuff behind with his mother in Maastricht, the rest went to the bulky waste. Furthermore, the rented house had to be left behind in accordance with the state of ‘before (we rented)’ and to be delivered ‘bare’: laminate flooring removed and curtain rails from the ceiling. Fortunately, he was able to resell those to the next tenant. The last night he slept on just a mattress which he dumped in the garbage the next morning. He still had to get a Covid-19 vaccine from the doctor. Unfortunately, he didn’t get a call for the vaccination. Due to delays. AstraZeneca had been in the news negatively and Health minister Hugo de Jonge instituted a vaccination break no less than twice, in the context of ‘further investigation’. In the end, Asha started calling the GGD’s for an appointment. Successfully! One day before departure, he was able to receive a Pfizer vaccine in -a village called- Oud-Beijerland, an hour’s drive from The Hague. Now, he no longer had a car. Sold. So he had to go up and down by taxi.
Emigrating is hard, I said, and with a pandemic it even becomes a hyper stressful exercise, surrounded by numerous uncertainties. Before leaving, he (just like me before) had to do a PCR test according to the corona rules and it had to be negative, otherwise he was not allowed to leave. The last day before departure, he was in the hotel at Schiphol waiting until 8 p.m. for the results of the PCR test. You guessed it. Negative. He could leave, but that was certainly not a foregone conclusion. What if it had been positive? Then he could unpack his bags again! But where? After all, we had already canceled the rental property. Asha had already handed in the key to the apartment. No one would want to take him in. Asha had run a big risk here. Did he have a plan B? I do not think so!
Anyway, on Sunday 2 May 2021, Asha landed at Soekarno-Hatta airport and, according to the corona rules of Indonesia, he also had to quarantine for five days. In Hotel Mercure Batavia Jakarta, just like me a month before. You guessed it. Expensive, very expensive. But it includes a quarantine package, consisting of: three meals a day, five items of clothing a day for the laundry and 2 PCR tests. Five days just in your hotel room. Luckily it was all over on after six nights and he could go where he wanted. But imagine if one of those PCR tests was positive! Then -as they say in Holland- ‘You really are the pisang’. There are now many stories of foreigners on the internet who tested positive after arrival in Jakarta and were immediately taken by ambulance to ‘designated’ hotels for corona-infected foreigners and had to stay there for 14 days. At their own expense. luckily that didn’t happen to us.
To recover we had booked a ‘staycation’ at hotel Mulia, where the first day of the rest of our lives in Indonesia really began. A prospect of other views, different culture, do things differently and a new home. Of our own.
During Asha’s quarantine, the visa agent in Indonesia had already contacted him to take the next step and apply for a KITAS, a residence permit for one year. For this we had to go to the Kantor Imigrasi in Tangerang on May 11th. There Asha had to give 10 fingerprints and also a passport photo was taken. Two weeks later, May 25, he received his KITAS-retirement. It didn’t stop there. This also includes a SKTT, an identity card for foreigners, which is still ‘work in progress’ and is scheduled to be ready at the end of June. By the way, next year Asha has to do this whole KITAS proces again, because every year he has to renew his KITAS.
Nice right?
I used the past tense above. We have now arrived in the here and now: June 17, 2021. And there are all kinds of other obstacles to overcome every day, such as in the field of mobile telephony.
Smartphones purchased outside of Indonesia, no matter how old they are, must be registered and then be subject to import tax. At least, if you want to use the smartphone with a local SIM card. And that’s what you want when you want to live here!
The procedure is cumbersome: first you have to register the IMEI of your smartphone online with all kinds of other data, such as purchase price. If successful, you will receive a QR code. With that QR code you have to go to the customs office (Bea Cukai) Soekarno-Hatta airport or go to Halim, another airport. There they check your smartphone and you will be told how much import tax you have to pay. If you pull out your wallet, they say you can’t pay there. You have to go to a bank branch or to an ATM to pay the import tax. You will be given all kinds of codes and reference data to be able to pay the import tax. So, I went to a bank branch, because an ATM machine is getting too complicated for me. The ‘counter’ employee then asks for my KTP and finally I can pay the import tax.
You spend a day with this baloney.
The next day, the IMEI of the smartphone is registered in some kind of government database and you can get started in Indonesia with a local SIM card.
Cumbersome? Mwah, this is still simple. More is on the agenda, including registering a ’tax number’, NPWP, for Asha. Because if you stay here longer than 183 days (about 6 months), you are liable for tax. Among retirees, here on the expat forum in Indonesia, there is commotion, because they too may have to pay tax on their pension.
So is Asha. He hopes that the tax authorities in Indonesia will respect the tax treaty with the Netherlands, meaning no double taxation will be levied. Actually, if you check the treaty Indonesia accepts the foreign paid tax only as a credit for the Indonesian tax. Tax on government pensions are not taxed, private pension are. Registering an NPWP must first be done online and then you have to go to the tax office. In short, that will keep you busy for another day. By the way, the visa agent said that Asha does not need to register because he is not a tax resident in Indonesia. However, according to the income tax rules (in the Omnibus Law) here in Indonesia, Asha is required to register with an NPWP. Problem is that at the Tax Office pensionado’s like me are told that you don’t have to pay tax, because you don’t work here in Indonesia, so you don’t get a NPWP.
Incidentally, I also had to re-register my NPWP at ‘kantor pajak’ (tax office), because the NPWP number on my KTP belonged to someone else. How is that possible? Hey, this is Indonesia!
Anyway, we are not bored, as you can read.
Phase three: temporary stay permit. Meanwhile, Asha is anxiously waiting for his SKTT, an identity card that is issued to foreigners in possession of a KITAS. His visa agent emails that he has to be patient until the end of June. Such a SKTT is issued by the local registry office, in our case by ’the city government’ Tangerang. With an identity card he can get a vaccination in Indonesia. Then he is fully vaccinated with two vaccinations. I was vaccinated with AstraZeneca in Jakarta at the beginning of June and will receive my second shot at the end of August.
Unfortunately, the corona infections in Jakarta are going in the wrong direction. They also suffer from the Delta variant and it looks like the corona measures are getting stricter here. Maybe the health clubs and restaurants will close? That would be extremely annoying, because we go to the gym almost every day. It has become our routine in Jakarta. We rented an apartment through Airbnb, because our house in Swan City has not yet been completed. This apartment building is located in Setiabudhi district opposite Lotte Avenue Mall. We are on the 26th floor with a beautiful view over the city. Actually nothing to complain about.
We have taken out a subscription to Fitness First. These clubs are mostly, if not all, located in the dozens of malls that Jakarta has. Our routine: fitness in the morning and then lunch in the food court of such a mall. I often go to another mall afterwards to join another Fitness First club with Zumba, Body Attack or one of the other workouts. Not Asha, too tired. The years now count heavily. Retired huh!
What we do, however, is not out of the ordinary.
Going to the malls is a popular pastime for affluent Indonesians and has become part of their lifestyle. It is the place to see and be seen, besides shopping you can also go there for recreation. In many malls, for example, cinemas, ice skating rinks, arcades, climbing walls, children’s attractions and different types of restaurants can be found. While in the Netherlands there is only one mall – in Leidschendam – there are more than 170 malls in Jakarta to choose from! Each with their own specialty: high fashion mall, such as Plaza Indonesia, Plaza Senayan, Senayan City, Grand Indonesia, Pacific Place, Kota Kasablanka and Pondok Indah.
If you don’t like high fashion or trendy nightlife, you can spend an enjoyable day at Bintaro Entertainment Center, Taman Anggrek, Central Park, Pacific Place, Mall of Indonesia, Ion Mall and Pondok Indah Mall – some of the most popular family-oriented shopping centres. The focus is on recreation and family fun in addition to a wide range of shops and services or one-stop shopping to meet the needs of the family.
In all the malls is an abundance of lunch and dining options and a variety of choices: from trendy restaurants with dishes from all over the world to cafes where coffee predominates to fast food dishes.
And if you think it’s all cheaper here than in the Netherlands. Well, certainly not. Anyway, all electronics stuff, such as laptops and smartphones are much more expensive here. The same also applies to branded clothing, sneakers, loafers and bags. Also products such as butter, cheese and milk. E.g. 1 liter pasteurized milk 1,40 euro; 1 liter fresh milk 1,85 euro; 1 cup Evire yogurt blueberry 125 gr 1,88 euro; 1 avocado 1,42 euro; Gillette 850 gram shaving gel 5,90 euro; 1 banana Muffin 0,95 euro; 1 Pain au Raisin (Raisin Roll) 1,15 euro; 1 smoothie 1,55 euro; 1 cup with 2 scoops Haagen-Dazs ice cream 4,10 euro and Maybelline lipstick is 8,30 euro. Not cheep at all, but expensive. In fact, everything that is imported is more expensive (than in Holland) here. And that’s almost all, when you consider that palm oil is the only product that Indonesia exports. Everything else is imported. Even petroleum and that while Indonesia is an petroleum producing country. Due to the strong growth of the domestic demand for petroleum, Indonesia has become a net importer of petroleum. In short, you really have to be careful what you buy here. In fact, only vegetables, fruit and meat, if grown locally, are cheap. Oh, yes, the taxi cars, public transport and internet are (still) cheap here. This has to do with the fact that human labor is still very cheap here. Have your house cleaned? For 100,000 Rupiah (approx. 6 – 7 euro) you have your house ‘spic and span’.
Since 2016, Indonesia has undergone a real revolution in the field of private transport. With an app on your smartphone you can arrange transport, similar to booking a ride with Uber in the Netherlands. In Indonesia, this was already established years ago, before Covid-19 lockdowns, in the capillaries of society. Whether it concerns private or package transport, you can arrange it in no time with the ‘Gojek’ app on your phone. Gojeks and Grab, the motorcyclists or scooters with their green jackets, dominate the streets here. Not so strange, when you consider that a large part of the population still lives below the poverty line and has to survive on a salary of about 3.000.000 rupiah (200 euro per month). Earning some extra money as a Gojek or Grab (moter)driver is a nice bonus. However, for most of them that is their only income.
We do nothing without the taxi service of Gojek or Grab. To the supermarket to do some shopping? Round trip with Go-Car. Just ‘app’ and within five minutes –sometimes even earlier– a car is right in front of you. Easy right? Why would you buy a car here? A car has and always will be throwing away money.
So, here you simply ‘app’ a car or motorcycle with a driver with Go-Car, Gojek or Grab. Not only for transport, but also for your breakfast, lunch and dinner. Do not feel like cooking? You guessed it. With Go-Food, your dinner will be in front of you in ten minutes. Really! Expensive? Mwah, it’s okay. For 50.000 – 80.000 Rupiah (3 – 5 euro) one already have a nice meal for 2 persons. There is also already Go-Clean and Go-Massage. Go figure!
And I’m not even talking about online shopping. Tokopedia is Indonesia’s online platform. Similar to Amazon or Alibaba. You can find and order everything on Tokopedia and have it delivered with Go-Send. There is already talk about a merger between Gojek and Tokopedia: GoTo.
Of course, we also visited and checked the status of the new-build project called ‘Lavon’ . You can’t just enter the construction site, so we first made an appointment with customer services. A salesperson from project developer Swan City brought us to the construction site. Unfortunately, he only took us to the part of the site, where the houses were almost ready for ‘hands over’. Much of the building site was far from ready, it seemed. So we have not seen our future house. Judging by the state of affairs, I am afraid that the completion of our house will not be in the foreseeable future. Perhaps sometime at the end of this year, while according to the contract the hands over would be no later than June 2021, including the so-called ‘grace period’, a grace period of six months during which late delivery can be fulfilled without penalty. It is now 15 July and we still have no idea of our hands over. Asha has rented the apartment, where we now temporarily live, for an extra month until August 10. Now I won’t say, “Expensive. Very expensive! ”, but it’s an unnecessary expense and waste of time, because we should really be busy unpacking the moving boxes and setting up our home in Lavon right now.
Fortunately, our apartment is comfortable and centrally located in the Golden Triangle of Jakarta, between the offices, embassies and several large malls. The Dutch embassy, for example, is within walking distance. Too bad, it is very unfortunate that President Joko Widodo has just made the decision to reintroduce a lockdown from July 3 on the islands of Java and Bali until at least July 20. The catering industry is largely closed, as are the non-essential shops, fitness clubs and a number of tourist attractions and most mosques. The apartment complex where we live has also closed its swimming pool and fitness room.
There is absolutely nothing to do here. I miss the feeling of close togetherness. The breath of fresh air from normal life is also missing: the casual encounters with strangers in the fitness club, building friendships, stops. Life becomes more static. More monotonous, as if you are on a train and see the same landscape over and over. Asha and I are really on our own here. There is not much interest in how we are adjusting, how we are coping with the delay of the handover of our new house or even: “How is it possible that you are here in Indonesia with the pandemic going on? How did you do that?”
We often go outside for a walk or a jog. We then walk to GBK (Glora Bung Karno), a football stadium that is part of a large sports complex. It takes us about half an hour to walk there. Then we jog around the stadium, a distance of about 5 km. We are certainly not the only ones. After office hours, around 5 pm, you will see many Indonesians jogging here. So it is a bit cooler. Well, cooler? It is still 28 degrees Celsius. What strikes me is that there is also little wind. And when there’s wind, it’s a gentle breeze. Not those strong winds like in the Netherlands. Also, there are no gusts around the tall buildings here in Jakarta. Quite strange.
After jogging, around 6 pm, I app our transport back to the apartment complex in Semanggi, as well as our dinner, plenty of choice.
Due to the lockdowns, there are a lot of unemployed, bums and plastic bottle pickers. Lots of people with nothing to eat. There is help from the government. but often it doesn’t get to them or others have already taken advantage of it (corruption). Moreover, that help is just enough to not die. So we feel called to do something for the poor as well. If we meet bums on the street, we give them money. We also distributed food parcels or as it is called here ‘bansos’, an abbreviation of Bantuan Sosial (social assistance).
Before the lockdown started, Asha received his SKTT, an identity card, and with it his NIK, an identity number. The next day, July 8, we immediately set to work to arrange a vaccination for him. According to Asha, it is much better organized here than in the Netherlands. You can make an appointment via an app. So you don’t have to call, like in the Netherlands. Then you go to the vaccination location, where you have to wait your turn in large halls with rows of seats. By constantly moving to another chair, the process is orderly. For Asha it is his second vaccination. I had my first vaccination June 4th. AstraZeneca. Fortunately no side effects. According to official figures, more than 17 million people have now been vaccinated, and most of them live on Java. Now the rest of the 280 million inhabitants.
A message just arrived by e-mail that our household goods have been released by customs. Now Asha had already seen through a tracking app that the ship had arrived in Jakarta on June 26. So, we had been waiting for two weeks whether our household effects would be released by port customs without any problems. Import duties, a fixed amount per m3, had already been paid in advance. However, you never know what problems may arise during a customs inspection, given the extremely complex and misty procedures to import goods into Indonesia. Moments later, there is a phone call from Logpro Indo Express, the agent who will handle the relocation from the port:
“We are partner agent of Windmill who nominated us to take care of the process of the incoming of your personal household goods to Indonesia. We would like to inform that your shipment arrived at Jakarta port on 24 June. Customs clearance process is finished and your personal household goods are now in our warehouse”.
We have been living in rented house in Lavon for two month now. This house has been offered to us by the project developer of Lavon, Swan City. This is where we live temporary, or rather we camp with our -still packed- household effects. We have already been able to explore the area a bit. Our neighbors, mostly Indo-Chinese, are very nice. A lot of food is offered via the group app and we often make use of that. We have also gone a few times to the nearest towns, Alam Sutra and BSD, mainly to do some shopping and get away from our ‘camping’. The lockdown, until now, has not made it easy for us. Fortunately, the malls have reopened two weeks ago and you can enter with a green check mark on an app what is similar to the Dutch ‘corona pass’. In contrast to the Netherlands, there is no resistance to this corona app. Everyone obediently shows their green tick to the security, which is set up at the entrances of the malls. Unfortunately the fitness clubs are still closed. So we have to be patient a little longer. Fortunately, we can already use Lavon’s outdoor pool and so we do. We also enjoy the green tropical sawa ’s that surround Lavon. By bike, but also when we ‘jog’ a few km in the afternoon on a jogging track specially constructed by Swan City. The air here is much cleaner than in Jakarta, so it’s also a healthy thing to do.
Phase four: repairs of defects on the house. In the beginning of September 2021, I got a Whatsapp from Customer Services Lavon: “You can get the key on 20 September”. And to make this long story short. After 4 months of repairing defects, unpacking boxes and decorating our house is now ready for ‘Living our Dream in Indonesia‘ to the max.
Please feel free to visit or as they say in Indonesia: “Mampir saja”.
20 januari 2022.
P.s. Are you planning to move to Indonesia? I have a list of dos and don’ts + tips & tricks that will save you a lot of time and money: click here.
Send me a mail at: vannana@protonmail.com