Long Term Vacationing Activities

Our Visa Run to Bangkok and Snorkeling

One of the nice things about traveling as an American is that you can pretty much go anywhere you want. There are 184 destinations that you can travel to visa-free or with a “visa-on-arrival.” (The best passport to have in 2020 is actually Japan with 191 destinations, but the American one is still pretty good.) Given this, I don’t usually look up visa rules when traveling, but for an extended trip to Bali it made sense to do a little research. Here’s the important information I learned:

1. If you’re staying under 30 days as an American, you can stay without a visa at no cost, but you have to leave before 30 days is up, period.
2. If you’re staying between 30 and 60 days, you can purchase a Visa on Arrival for 500,000 IDR (~$36.) It’s valid for 30 days, then you’re able to extend it for another 30 days for 500,000 IDR more at an immigration office. Apparently, people usually just pay a little extra to have an agent handle the whole process.
3. If you’re staying more than 60 days, you can apply for a Social Visa which can then be extended 3 times more, 30 days each, for a total of 150 days. This requires a local Indonesian resident to send a sponsor letter to immigration before your arrival.
4. One caveat to all of these options: if you leave the country at any point with one of these visas, the visa is nullified and you have to start all over if you return. (There are ways to get a Business or Multiple Entry Visa but they’re a bit more formal and complicated.)

Being the non-planners that we are, Ryan and I didn’t want to pay for a visa having no idea how long we intended to stay. So we opted to go visa-free and planned a “visa run,” AKA a somewhat dubious but totally legal and very common way to reset your length of stay. Like real digital nomads / long term vacationers, we did our visa run by going to Bangkok, Thailand!

Bangkok is famous for its street food so our first stop was a random food court right across from our hotel! It did not disappoint. 😋 We found ourselves the Chinese food cart and got stir fry garlic bok choy and egg fried rice 🍚. It may sound simple, but it was full of flavor. We rounded out our meal by crossing the street once more and stopping by one of the best mango sticky rice shops in town: Mae Varee Sweet Sticky Rice with Mango. The store is known for having some of the most well-selected mangos, which are then cut at optimal ripeness. It was double the price of our actual meal but 100% worth it.

Fun Fact: When you bite into something as sweet as a good mango, you assume there’s no way it can be good for you, but mangos are actually chock-full of nutrients — especially vitamins A and C.

After a traditional Thai massage, we called it a night. All the way up on the 34th floor of our hotel, we actually had the quietest night of sleep we’ve had in a few weeks. In Bali, you really are somewhat one with nature unless you’re in the middle of town. There always seems to be a gecko, bat, or stray dog reminding the world they exist! In Bangkok, there was only the faintest sound of traffic lulling me to sleep.

Interestingly, there was a lot about Bangkok that seemed to make me feel a little more “safe.” Cities are familiar to me. Even with coronavirus shaking things up by forcing me to strap on my face mask, I felt a sense of calm as I boarded BTS (Bangkok Transit System) Skytrain for public transport.

You can see the stairway leading up to the Skytrain in the background. It’s super easy to use the public transportation system and there’s even a sort of walkable “pedestrian highway” above the traffic.

I visited a mall, ordered some fries at a McDonald’s, and even saw a dermatologist at a hospital. I might as well have been back in New York. My visit to the doctor cost me roughly $45 …and that’s without insurance at one of the more expensive hospitals in the city. That’s less than my specialist copay when I did have insurance in the US. Quick, someone figure out what Thailand is doing right!!

Anyway, I don’t want to make Bangkok sound like some generic city. It most certainly is not! For example, I don’t think you would find mall art like this in the States:

Celebrating Year of the Rat

And you have to appreciate street signs like this:

They did not lie. It was Thai food. It was very good. And it was cheap.

I also wouldn’t expect a bank to advertise by getting endorsements from what appears to be a K-Pop band:

I thought to myself, “There’s no way this is just a random group of girls advertising for a bank.” So I looked up BlackPink and it turns out they are a a super popular South Korean girl band. Their music is actually kind of catchy😆.

Unfortunately, one major difference between New York City and Bangkok is the air quality. It was extremely hazy when we were there: it had a 150 Air Quality Index or AQI. For reference, New York City typically clocks in around 40 AQI and puts out a warning when it exceeds 50 AQI. The face mask I brought to combat coronavirus probably helped me more with the pollution than anything else. Apparently it gets worse in Bangkok around this time of year due to the lack of rain 🤷‍♀. On our flight back to Bali, we could even see the layer of smog enveloping the city from the window.

One final thing I’ll say about the trip is that I also bought myself a watch at the Duty Free store. 😍 I’m absolutely obsessed with it! It has a slight pinkish tint and it’s water proof.

It’s a Swatch! ❤

I’ve actually been meaning to buy a new watch for a while, but I’ve been postponing this purchase for so long that it actually made it onto my list of random goals for the next 12 months.

Proof that I have goals.

Yup, that’s an actual picture of a list I wrote a few weeks ago, right when I came to Bali. I was struggling to figure out how I wanted to spend my time in lieu of my 9 to 5 job. In Timothy Ferriss’s “4 Hour Work Week,” the author emphasizes that the goal of reducing time spent working is not to get more free time but to spend more time on the things that give you joy. Creating an unfiltered set of desires for the next 12 months seemed like a good approach to coming up with a plan, and I ended up with an interesting and somewhat random list.

Of course it’s a little filtered here though! I’m not ready to bare my entire soul, but right in the middle of the page you can see that I wanted to “buy a functional but stylish watch!” Even though it’s a small accomplishment, it still feels satisfying to be able to actually cross something off of this list.

Snorkeling Time!

You know what else long term (and short term) vacationers do in Bali? They get involved in the ocean. Yesterday, we went snorkeling around Nusa Lembongan — an island just southeast of Bali, and I brought my new swanky watch hehe 😎. We went to three snorkeling spots, and at the first spot we actually saw some manta rays. Holy moly they’re big! 🙇‍♀️ There were three of them foraging with their mouths open wide and it felt so surreal watching them. With wingspans larger than me, they looked so graceful. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to capture pictures of the manta rays, but I do have a few other photos and a video of the the later two snorkeling spots we were at.

I’m holding on to combat motion sickness on our speedboat from Bali to Nusa Lembongan! 🤢

A candid shot of the whole gang (including Ryan’s friends Eric and Chika on the left) on our private boat. We’re on our way to the first snorkeling spot Manta Bay, known for its manta rays.

I fought my sea sickness and made it into the water at our second snorkeling spot.

Next post, I’m going to be switching things up a bit and actually let you in on some of the journaling and reflection that I’ve been up to. Hope you enjoyed the update on our ventures this time around and get ready to get personal!