Palembang - City adventures

After my long travel I decided visiting a big city would be a nice opportunity for having a break, before heading on to the south. Extending my 30-day Visa could be done here, too. 😎
Finding my best price-value for accommodation in Sumatra, for now (10€ for two nights) in a quite clean private room, brought me some guests into my clothing. 🙈 No, no bed-bugs, but some ants were beginning to build a colony in my small packing cube 😱 As I've found them just before departure, no time for a laundry anymore, getting some ant poison and putting everything in plastic bags, made it, for now. Luckily no needed clothing was affected. 😅
So after getting some rest from my long trip, I went to immigration office, in the south of the city. My first time riding on bike taxis in a big city in Sumatra was nice, adrenaline kicked well, sometimes 😬
After struggling a little bit with the Indonesian bureaucracy, the very helpful officer there found me a guy, who would "guarantee" for me, during my extended stay. I've only seen this guy for 5 seconds, he didn't want to take any money from me, just telling me, I hopefully enjoy my trip. 😅🥰
Next obstacle was, there was a national holiday on Thursday and processing my visa until Wednesday would very likely not work. After some begging from my side, I was told to come again the next day, close to office's closing time, perhaps it could work out. And bringing some food, then, would be nice. 😲🙄🤔😅😂🤣😂
Ok, grabbing some nice cakes from a fancy bakery on my way, tomorrow, was on my to-do list. 😬
But the next obstacle was already waiting literally around the corner: ATM outside the immigration office decided to have an error and take my credit card. 😱
All in all I can deal with obstacles, but that was kind of a worst-case scenarios, as using my spare card would cost me huge amounts of fees and getting a new card from home would take ages.
Furthermore I found out that my Indonesia tourist SIM card had no balance for calls left.🙈
Not being able to call ATM's bank Hotline, only little amount of local cash left, felt not good. 😑
But, as usual, some amazing locals were around: some guys from immigration office's security services did amazing efforts to help me!
So, to cut a long story short:
I was invited to some martabak, while waiting for the bank's calling back. When it was clear, there's no solution on the same day, they told me exactly to which bank office to go the next morning and gave me a free lift back to my hotel. 🥰
Next day at the bank's office, many more extremely helpful people taking care, telling me they'll call me soon. Half an hour later my friends from the immigration office called me to tell me my card is on the way to the bank office, another half hour later I got it back 🤩😅
Finally, I think, it won't be possible to get back your card within less than 24hrs in Europe 🤔
So got some cash for the bakery, taking fancy cakes to the immigration officers, got my Visa. 😎
Getting some more cakes, for the amazing guys from the immigration office's security services. 😅
Made some new friends, had some challenging, interesting, but finally nice experiences. Some time for shopping in Palembang was still left, before my leave, further on to the south. 😎Leggi altro