My arrival in Bali was very inauspicious. The first 30 minutes after arriving in Bali did not go very well. First in the immigration after I paid $10.00 fee for visa or arrival, the immigration officer looked at my passport and asked me to follow him to a room in the back. Another immigration officer, a relatively young guy, sat down in front of me and explained that they have problem with my passport – my passport does not have any page left for them to put on the visa on arrival sticker. And after some time he explained that the problem can be solved by paying a $50.00 fee to add an extra page to my passport. He wanted to know what I would like to do; like I had some choice. So I forked up three $20 bills, I did not have the exact change. In a matter of minutes he came back with a page added to my passport and the visa pasted on it and he did not bother to give me the $10 change. I was relieved to be done with the shake down and was anxious to move on a and forgot to ask my change. Any way, corruption, is alive and well in Indonesia. After I got my luggage and got through the customs Mah-day recognized me and waved. He was concerned that he may not recognize me and I may not recognize him so he spent some time going to the Omnikron website and looking at my picture there to refresh his memory of what I looked like. I was relieved to see Mah-day after the shake down and extortion by Indonesian Immigration. As we were going towards the car my forehead bumped into one of the poster boxes hung too low advertizing something or other. It has a pretty hard bump and I was afraid that I may have cut open skin on my right side of the forehead. But fortunately I did not see any blood. There was restaurant right there. We were able to get a small bag of ice that I used to ice the bump for the next hour and because of the timely icing the bump that swelled up a pretty big went down and did not cause me much of problem during my stay in Bali. And now that my Bali trip is complete and I am safely back home in California, I had no other unpleasant experience in Bali.
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