How to get a visa extension in Bali

1. Find the nearest Immigration Office (Kantor Immigrasi).
2. Go to one man behind a counter to get the documents and forms you need to apply for a VOA extension and a red cover for them. This will cost you a small fee, 10,000 rupiah to be precise.
3. Fill in the forms.
4. Go to a lady behind a desk who will check if you have attached everything they need. This would be:
   A copy of your passport, a copy of the passport page showing your visa on arrival, a copy of your ticket out of the country.
5. You will get a number from the lady and be told to wait until "her friend" will tell you it is your turn.
6. You sit down to wait, wondering why you are waiting when nobody is standing in front of the counter.
7. You wait a bit more and so does the other tourists.
8. A nice French girl who is in to pay for her visa tells you that you do not have to wait, nobody will call your number.
9. You give the man behind the counter the filled in paperwork and your passport and he tells you to sit down and wait again.
10. Your name is called and you get a slip with your visa application number and are told to come back in two working days to pay the Application Fee of 250,000 Rp.
11. You come back two working days later to pay at the cashier. This produces a pink paper for the cashier, a yellow paper for her colleagues behind the Visa Application Counter and a white copy for you. They all say that you have paid the Application Fee.
12. You are told to go to the Visa Application Counter to hand them your reciept.
13. They have a look at it and write down the date when you can pick your visa and passport up. This date will be two working days later.
14. Two working days later, you arrive to pick up your passport. The immigration office is full of other foreigners also waiting for their passports.
15. You wait, wait and wait a bit more until your name is called and you get your passport at the counter.

The funny thing is that the stamp is from the day you paid, which means your passport has been sitting in the immigrations office for at least one day before you were allowed to pick it up.
You can avoid the going back and forth to the Immigrations Office by paying your hotel or one of all the local travel agencies, shop keepers (or who ever offers to do it for you) the neat sum of 800,000 Rp. If you need an extension in Bali, it might actually be worth paying them to do it. Best thing is, in Jakarta it will take one day at the most to go through that same procedure. Our suspicion is that this is all done to boost the economy in Kuta and South Bali.

For a person living in Vienna, this felt almost like dealing with the authorities back home though. Maybe the Viennese administration was the role model used in Indonesia after independence from the Netherlands?