Moving to Bali

We're a week away from our first holiday since moving to Bali and I wanted to write a little about our initial experiences in the hopes that it will be useful or interesting for those wanting to move here who don't have a lot of resources. I've tried to provide details of costs and services we used where appropriate. We had neither money or opportunity when we decided to move, but we made it work, and I'm sure others could do the same.

Background

A year ago Doug and I were living in Melbourne, and had only been back 12 months after nearly 2 years travelling in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. We just weren't cut out for the city anymore and even though we both had decent jobs and a nice apartment, we felt stifled and somewhat unhappy with our lifestyle. We were spending a fortune on short breaks, and we'd just completed a 4 week sailing trip in Indonesia's eastern islands and had stopped for a day in Bali on the way home. We were eating in a restaurant in Ubud and I noticed Doug smiling around him - looking young and happy and totally comfortable. He told me he had always wished he could live in Bali and I decided then and there that was what we were going to do.

Unfortunately all that travel had left us pretty light on financially. We didn't have the money to just get up and go, so I had to think of a way to make it happen. I approached the owner of the web development company I was working for in Melbourne, offering to take a significant pay cut to be able to continue my work for the company remotely. He turned me down, but he did offer me the possibility of working out of a satellite office in Bali and managing some programmers that they could outsource work to. He stressed that it would be an experiment, and there was a distinct possibility it might not work and I would be left without a job in Bali. I took him up on the offer anyway - no reward without risk...

At first the plan was to move in 6 months, but there was so much work that my boss encouraged me to leave earlier, and in the end it was less than 3 months from the day I wrote him an email on the subject until our arrival in Bali.

The Result

12 months later we are living in Bali, much happier, much more relaxed, and I often see that wonderful smile on Doug's face. The experiment was very successful - I started out with 6 programmers in the office and will have 13 in a few weeks, and we'll still have too much work! I haven't missed home once, have never spent even a minute regretting our decision. It was the right one for us. Financially we are a lot better off, even after my pay cut (and a performance-based raise I got after my first 6 months made up for a lot of that, it's easier to be a good worker when you are a happy worker!). We've been able to save nearly 3 times as much as we could in Melbourne with a lot less income.

Preparation

Marriage: After doing a LOT of research we decided for legal and visa purposes it was going to be a whole lot easier for us to be married. In Australia you can get special dispensation for a quick marriage (otherwise you need to give a month's notice) from your employer if you need to work overseas (I assume this rule is intended for the military). This dispensation was granted and we were married within 2 weeks and able to apply for our visas.

Visas: My boss already had a friend with a web development office here (we work out of the same office now) who was able to sponsor me for a work permit and KITAS. The company in Australia paid for it. It was USD1200 for my work permit, and we paid Concord Services to organise it and a KITAS for both of us, at about IRP 7 million ($780) each. We had to pay extra for Doug's KITAS because there is no Indonesian law that covers the male spouses of women working in Indonesia. He therefore had to apply for a "special" KITAS, because no civil servant in Jakarta was willing to call him my dependent. I now have 2 employers - the company here in Indonesia and the company in Australia. I get paid half in Australian dollars and half in Indonesian rupiah, and have to pay tax in both countries (obviously). However, this still works out better than being taxed on my full wage in Australia. I'm explaining this in case anyone would like to make a similar arrangement with their boss. I get paid in rupiah at an agreed exchange rate which is reviewed from time to time, based on my Australian annual wage.

Concord services did a good job of arranging the visas at short notice. We still had to pay nearly $300 in Australia for our "temporary" visas based on the telex visa faxed to us from Jakarta, that allowed us to get our KITAS when we arrived. We had those visas within 6 weeks and our KITAS just 2 weeks after arriving in Bali (this involved 1 trip to immigration and 1 to the POLDAS, police station, to which we were escorted by an employee of Concord who ensured everything went smoothly).

Home: Given that I was starting work just 3 days after our arrival, we really wanted to have somewhere to live organised before leaving Australia. It's not an ideal way to house hunt, but it worked out pretty well for us. We put a "wanted to rent" advert in the Bali Advertiser (it only cost about $5 I believe) and got a lot of responses, mostly from real estate agents flogging overpriced villas, but quite a few from private owners, and there were some good options among those. I'll explain more about the places we've lived later on.

Packing up: We put all of our household furniture etc in storage in Melbourne for the first 6 months, just in case anything went wrong and we needed to return to the country. It cost us $140/month to rent the storage space.

Living in Bali

Home: We were lucky enough to find a very cheap option for our first four months, since the cost of moving had bled us a bit. We paid IRP5 million($550)/month to stay in a lovely little furnished house in the ricefields in Kulibul, looking after 3 cats belonging to the French owner who was returning to France for a while. I'm so glad this was our introductory home in Bali. While only 10 minutes drive to work it's a perfectly quiet, wonderfully friendly Balinese neighbourhood. We made good Balinese friends there, got invited to some amazing ceremonies at the local banjar and generally had a great time. It's rapidly being developed there, but for now it's still peaceful & green and I loved going home to it every day after work. We hope to move back there soon. It's also a breezy area, a little cooler for some reason than its surrounding suburbs. The only drawback were the evil mosquitos!

We also arranged our next home in Bali from Australia. A Swedish woman has sublet us her house in Kerobokan (Umalas) for a year. In hindsight this house is a bit big and expensive for our tastes (we're simple people!) but it has been very nice to stay in and convenient. We paid IRP115million ($12,725) for the year, for a 2 story, 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom home with a private pool. It's nicely furnished and very close to the office - less than 5 minutes on the bike. It's close to Batu Belig beach, one of the quieter, more relaxing places for a sunset warung meal in the south that won't hurt your wallet. We LOVE the pool and will miss it very much. Over Christmas we had loads of family and friends stay with us and the house was full, but now it feels a bit ridiculous with the 2 of us occupying one small corner. I'm a great believer in only having what you need, so at the end of 12 months we'll look for a small local house in Kulibul (we've already been offered a few places from IRP35million ($3870)/year).

For those moving to Bali - if you love Bali for it's people, as we do, avoid the usual expat suburbs. The locals are a bit more jaded and less friendly in those areas. You'll be rewarded 10 times over finding somewhere a little bit out of the way, which we were lucky enough to do by accident. There are some great areas that are not much further from all the shops/action etc where you will still be greeted with smiles and waves from every man, woman and child you pass, and where strangers will stop to chat with you about the weather just because you are there, and not to sell you anything!

Do not forget - in Bali you almost always have to pay for at least a year up front when renting - we had to scrape up $15,000 AUD for the house we are in now. (The Oz dollar was a lot weaker then!)

Help: We have the best pembantu in the whole world bar none I'm certain. Illuh works only 3 hours a day, 5 days a week (I like my privacy on weekends) but somehow our house is always spotless and full of wonderful tropical flowers. She is sweet as anything, works very hard and is looking for a second job if anyone needs a hand near Umalas. She washes, irons and organises everything, from feeding the animals (we also inherited 2 animals with this house) to doing the shopping and paying the banjar and the rubbish collector. Half of the reason Bali is so relaxing is because of the wonderful Illuh. In return she gets IRP700,000 ($78)/month and seems happy with it, and we pay her children's school expenses. She is happy to come on weekends if we are going away to look after the animals and in general never complains and never misses a beat. She speaks no English at all, but communicates quite easily with gestures & our limited Bahasa Indonesia.

          Evening sea and black lava beaches at Jemeluk, near Amed, Bali           Plastic streamers serve to scare birds away from ripening rice at Kulibul, Bali           Reflection and offerings, 2011 Melasti ceremony, Seminyak beach, Bali           Villas encroach on ever shrinking ricefields at the popular expat enclave of Canggu, Bali           Last light pools on the beach as a storm sweeps in to Batu Belig, Bali           Tourism central: Jalan Monkey Forest, Ubud, Bali           A priest blesses revered carvings among the ancient bas reliefs of Yeh Puluh, Bali           Representation of Acintya, or Sanghyang Widi Wasa, the One God, Ubud, Bali           A wet season downpour flash floods the steps to a waterfall near Munduk, Bali           Javanese search offerings hoping to find cash after a 2011 Melasti ceremony at Seminyak, Bali Evening sea and black lava beaches at Jemeluk, near Amed, Bali

Learning Indonesian: We were quite determined before we left to have some of the language. We bought a couple of phrasebooks and tested each other nightly for 2 months before we arrived. Indonesian is the easiest language I have ever tried to learn, practical and simple if you just want to learn to communicate (being fluent is a different story of course, unless you have an Indonesian partner to learn with, you'll probably always sound a little slow!). I am sorry to say, 12 months down the road we probably remember less than we did on our first day! We've picked up lots of new useful words, but seem to have gotten to the point where we are learning different ways to say the same thing, which is where the learning starts tailing off and we become lazy. English is too convenient in the office, and I've found that our pronounciation is so bad in most cases (no matter how hard we try to improve) that most everyone prefers to use English. Just the same, I would never want to be here without being able to be polite and make myself understood in a language almost everyone speaks. If you intend to travel outside of the south on the island and feel less like an alien, you must learn the basics. Keep in mind that very young children and the very old might not speak Indonesian either, so it helps to have a few words of Bahasa Bali as well, because the smiles you'll elicit are well worth the trouble.

Work: Before we left Australia I was a bit concerned about how I would go working here as a manager. I knew that all the starting employees were Muslim men from Java and I was worried I would offend, or not be able to surmount the cultural differences. I posted on a few forums asking about managing employees in Indonesia and people were so negative - one person told me I'd be "eaten alive". They couldn't have been more wrong. Every employee in the office is polite, hard working, happy and easy-going. When I first arrived they had very little English, but they've improved out of sight! Their skills have likewise improved rapidly and their teamwork is better than I have seen in any Australian office. Even those who are fairly conservative never batted an eyelid at my status as the only female in the office, and the one giving the orders at that.

We now have Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist and Catholic Indonesians working in the office and they all get along great. We don't pay the highest wages in the industry, but enough to keep them happy and they have the same conditions of employment they would get in Australia, which I think is the big drawcard. They tend to arrive a few minutes late, but they try to complete work before they go home even if they have to stay back, which is impressive. Most telling of all, their work is making a lot of money for the company. It's indistinguishable from the work produced in Australia, follows the same processes and controls, and of course, wages and overheads are a fraction of what they are in Australia. Note: I would not recommend opening a business in outsourcing unless you already have a really good knowledge of the industry and can provide your employees with a lot of structure. Saying they work really well is not the same as saying there are no cultural differences. They are not great at working autonomously (and fair enough) and they need comprehensive instructions and easy to follow procedures to be at their most effective.We now need a much bigger office in Kuta or Denpasar where we can get fibre optic for our internet connection.

One thing that is difficult is recruiting skilled workers from Bali. Web development outsourcing is becoming very competitive in Indonesia (Rynet were looking for 50 programmers at the beginning of this year! I didn't think the available pool was that big) and we've had no results from advertising for staff, in print or on the internet. Almost all our developers have been found through the vast Facebook networks of our existing employees. I would really like to see the universities in Bali be more active about developing connections with potential employers. So far we've had to import almost all our programmers from Java, which is a shame because I'd like to offer jobs to Balinese as well. I would also like to see more expats start up outsourcing businesses in the information and technology sector (not competitors of course ;) - because Bali could have an information economy too, making it less prone to difficulties if the money in tourism dries up. It would also be great to see more technology training providers here.

Getting Around: This is the hardest part for me. I've never been fond of vehicles, they make me nervous. The traffic here can be horrific, and I now ride pillion on the back of Doug's scooter everywhere. I find it pretty terrifying, and every time I almost get comfortable, something happens to bring back the nerves. My ONE real complaint about Bali - the way other expats drive. I can't understand how when someone gets in their oversized SUV they suddenly think they are the only humans on the road. Just last weekend a bule in a blue van tried to overtake us (we were already doing about 70kms) on the road between Mengwi and Bedugul. He was never going to make it, there was a truck coming in the other direction, so he swung back in and smashed into the side of us. It was a miracle we weren't killed. He looked back, saw us wobbling straight towards the edge of the road, and sped off even faster. In my residential neighbourhood the foreigners who use motorbikes buy offroad bikes twice as big and fast as anything a local rides and do 100km/hour through an area filled with dogs and children. Their selfishness disgusts me. Please, if you come to Bali buy or rent a vehicle that isn't so big or so fast that you can't see the damage you are doing. Bali's roads are not western roads. They are full of small bikes, unexpected hazards and people - just like you.

We hire our scooter in Seminyak for IRP600,000 ($66)/month. It's a good bike, gets regularly serviced and does the job just fine. It costs almost nothing to run. The only time we ever wish it had a bit more grunt is on our long road trips when it really struggles to climb steep hills with the 2 of us and luggage on board (it's a 105cc Honda Vario). Occasionally I have had to get off (e.g. the back roads out of the northern side of the crater above Batur) and walk up the steepest parts of the hills! Unless you plan on tackling something like that, all you need is a little scooter.

Bureaucracy: It's not as bad as almost everyone says it is. If you are having trouble getting something done just ask an Indonesian friend to accompany you to the office. We had no trouble here at all opening bank accounts, getting the phone and internet on (all done in less time than it takes us in Australia) etc etc. My husband even got an Indonesian driver's license this way.

Moving from Australia: After 6 months it was clear to us that they'd have to drag us kicking and screaming back to Australia, and it made no sense to keep paying storage for our things in Melbourne. Doug's daughter Rachel kindly sold our furniture for us (thanks Rach!) which covered the cost of bringing everything else to Bali. We used Alltrans Indo Cargo from Melbourne and it cost us just under $1500 to have nearly 400kg of goods delivered in 3 days, door to door, no fuss and no customs problems. Thanks Tedja :) I'd recommend Alltans to anyone.

Shopping & Food: We are vegetarian, which isn't difficult in Bali but can get expensive unless you eat a lot of vegetarian nasi goreng. Mostly we eat out or have meals delivered from local restaurants, which isn't expensive and in Kerobokan there are tons of great options. Shopping we find a touch more difficult. When we first arrived we were determined to buy everything from markets and warungs like the locals, but that's harder than it sounds. We discovered that unless you have Balinese energy and capacity for finding things, it just takes waaaay too much time to shop this way if you are working full time. Having said that, markets are a good place to wander in and buy a bunch of fruit and vegetables. For everything else we use Canggu deli, or the Tiara Gatso supermarket which isn't too expensive and relaxing and quick.

For Fun: This is the best part about living in Bali. In Melbourne to have a weekend away we needed to hire a car and drive to a b&b that would cost at minimum $150/night. In Bali we just jump on the scooter and we've found dozens of places we love to stay to get away from all the rush of the south for between $15 and $30/night. Our favourite is Munduk, in the ialand's central mountains near Lake Tamblingan. We never get tired of the lovely cool air, the walks through the cloves, cocoa, rice and forest, the drives down winding hills through great scenery and the local teas and spices.

Ubud for galleries, museums and window shopping is 45 mins away on the back roads, Amed just 3 hours for a spot of snorkelling in some blue water (no offense to those who love Balinese beaches, but I wouldn't swim at any beach in the south if you paid me, as nice as they are for a meal at sunset). DVDs are cheap. Bars and restaurants with good bands are everywhere and if you want to really get away, Indonesian airlines can take you to hundreds of remote places for a fraction of the cost of a city break at home. This is why we wanted to live in Bali, and it hasn't disappointed us.

The Weather: I hear a lot of people complain about the heat, the rain in the wet season and the dust in the dry season, but it makes me laugh. If you don't appreciate a tropical thunderstorm, admittedly it's probably the wrong place for you. It can get very hot and muggy, so if you are bothered by that don't stay anywhere without a pool. A swim is an instant reviver. Apart from that, the weather is the other best reason to be in Bali. Note that the south is much, much hotter than anywhere else in Bali, but there are plenty of cool places just a short drive away...

Miscellaneous: Books - I don't know how people live without them. Periplus has mostly coffee table reading and through the roof prices, so we are frequenters of the many good used book stores here (try Nyoman across the road from the Semaya in Seminyak). Note though, this is still our biggest regular expense living here. We spend approximately IRP400,000 - 800,000 ($44-88) on books every few weeks. I enjoy non-fiction and those I mostly have to import. Which brings me to the other small annoyance...

Mail: We've had lots of mail go missing between here and Australia, including the CDs of our wedding photos (very disappointing!). If you have something you need to arrive, send it by Fedex (costs the earth) or have it delivered to friends and family at home and wait until you have visitors. The mail here cannot be trusted :(

Conclusion:

All you require to have a really great life here in Bali without having a lot of money is a good attitude, a little bit of imagination and determination to provide the income you need and an air ticket. Don't listen to negativity (unless it is just providing solid, factual advice). Just remember that close to perfect IS perfect for all reasonable people ;)

The Future:

As for us, next week we are off to Raja Ampat to experience even more of this beautiful country. In a couple of years we hope to have enough cash to do what we originally planned to do - move to the mountains. Then there's the Kyrgyz Horse Expedition. Further down the dreaming track is retiring to our mountain base to write and maybe open a small gallery for Doug's photographic work. We'll let you know how it goes!