You’ll need a holiday after tackling Bali’s nightmare airport queues

Ngurah Rai Airport, Bali. You “debark”, as Americans economically put it, into an arrival hall so large that your Airbus might have taxied right in and saved everyone a walk. Meanwhile, Bali awaits just a few paces and minutes away.

And then you see them. Two hundred, 300 people – who’s counting? – planeloads, all ahead of you in lines, wandering bewildered or hopping from queue to shuffling queue, questioning those in the queues in front: “Am I in the right line?” Who knows? It turns out I am in the right one, the “visa on arrival” payment queue where you surrender 500,000 rupiah ($50) in order to queue for the next queue. Good morning, Indonesia.

After an hour of queueing for queues, I stagger out into actual Bali.Credit: Jamie Brown

Passengers are paying in dollars, euros, pesos, yuan, rubles, zlotys, you-name-it. The officials, long proficient in receiving foreign funds, accept them via card, cash or bank transfer. The delays, considerable, are all with us, the jet-lagged bules (foreigners) wrestling with phone signals, passwords, verification codes, downloads and the random digital humiliations that a banknote never inflicts.

Courtesy of a simple Australian $50 note, I clear the visa fee rank, only to move onto the immigration line, a sort of human cattle crush. Snaking lines of hundreds of foreigners shuffle forward by the centimetre, dazed and bemused, worrying afresh about whether they’re in the right line. They are, but for many, unnecessarily so. A few metres away, 30 gleaming electronic gates stand unused except by a few locals and visa-exempt ASEAN passport holders.

Another 20 minutes creep by in this petty pace on the imigrasi conga line. My turn comes and goes, smoothly. Now officially stamped into Indonesia, I brace for the next round of potential Do-Not-Pass-Go: the person-free (and assistance-free) Electronic Customs Declaration terminal. Dozens of desperates on the same mission are milling around the eight or nine terminals. In fact, you can skip this step by declaring in advance and receiving your clearance code online. If only one knew.

The arrivals hall at Bali’s airport.Credit: iStock

We queue for combat with a terminal, hoping it will spit out a QR code ticket that then allows the bearer to head to the exit queue. After 10 minutes it’s my turn, but a notice declares: “The printer is not working. Please take a picture of your QR code and proceed to the customs check-point.” I’m about to do so when, contrarily, the printer jerks awake and churns out my QR pass. Terima kasih for small mercies.

Heading towards the hopefully ultimate queue, I see a prominent notice advising, “Scan here for any immigration clearance complaint”. You bet! All around I’ve seen perplexed phone fumblers, non-digital natives and the elderly, stalled in tech-wrecked anguish. Nowhere, but nowhere is any official assistance in evidence. I scan the immigration complaints QR code and – voila! – it connects to nothing. Who’d have thought?

Move on. There’s light at the end of the queue. The Whack-a-Mole routine – queue here, queue there, now over here – concludes with delivering your customs QR docket at the final desk. I then plod towards the exit, only to have my suitcase directed to, of course, a queue. The luggage security scan. I load the bag onto the conveyor. It rolls straight through the scanner, no alarms, no dramas. In fact, world-class fast. The secret: there are no staff on the other side monitoring the monitor.

After an hour of queueing for queues, I stagger out into actual Bali, aching for a Bintang, a massage and a week to get over it all before queueing again for departure. A local friend who’s patiently waited for me says, “Aussie passport – you could have just used an e-visa at the electronic gate.” If only one knew.