Help me with a 'plan': it can be conservative, or outrageous, I don't care!

The BBQ Pit
1

In the last 20 years or so I’ve been a card-carrying misanthrope (just for back story) but it means I have only one real-life friend. He’s going through shit of his own at the moment so I don’t want to ask HIM to help me make a plan. :slight_smile:

More back story…I moved in with my daughter and her two babies (at her behest) app 14 years ago. There’s been a few house-moves in the meantime, from one part of Aus to another and to another! I just packed my shit in a suitcase and shoved it in the removal van. Meh.

In the last couple of years, things have been tense between us. Her kids (my grandkids) are lazy little fuckers who do nothing to contribute to household harmony. Instead, they wanted a new kitten and a puppy and RATS, MUUUUM CAN I HAZ RATS. Yeah, me, Nanna, wasn’t consulted of course.

Long story (I’m sure you know where it’s going), kids don’t actually give two fucks about the pets they asked for. Me: “has anybody fed the kitties this morning, do they have fresh water??”. Dead silence. “Hey Kid 1, it’s your job to walk the doggie every morning, have you done it yet?” Kid 1 bursts into tears and says I’m a cruel grandmother for hassling him like that. Fucken rinse and repeat.

Aaaanyway, about a week and a half ago my daughter kicked me out of the house, for making it ‘too stressful’ for the fucking kids. Bwahahahha. I swear it’s more stressful for the rats with no clean water, cats who haven’t been fed and a poor doggo who has been holding onto her morning shit for four fucking hours before one of the kids finally takes her for a poop.

So, I booked a fucking flight out of Australia, and I’m here in Indonesia. A couple of weeks before my ‘eviction’ I’d accessed some of my superannuation (401k) in order to get my teeth fixed (extractions and dentures). So I thought to kill a couple of birds etc…get the fuck out of Mad Daughter’s Life, and fix my teeth.

BUT, now I’m here, I’m not sure I want to go back to Aus anytime soon. The dental work here is costing me a SHITLOAD LESS than I anticipated (like by 4k or more) so I have a few $$ to keep travelling.

Do I go back to Aus when my visa here in Indo runs out (and assuming the dental work is complete), or do I throw caution to the wind and piss off to somewhere else. I have nowhere to go back to in Australia and would need to apply for emergency accommodation the moment I landed.

Or? Give me some ideas folks!!

2

Indonesia is a big and wonderful place. Travel on your visa, send selfies to your daughter from beaches, volcanos, incredible ancient architecture. Show you are independent and do not need her, particularly, even though you love her and the kids.

I assume you are in Bali, being Aussie, but have a look at Sumba and Flores (especially Flores) and if you are a brave tourist, Kalimantan (my current number 1 goal in that area)

Enjoy a holiday, then… move out.

Get a home nearby your daughter. There is a famous theme, “I love children. Then I give them back to their parents”.

ETA, if you are in Bali, which has its own twist on Hinduism, and you don’t mind following a little “Eat, Pray, Love” style philosophy (not that I read the book or watched the movie), Northern India is really worthwhile and more cheap. Transport more reliable and much more English spoken.

I really liked Gujurat, but I am an adventure tourist… it was hard work. Rajasthan was totally easy and really worthwhile

I hope you enjoy the time away.

3

Late edit, @CairoCarol has had way more experience than I in Indonesia, she may well have better advice.

Jakarta is incredible, but crazy. Do not try to hire a car. I stayed in Bogor, which has a direct train to central Jakarta, then hired 3 wheel ‘tuk-tuks’ which come with a driver/guide/guy who wants to make a commission from steering you to his cousin’s business (India is similar)

If you are in Bali, and (presumably) you want peace and quiet, you can get a cheap bus ride to Padang Bai, a tiny resort town from where ferries to Lombok arrive and depart. Granted it was many years ago, but my ex girlfriend and I were spending a bit less than US$ 10 per day, for both of us - food, accomodation, everything.

It is much more relaxed than the Kuta hustle & bustle, cheaper, and has beautiful beaches.

4

Indonesia is pretty awesome, and cheap, but it’s quite difficult for foreigners to stay there legally for an extended period of time - and if you overstay your visa, there can be severe consequences, from being deported to even being jailed.

I left Indonesia in 2018 and I believe the laws regarding visas have changed since then (plus I was never trying to stay without either having a work visa or being the permitted spouse of someone with a work visa) but I recommend signing up for and asking questions of this forum, which is specifically intended to help expats in Indonesia. The members can be a bit coarse toward newcomers so be prepared to take a bit of shit, but the advice on what your options are to remain in Indonesia legally, and how much it will cost, is generally spot on. Plenty of the posters are from Oz, so they’ll be able to advise regarding which Australian benefits can follow you to Indonesia (I seem to recall that not all health care received in Indonesia will be covered by Australia’s health care program, but I am far from experienced on that score).

Indonesia has some advantages - beautiful country, inexpensive, nice people, gaining basic conversational skills in the national language is not too difficult - but it’s also not necessarily the right choice, primarily due to visa difficulties and crappy health care. A friend of mine just decided to retire slightly early and take his pension to somewhere where it would go farther than in the US. I believe he carefully checked out Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and perhaps Vietnam too. He chose Thailand, due to its welcoming visa policy for foreign retirees and excellent, inexpensive health care. I’d probably recommend researching those options yourself.

Were I to plan on staying long term in Indonesia without employment and/or family supports, personally I’d probably go for somewhere on Java (NOT Jakarta). Bogor and Bandung are a bit cooler; Solo and Yogyakarta have extraordinary arts & culture, and relatively decent tourist infrastructure. But that’s just me; it’s a big country and there are many choices. Bali is certainly awesome, and used to have a pretty tolerant look-the-other-way attitude toward foreigners overstaying their visas. But that may well have changed.

5

First and foremost, your “home” sounds like a nightmare. I would never live there again if I were you. So, unless you actually want to and can afford to travel in perpetuity as if you were banished from your homeland, the plan would be to secure a permanent home in Australia and not even tell those people where you are.

6

I am in the middle of a similar voyage of personal discovery and rearranging where and how I live after some unpleasant domestic changes. So I’ve thought a lot about that aspect of our lives and how to maximize my performance on a new chapter. So …


IANA expert on Southeast Asia tourism. But friends who are tell me it’s cheap and great fun.

Your bigger issue is where and how to reside, not how to vacation. You might find that 1 month each in three countries and you’re now quite ready for familiar food and accents in dear old Oz. Or you may find the opposite. My advice is to try this experiment - predictions are useless; only experience can answer the question.

So my advice is to not take this time in Indonesia and act like a tourist seeing the usual sights and swilling the usual drinks. Instead “practice” trying to live there like a local for a week or 3. While looking at which other nearby country(ies) would also be plausible long-term residences. Then go there and do that again.

I recall one of my US friends telling me of a US friend of his living in IIRC Thailand effectively indefinitely on a tourist visa. IIRC … the laws require him to leave Thailand for 3 days every three months to “renew” his ability to enter Thailand and stay another 3 months. So he grabs a cheap flight to e.g. Saigon, hangs out there vacationing for 3 days, and flies back home to Thailand. Where they stamp his US passport with a fresh 3-month authorization. Lather, rinse, repeat. All fully legal and aboveboard.

You probably want to look into which country(ies) offer these sorts of low-effort renewals. Plus which ones make longer term permanent resident status easy to obtain.

There are certainly websites dedicated to people trading ex-pat info. You can Google as well as I can.


If at the end of the experiment you go back to Oz, pick your spot with no regard for daughter & grands. You are not responsible for that family, and they are not responsible for you.

As you know far better than I, Australia’s a big country with lots of different environments to be had. Try one quite different from where you have lived. East coast, west coast, north coast, south coast, inland, Tasmania? Big city, small city, etc.

IIRC it’s sort of easy for Aussies and Kiwis to live in the opposite country. Easier than for folks from other countries at least. I’m thinking mostly from a legal / immigration perspective, but AIUI the cultural fit is pretty close too. There’s a lot of NZ that’s quite different from anywhere available in AU. You might try that on for size too.

Good luck with the adventure ahead!

7

Although your point about not living like a tourist is well taken, there is no such thing, at least for many years and without marrying locally, as “living like a local” in Indonesia, and probably in the rest of SE Asia. Lack of language skills, greater wealth (real or perceived), and ignorance about local customs will always set you apart. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a good life as a foreigner, or that you will not ever integrate effectively into the local culture, but if you go expecting to be accepted as a local, to live just like a local, and to have local friends who don’t see the foreigner first and the human being second, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

The Westerners who are successful at making a new life for themselves in SE Asia (and there are many of them) are the ones with realistic expectations, not those who expect to have a “normal” local lifestyle right away. That simply ain’t happening.

8

Don’t give up on your family. Living in the same house can strain even the best relationships. Try to find the best in the kids. They sound like pretty normal kids and will likely grow up to be fine people. They’re pretty self-centered at that age (teenagers?). Stuff like not caring for pets or grandparents is not that unusual.

Unless you have a ton of money, I would recommend going back to Aus and using the $4k windfall to find a place to live rather than vacation. That $4k is not free money. It’s your retirement nest egg. If you normally wouldn’t take $4k from your account to go on vacation, then you probably shouldn’t go on vacation with this $4k. Going on vacation might be fun and helpful to clear your mind, but that might all be for naught if you are left with $0 and no place to live afterwards.

9

Don’t listen to filmore, he’s always fucking boring. Live it up! Head to Singapore. That’s where the real action is. Eat some black pepper crab, hang out with the crazy rich asians, learn mahjong! In about a week when you’ve run through the $4k, fly back to Oz, rescue those poor animals, rehome them with better deserving animal parents, make another 401k withdrawal and head out again somewhere new, and live it up!!!

You said outrageous was okay.

10

Yeah, that takes years. Even in the US moving from say Colorado mountains to NYC, or visa versa.

That’s not to say you won’t be accepted, at least in the states. Depending on the very local culture you run into. Colorado is pretty tough on this. With all the ‘Colorado Native’ bumper stickers we used to have.

I do agree with taking off for a little bit. Explore some. Seems like the OP was in an untenable spot. Time to live their life.

11

Although I agree absolutely with @CairoCarol post, the language Bahasa Indonesia is really easy to pick up. I was up and running in about 3 days, the first time I went - negotiating prices, asking directions, etc.

There are two complications, formal Bahasa is much more complex than colloquial Bahasa, with a bunch of weird tense rules, and as a permanent resident applicant you need to take a test to show you know formal Bahasa. Secondly, it is largely based on Javanese, and as you travel east, further from Java, fewer and fewer people speak Bahasa.

However, what is not to love about a language that uses onomatopoeia so creatively: a single duck is ‘bebek’, a flock of ducks is ‘bebek bebek’.

Orangutan is “orang utan” - people of the forest.

Completely fascinating country, and with 4K cash in hand, I would be into Kalimantan, Papua, and all sorts of weird off the tourist route islands.

12

Agreed. I probably said that more strongly than I meant, or at least used words that meant something in the context inside my head that’s different from what they mean in my audience’s heads.

What I really meant was to go to [whichever] country with the attitude of "While I’m here I’m testing the waters to live here ", not “while I’m here I’m partying / visiting museums / napping by a hotel pool with a frou-frou drink”. Visit grocery stores, not trinket shops. Tour housing, not museums, etc. Take public transportation, or at least whatever form of taxicab is used by locals, not by tourists. Immerse yourself in the reality of the alien-ness of it.

To be sure, in a week or even a month you (any you) won’t know what it’s really like to live there as an ex-pat. But if you find your “practice ex-pat” attitude hard to hold, or it’s actively off-putting to do, well there’s your answer. Doing the ex-pat gig is not for you.

All the above would be true for an Aussie trying on the USA or UK for size. It’s just far more daunting in a culture very different from your own.

13

I agree. Had the same epiphany in a vacation spot we’d visited every year.

The minute we decided to look into moving there, I followed your plan, and it was eye-opening. The city was far less “fun”, and I found myself thinking “Well, if I lived here, I wouldn’t be heading to the beach and stopping to browse this cool open-air market for gourmet foods, I’d be taking a bus to that depressing local supermarket for utterly ordinary staples.”

But that was in the US…

Indonesia? That’d be beautiful even on a budget!

14

kambuckta:

I really think you need to discuss your financial situation for people to give good advice. In another thread you say:

And secondly, I am in a far more precarious financial position than any of the beneficiaries. I have never owned a home, I live week to week on government benefits (due to chronic health conditions) and I will probably be unable to return to work before retirement age (67 here in Aus).

Will all the government benefits (money, health insurance…) continue to pay if you reside outside Australia?

Personally I wouldn’t feel comfortable living outside my home country with the combination of chronic health problems and few financial assets at the age of 63 even if the cost of living was lower.

15

Your daughter and the grandkids: if you were there 14 years and they were babies when you got there I’m assuming they are teenagers. Which we all know is horrible. It passes.
I bet you were more of a parent than that fun Grandma.
This is possibly where you erred.
If so, you stepped on your daughters territory.
She was rightly at odds with you there.
You may not agree with her parenting style and should tell her. But acting on that is not what you should do.

It is best you are separated at the moment.
Enjoy a trip. Go home and find a place to live. Reconnect with boundaries set.
It’s not your problem to re-home the pets. If they are seriously mistreated/neglected call the humane society on them.

Finally, shame on your daughter for evicting you.
If it was my daughter she’d have a boot in her ass.

Good luck with the dental stuff, have a safe trip.

16

True, “taxi Bahasa Indonesia” is pretty easy to learn. But not only is formal Indonesian much harder, colloquial Indonesian can be almost impenetrable when spoken by people under the age of 40, unless you are steeped in the local culture. I don’t have a cite, but I know that I’ve read (and probably was told in person by John U. Wolff, who was head of the linguistics department at Cornell when I studied Indonesian with him) Indonesian is one of the fastest changing languages in the world. My Indonesian language teacher in Washington who trained State Department officials had lived in the US for 5 or 10 years before I met her; she said she had difficulty following colloquial Indonesian even after that relatively short absence. Never mind the fondness for acronyms (ABS being an eternal favorite) and portmanteau neologisms.

Sorry if I sound like I’m pushing back on your comments. It’s just that, as someone who studied the language seriously and then lived for 17 years in Indonesia, I shared many an eyeroll with Indonesians and competent foreign speakers, when people who could do little more than direct a taxi or bargain for a piece of batik proclaimed how easy Indonesian is. Sure, if all you want to do is tell your driver where to go or tell the maid to buy groceries for you. If you want to read Kompas, (a comprehensive newspaper that covers national news) it’s not especially simple.

I think Indonesian is ranked somewhere in the middle (3 out of 5) in terms of difficulty for a native English speaker to learn. Easier than Thai, harder than Spanish. But I’m working off of memory and don’t know who is even in charge of setting such rankings.

17

There ya go! That is an EXCELLENT set of suggestions.

18

Thanks all. I’m already more of a ‘local’ tourist, happy to use public transport, shop where the locals shop, avoid trinkets like the plague…although it was impossible for me to buy a bottle opener the other day that WASN’T shaped like a friggin’ penis. :stuck_out_tongue:

I shall wait until my teeth are done (first impressions being taken today) before making any decisions about ‘where to’ after Bali. I might feel even MORE adventurous and confident, who knows?

19

When it comes to living more like a local, if you’re staying at a hotel, think of moving out and finding a place like a B&B or boarding house. That would help to stretch your $, enable you to stay longer and see more of what living there is like.

How long is your visa good for? Do you have a return ticket to AUS, and if you do, does it make sense to change it (if possible) so that you can also go and check out another country or 2, like Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines?

And, agreeing with @Beckdawrek, shame on your daughter for evicting you!

20

Not staying at a hotel, a homestay which is predominantly occupied by local singles and families, and works out to around 2mIDR or $200 AUD per week. I’m not a swish hotel person, and have stayed here previously and found it perfectly situated with all the shit I need. It’s clean, a comfortable bed (not all that common in SE Asia, good wifi, hot water and it’s quiet despite being on a main road. :slightly_smiling_face:

And I didn’t book a return flight to Aus and strangely, wasn’t asked for proof either in Aus or when landing in Bali. So I’m pretty much free to go wherever I bloody-well like when I decide to leave here.