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Tales & Stories The Beginning of our Family Adventure

The Road to Indonesia: Week 4, Fun & Preparations

Intro

The 4th week is already behind us, and a lot has happened again. This was a week were we have done a lot of research and made some big decisions regarding bookings, dates and planning. Let’s have a recap. 

Monkey Town & Friends

The week started of really well. A few good friends of us just had some free days planned and came to drop by with their family. We wanted to go to Butterfly / Botanical Garden with our kids, but unfortunately it was closed when we arrived. However, this was actually a blessing in disguise, because that’s when we decided to go to Monkey Town. Monkey Town is an awesome fun big play area for kids were they can run, climb, jump and play around, and were the parents secretly also can become a little kid again. Our daughter has just turned 1, and we always said that we wanted to go there with her when she was a little bit older. We thought that would not happen anymore since we are moving of course. However, since the son of our friends is around 2 years old, we still had a good excuse to go with all of us.

In the end, our little daughter also really enjoyed it, and we literaly saw her discovering & developing herself as well that day. It was a great start of the week, and we can now also check Monkey Town of our check list before we leave The Netherlands ✅😁.

Flying Tickets, Baggage & Customs

We did a lot of research of all the options with every different flying carrier around. Emigrating with a baby is of course different then just booking a flight for a holiday. Even though we are going to sell almost everything, we are still taking some things with us and how we take that stuff with us, can be a big difference in price but also insurance that it will arrive safely. Booking extra suitcases on a flight is quite expensive. For 2 extra suit cases we often payed around €1000; more on the flight ticket. For that price you can almost go back and fort if you search well for it. Besides the extra kilo’s for which you have to pay, there is of course also customs.

There is a vague rule that within the first 90 days, KITAS holders can bring in their stuff without import duty. However, I say vague for a reason, because apparently this can also change a lot depending of were you enter Indonesia and who of customs you have in front of you. So finding out which carrier charge what for which services, how to deal with customs, and the big question how and which stuff are we going to take with us, is one of the biggest time consuming topics of this week. However in General there are a few things that we’ve learned and like to point out:

  • Qatar is one of the few flights that allows you to take 30 kg in each suit case (as of this writing) .
  • We also noticed that if you are bringing animals on your journey, that Qatar is also one of the best flight carriers regarding to the well being of your pet.
  • Qatar is known for his great service (and for us they never dissapoint), but taking extra kilo’s with you is also quite expensive. In that case some carriers are cheaper.
  • Turkish Airlines has some great deals, but unfortunately in our case, their customer service was horrible. The line breaks up half the time, their English is often really bad, and I can’t say they were that friendly. This gave us some doubts if we should continue with them, and after reading also a lot of terrible reviews, we decided to not go with them.
  • Some carriers allow you to take a lot of extra baggage when you go business or first class. Depending on the time and price, this can sometimes be cheaper than only paying for extra baggage.
  • Customs seems to be quite difficult in Indonesia, but there are agents who also are willing to help you prepare for this. For a price of course.
  • You can also send your baggage trough a service like “world wide baggage service”. For what I see now, this is much cheaper than taking it with you on the plane. Again, after talking with some of those services, I’ve heard several times that shipping to Indonesia is more difficult than comparing to other countries, because of customs. Most of them recommend to use a local agent or partner of them, so that there will be no surprises. This is one of the options that we are currently looking into.

Insurance: Safety Wings vs Allianz

When moving abroad, things like health, travel & liability insurances can be a big topic to go trough. Questions like, what happens with my old insurances, can I keep them and/or do they cover the country I’m moving to? If not, which companies are willing to cover us, and for what?

The answer to these questions are quite different for everyone. Depending of your residency, nationality but also the place were you want to live. This becomes especially difficult if you are world traveller and you have not a registered residency anymore.

Insurance: Safety Wings

However, I was happy to find out that there are a few companies who are solely focussed on the world traveller type. One of the most recommended ones of them is “Safety Wings”. They are flexible, not that expensive, have a great location coverage area, and seems to also be able to handle the most claims. Because of this flexible nature, we’ve chosen that for the transfer period we will at least use Safety wings for our Health & Travel insurance. We maybe also have some active dutch insurances, just for the transition phase.

Insurance: Allianz

However, since Safety Wings doesn’t cover most things regarding pregnancy or heavy costs like cancer treatment, we most likely move to a local insurance policy in the future. Once we have been completely settled in Indonesia and consider it as our home. One of the insurance companies we are looking into is Allianz. As from a first impression and for what we saw in the first quote, they were really reasonable and they cover a lot of different costs, including costs regarding pregnancy. For now we cannot tell much more about them, but we will get back to that topic most likely in a different post.

*Pro Tip: When comparing insurances, be sure to check out the fine prints & coverage. Most people tend to mix up travel insurance with full blown health insurances, which is not the same. A travel insurance often provides some health insurance, but just good enough to lap you up and fix you so that you can go back to your home country to get proper treatment. They often not cover living a broad for years. Some do, but it is really important to check the fine prints in these cases.

BBQ & Enjoying Eindhoven

I don’t know what it is, but I think that this is one the best summers in The Netherlands since years. So of course we had another BBQ and parties that we attended. I’m actually not sure if expats are often BBQ’en in Indonesia, but if they don’t, then it is definitely one of the things that I’m going to miss once we leave The Netherlands.

Alright that’s it.
Thank you for reading again, and see you in the next post

Samir & Sarana
TTWLB