Living in Bali: What a Long Stay Is Really Like
A great many people arrive in Bali for two weeks and leave wondering what it would be like to stay. A smaller number come back and try it, and almost all of them report the same thing: the island they lived on turned out to be a rather different place from the island they had holidayed on, mostly for the better and occasionally not.
The first change is that the holiday economy stops applying to you. Two weeks of restaurant meals, drivers and beach clubs is a holiday budget; six months of it is unsustainable, and long-stayers quickly migrate to warungs, scooters, monthly villa rates and local markets. The good news is that this version of Bali is both dramatically cheaper and considerably more interesting than the visitor version.
Accommodation works completely differently at length. Nightly rates are for holidaymakers; monthly and annual rates for the same property can be a fraction of them, and much of the long-stay market never appears on the booking sites at all. It runs on local agents, community noticeboards and word of mouth, which means the first month is usually spent somewhere temporary while you find the real thing.
The administrative side is the part people underestimate. Visas, extensions, the rules on what you may and may not do while here, and the tax position if you are working all have real answers that change periodically, and getting them wrong ranges from expensive to seriously so. Anyone planning more than a couple of months should take proper advice rather than relying on what a stranger said in a café.
The practical texture of life takes some adjusting to. Power cuts and water interruptions happen. Wet season rain is genuinely torrential and can shut a day down. Damp gets into everything, from shoes to camera lenses. Nothing arrives when it was promised. None of this is a hardship, but it is a different rhythm from a European city, and the people who settle happily are the ones who stop treating it as a series of failures.
The social side is unexpectedly easy and worth working at. Bali has a large, unusually open long-stay community, and it is not difficult to meet people through co-working spaces, classes and sport. The people who last, though, tend to be those who also build relationships outside it - with neighbours, with the family who run the local warung, with a bit of Bahasa Indonesia - and the difference in the quality of the experience is considerable.
There are real drawbacks and it is worth naming them. The traffic in the south genuinely wears people down over months. Waste and water pressure are serious local issues. Healthcare is excellent privately and expensive to match. And there is a particular loneliness available to anyone who lives somewhere that everybody else is on holiday, which is a stranger feeling than it sounds.
Most people who try it, though, extend at least once. What they tend to describe is not paradise but something more useful: a place where the daily texture is warm, the outdoors is always available, life costs less than it does at home, and the ordinary business of getting through a week is somehow lighter. That is a good deal, and it is worth knowing that it is available for longer than a fortnight.