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his refers to a letter titled '€œOn visa on arrival'€, (The Jakarta Post, July 13, p8) by Björn Schimanski, Denpasar.

We were at the Bandung airport and experienced similar issues. We entered Indonesia from Bali and were planning to exit from Bandung back to Kuala Lumpur.

When we arrived in Bali 30 days ago, immigration gave us the 30-day free visa. Immigration had asked as us to show our outbound ticket and we did, but did not tell us that it was not possible to exit the country from Bandung.

After having already checked in with AirAsia in Bandung, immigration told us that we couldn'€™t fly and that there was nothing we could do.

We spoke with an AirAsia supervisor and they didn'€™t do anything to help us. They didn'€™t even offer us a possible solution to our problem.

We spent all afternoon looking for possible solutions and ended up booking a flight for tomorrow morning to Medan and from there to Kuala Lumpur.

We will spend the night at the airport and pray that tomorrow we will be able to fly out of Indonesia.

Both immigration and AirAsia were not helpful. I don'€™t understand why Air Asia sold us the tickets if they knew our nationality and the laws.

When we first arrived in Indonesia at the Bali airport, it was only a few days after they applied the new visa legislation. I had checked the visa policies at my local Indonesian Embassy website before traveling and there was no notice of new legislation.

I will try to make a formal complaint with the airline but we have already lost time and money.

D. Mariani
Bandung