Moving to Bali is easy enough. Making fly high yoga canggu life work is harder.

Here’s a few things you really should know before you move to Bali. How Much Does It Cost to Live in Bali? How much does it cost to live in Bali? How long is a piece of string? A solo chap could spend hundreds on fine dining, imported wines and expensive women or eat from local warungs for under a dollar. There is no fixed answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to spend more money than you thought you would. 2: Road Signs Run Perpendicular to Streets Everyone gets lost in Bali, all the time.

Where there are street signs, however, they run perpendicular to the road they are naming, rather than parallel to it as in Anglo cultures. Unless someone’s run into them, obv. 3: Rentals are Paid Upfront Whether you’re renting for one year, three years, 20 years, or 50 years, the money is paid upfront. You might be able to finagle X amount upfront followed by Y in three months, or, for longer leases, taper a 30-year payment over three years, but if you take a property for a year, you pay for the year upfront. If you take land for 20 years, you pay two decades cash down. South African, Chilean or Australian wines cost double that. 5: Visas Are Fiddly One plus side of Bali?

There is currently no official limit to the number of times you can enter Bali on a tourist visa. That said, in October 2015 an advisory recommended restricting entry for people with more than one tourist visa in their passports. As of November 2015, you could still choose to ask for the old tourist visa on arrival at the airport. For multiple entry visas, options are the KITAS, an expensive and hard-to-obtain residence visa which requires that you are employed, retired, in education or running a business in Bali, or the business visa. Please note that Indonesian visa regulations change often.

6: Bank Machines Eat Cards Most Balinese ATMs spit out cash before returning your card: to retrieve the card, you have to press a key to exit, which means cards are often left in machines. 7: Electricity Is Complicated Indonesian electricity is terribly democratic. If you use less, you pay less. More specifically, if you have less capacity to use electricity, you pay less per unit. 8: All Those Zeroes Can Get Really Confusing A revaluation of the rupiah is on the cards over the next few years. 9: Your Banjar Matters The banjar is one of the oldest social units in Bali, essentially a type of Hindu parish council: the guys in ceremonial gear you’ll see directing traffic from time to time are representatives of the banjar.

10: That Stuff in the Absolut Bottles? Petrol Arak is made and sold on Bali, but the yellow murky stuff in the Absolut bottles at the roadside stands is petrol, sold to passing bikes at a small premium on the petrol station price. 11: Foreigners Cannot Own Property In Indonesia Under Indonesian law, foreigners cannot own land or property in Indonesia, though many can and do take long leases. Coloured chicks at a funeral in Ubud, Bali. 12: Most Balinese Have the Same Names Bali has a caste system, and most Balinese belong to the rice-worker caste.

Made, Kadek or Nengah for the second, Nyoman or Komang for third-born, and Ketut for the fourth. 14: Nobody Wants That Pet You Just Acquired Most rural Balinese don’t have the money to sterilise their dogs, so female puppies tend to be abandoned, leaving a glut of cute animals for foreigners to pick from. But because of rabies, dogs can’t leave Bali legally, so a lot of cute abandoned puppies end up being less cute abandoned dogs when their owner decides they’ve had enough of paradise. 15: Pricing Is Random Pricing in Bali, on everything from houses to petrol to food in the market, is driven less by Keynesian economics than by gossip and perception. If someone builds a fancy-schmancy gigantic 3-bedroom villa with an ocean view in A. Other village and rents it for 250 million, that becomes the rate for the myriad mini 3-bedroom villas that will pop up in its wake in A.