How Bali Became a Second Home for Two Zagreb Residents

Stories about people who one morning woke up determined to leave the country where they live and work, pack their things, and head into the unknown either inspire us and make us admire them or lead us to seek flaws in their decisions. We try to rationalize their behavior and characterize it as reckless, risky, strange, and similar. Most often, this depends on our own inclinations and how we perceive our own lives.

When my longtime friend and colleague Nadja Irena Fišić one day declared that she had decided to leave her job and move to Asia with her new boyfriend, my eyebrows hit the ceiling. A city ‘girl’ wandering around dirty Asia? Maybe for an extended vacation, but to live? No chance.
As time went on and she became more persistent in her decision, the image of the two of them putting down roots on white sand, in some ‘beach’ bar, became clearer and more acceptable to me. At their farewell, they both had full support for their crazy venture. Damn, a person can always return to their home nest!

Love at First Sight
The story of two Zagreb residents, Damir Pavičić (Mirda) and Nadja Irena Fišić (Fiša), is not a story about turbo-young ‘backpackers’ who do not care about tomorrow. When they left Croatia, they were a fresh couple in love, so their joint decision to leave their jobs and friends behind was met with a certain skepticism. Mirda was earning a decent income in the construction business, and Fiša in journalism. We can say they had above-average earnings and were not forced to go where the bread is. They sold her weekend house to secure some savings and decided to rent out their two apartments, living off their rent on the other side of the world. They chose Asia after spending three weeks traveling in Thailand with friends. They were attracted by the charms of the East and realized that the money from rent could be enough for them to live without having to work any job.
And so, on January 15, 2013, Mirda and Fiša bought a one-way plane ticket and turned a new life page, 16,000 kilometers away from everything they had known until then.
– Our initial idea was to travel around Southeast Asia for three years and settle where we found it most beautiful. However, after just four months of wandering through Malaysia and Thailand, we had enough. When we arrived in Bali, it was love at first sight. By the second day, we rented a scooter and began searching for long-term accommodation, preferably away from tourist centers. We met a man whose brother owned a resort in Bukit and arranged to rent a bungalow for 1500 kuna a month. Since we became ‘locals’ with him, he further reduced our rent to 850 kuna a month, including utilities. It is a modest one-bedroom bungalow with a bathroom, measuring 35 square meters, with a terrace. And that is all we need – says Nadja. Each drives their own scooter, which costs 250 kuna a month to rent, and a liter of fuel costs three and a half kuna. For 10 kuna, they can travel 120 kilometers.

How to Earn
Before leaving for Bali, various ideas spun in their heads about what they could do in Asia: from buying cheap bungalows for rent to running a ‘beach’ bar. All those ideas quickly fell through when reality hit them. Namely, no white person can legally own land or property in Bali. Only an Indonesian can. Therefore, if a white person, no matter how wealthy, wants to buy land or a house, they must take an Indonesian as a partner.
– For example, one Australian partnered with an Indonesian to buy land and built a villa worth two million dollars. In the end, the Indonesian ‘screwed her over,’ and she had to declare the contract null and void. The Indonesian ended up in prison, and she was deported back to Australia, with no rights to the acquired property – adds Fiša.
Many whites have moved to Indonesia with similar plans to build bungalows, especially from the USA, Australia, the UK, and Russia. With their ambitions, construction prices have risen. Labor costs in Bali have also increased, as there is not enough local labor, so builders are imported from other countries. Additionally, there are plans to build a Formula 1 racetrack in Bali, which has significantly increased land and property prices. For instance, a two-bedroom villa with a pool costs 120,000 dollars, and a foreigner can only obtain it on a thirty-year lease. Under such conditions, whites have come up with a much simpler and cheaper way to earn: renting a villa for two to three thousand euros a month (usually for the whole year) and then renting individual rooms to tourists illegally. And that is a public secret. It is also the best way to make money in Bali at the moment. Since summer lasts 12 months there, there are no problems renting rooms for a very decent amount.

Social Visas
Mirda and Fiša live in Bali on 6600 kuna a month from renting their properties in Zagreb and Velika Gorica, and as she says, they could live on three and a half thousand, which is enough to cover the costs of renting a bungalow and scooter, food, visas, massages, and even have a beer or two. They are forced to renew their visa every two months and can extend it a maximum of four times a year. Therefore, like other white ‘locals,’ after six months, they leave the country and return, and the whole process starts over.
– All foreigners live on this so-called social visa. Otherwise, they would have to obtain a work permit issued by an employer, which costs two thousand euros, which is not worth it for anyone. This year, the number of work permits in Bali has decreased by 50 percent. A social visa costs 350 kuna a month for two, without an agent’s service. Therefore, it is very difficult to estimate how many foreigners actually live in Bali, but we can say that at any given moment, there are about five million people on the island, with locals numbering around three million – says Fiša.
Since they arrived in Bali, she has been trying to find some steady engagement or job, but that is much harder than she expected. Jobs are usually sought through local classifieds or social media. Most foreigners work in tourism (which 80 percent of the population lives off), in public relations jobs or managerial positions, and it is desirable to know Russian or Chinese. They are also looking for programmers and experts in digital marketing and social media. At one point, Fiša found a job in digital marketing for a British company, but very quickly faced the good old Croatian story she fled from – the boss simply did not have the money to pay her. If you hit a financial snag and, say, want to find a job in a café, no one will hire you because the average salary for Balinese in such jobs is 100 to 200 dollars a month. A foreigner can eventually be a manager or owner of a café or a top chef, who can earn up to half a million dollars a year.

The Youngest Language in the World
Describing the Balinese, she, like many people who have traveled there as tourists, has only words of praise for them: they are incredibly polite, constantly smiling and greeting with a nod. They rarely speak English, so Mirda quickly mastered the official Indonesian language called bahasa indonesia. It is said to be the youngest language in the world, invented seventy years ago to connect 18,000 islands in Indonesia communicatively. It has a very simple form and is not burdened with verbs and tenses, which is ideal for foreigners. But even when you understand Indonesians perfectly, it is very difficult to find the same wavelength because they belong, according to Fiša’s words, to a completely different world than the one known in the West. They mostly sit outdoors all day, constantly eating and chewing something, drinking coffee until the afternoon, laughing, and love watching soap operas (although that does not sound much different from the lifestyle of Croats). However, you will rarely see an Indonesian woman smoking cigarettes or partying with friends.
– Indonesia is the largest Muslim country, with Bali being an exception, where Hindus live; they go to temples every day and are very devout. Indonesians generally go to bed early and wake up early. They are very mild-natured, and when they are near us and listen to our conversations, they think we are constantly arguing – says Fiša, adding that they have not yet managed to get close to any Indonesian.

Eternal Summer
In Bali, the temperature is ideally 25 degrees Celsius all year round, but darkness falls as early as 7 PM. The rainy season lasts from December to April, and the hottest months are April and October, when there is not a breath of wind. Bali is the only place in the world where you can surf all year round and is often called the Asian California due to the so-called beach lifestyle. On Bukit, the peninsula where friends live, there is a beach of the same name that is ranked among the top ten surfing beaches in the world.
Bali is attractive to many social groups also because no one imposes themselves or boasts about their financial status. Everyone wears the same flip-flops, rides the same motorcycles, and class differences are hardly noticeable. The emphasis is not on money but on time. The more free time you have, the higher your status. By that criterion, Mirda and Fiša deserve the highest because they spend most of their time on activities such as yoga, spiritual ecstatic dances, Indian drumming kirtan, etc. If you are in Bali, you can afford to work on yourself, then you are a king. Mirda certainly deserves the royal title, although his outward appearance does not reveal it at first glance: he walks around in casual ankle-length cotton pants and t-shirts, mostly from Croatia, with cut-off collars. With such status, you can afford to pull out everything from the past that you may have wanted to do at one point but never had the time for. Thus, Mirda surfs in Bali, plays chess, plays guitar, reads, and for a while even studied the properties of elements from the periodic table. Fiša, from time to time, does something, writes a column for the digital edition of Cosmo, cooks, and hosts tourists from all over the world. Over time, the two of them have become indispensable hosts in Bukit, known for organizing good ‘Balkan parties.’
– So far, we have met and hosted hundreds of people from all over the world and heard various stories from them. Our life in Bali flows from day to day because it is impossible to plan anything. Whenever you plan something, it usually falls through. The day simply goes in an unforeseen direction – says Fiša.

Time for Yourself
Bali has turned out to be more than she initially expected. There were various challenges, and one of the biggest was time and how to use it. Time allows you to be alone with yourself, confront some questions for which you have no time in the West, and sometimes it is not easy to hear the answers to them. Fiša realized that sometimes it is hard to be alone with yourself, that it can be a long and painful process. However, her initial fears about whether she would find a job or lose friends have faded. They have both visited Croatia twice in the meantime, and they have met friends while traveling in Thailand or Sri Lanka, where we also met at the beginning of the year and spent about ten days together. At that time, I saw firsthand that the Zagreb residents had very skillfully ‘fitted’ into the Eastern world and that nothing was unknown to them anymore. For both of them, Bali has become a second home.
Nadja has transformed from a city ‘girl’ into an unmade-up woman in flip-flops with a blissful smile on her face. Now she lies peacefully by the pool, most likely dreaming of a piece of roasted pork and ćevapi, which are an unattainable dream in Bali.
– Many people have asked me: ‘Well, what do you do there?’ I tell them that I do everything they usually don’t have time for. And of course, it is not boring. You do what you want and when you want – concludes Nadja.