Taiwan has asked the Indonesian government for a grace period before Jakarta raises its landing visa fee, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
Jakarta announced on Wednesday it would introduce a new single 30-day Visa on Arrival (VOA) that costs US$25, scrapping its old seven-day US$10 landing visa.
MOFA said the new system was applicable to the 50 plus countries eligible for Indonesia’s VOA.
The news, however, caught the ministry by surprise.
Ministry spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) said Department of Asian and Pacific Affairs Director-General Matthew Lee (李世明) had called in Indonesian Representative Suhartono to ask for an explanation.
Chen said Suhartono told Lee he had no prior knowledge of the price change, but promised to relay to his government Taiwan’s request for a grace period.
Taiwan has visa-waiver privileges with its allies as well as with the UK, New Zealand, Ireland, South Korea, Singapore and Japan.
In other travel-related news, the ministry said seven Taiwanese are still stranded at the World Heritage site of Machu Picchu, Peru, after rains and mudslides knocked out several sections of train track, trapping about 2,000 visitors.
About 600 tourists have been evacuated by helicopter, foreign news agencies reported, and a ministry official said 15 members of a 21-person Taiwanese group were among those rescued.
“The trapped Taiwanese people are now at a hotel,” said Joanne Ou (歐江安), a ministry section chief.
“Peru’s military has taken over the rescue operation and is airlifting old or weak people first,” she said.
The Taiwanese still trapped in the Inca citadel were wait-listed because they are younger, she said.
The ministry was in close contact with Taiwan’s representative office in Peru, she said.
Gycs Gordon, director of the Commercial Office of Peru in Taipei, told the Central News Agency that the rain was “some of the worst in decades” and that the railway to the site has been cut off for three days but was expected to reopen today.
More than 2,000 people from Taiwan visited Peru last year, most of who traveled around the Lunar New Year holiday, Gordon said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching