Highlights from Friday at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival:
from our special reporter in Ubud Katie Jacobs

I started the day in the intimate Left Bank Lounge for a session called 'Wanderlust: Travelling stories". The first panelist was Andrew McMillian, a rock journalist from Darwin, who has spent a large amount of time living with Australian Aboriginal communities in the Western Desert and Northern Territory. He had some fascinating insights into a little understood group gained travelling within his own country.The second was Lee Su Kim, A Chinese Malaysian (Baba-Nyonya) who discussed studying in Texas and the peculiarities of being an 'alien of colour' in the USA.

The final panelist Brian Thacker was very funny. He has made a career out of absurdist travel, e.g. writing a book on travelling to five countries simply based on the fact he had never heard of them (and not researching anything before he departed) and 'Sleeping Around' chronicling his adventures while travelling the world with the website couchsurfing.org where people open their homes and their couches to travellers for free.

My final session later in the day was a complete contrast and turned out to be particularly topical. 'Writing in the new world: Obama and Dissent' discussed the importance of continuing critical analysis and dissent within the media. It featured Fatima Bhutto, a journalist from Pakistan, Antony Loewenstein, a political journalist from Sydney and Jamal Mahjoub, a novelist from London by way of Sudan debating whether Obama has so far failed to live up to his promise through a lack of concrete actions or whether his message of hope and change and the very fact of his reaching the presidency is the main thing and the importance of continuing dissention even given, or perhaps because of, his worldwide popularity.

On a side note I happened to be in the same venue as these writers when the news came through that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize which drew some fairly heated opinions from the participants.