Last year, I went out and toured the Lapindo mudflow in Sidoarjo, East Java. However, I only ever ended up writing this one blog post about it, which was pretty slack. I knew I had started writing a proper feature story, but in all the chaos of being on the road and then going home to Oz and moving to the US, I forgot to finish it and get it published. I was looking for something else on my computer today, and I found the rough draft. So it’s crazy out of date (written in May 2010), but still interesting I think… so here it is, on the blog. I figured it was better to post it here than to not have it published at all… It’s pretty rough sorry and not exactly complete. (PS. I have a slideshow of pics from the Sidoarjo site here).
Read the story…
A bird in a cage at Yogyakarta’s historic bird market
Remember I spent a few weeks kicking around in Yogyakarta, Central Java, earlier this year? Well, I not only went to language school and stuffed myself silly with Gudeg and other delicious street food. I also wrote a travel guide (and photographed for it too) for the city, which is now up online at Travelfish, an excellent site for anyone thinking about travel in Southeast Asia.
You can check out the Yogyakarta guide I wrote here. Enjoy! You really should visit, it’s a great place, and the guide has lots of recommendations for eating, accommodation and attractions.
Contrary to popular belief, I am doing some freelancing on the road. It’s the type of freelancing I would class as “hardly investigative”, but it’s been keeping me occupied and badly paid, just like if I had a real journalism job.
So here’s a few links to some recent writings.
1. Remember, ages ago, I alluded to actually telling you all about how much I enjoyed attending the Casa Luna cooking school in Ubud, Bali? Well, I ended up writing about it for the Jakarta Globe, so you can read about it all over there. The picture on the left shows some of the dishes that we made in class… so yummy!
2. I wrote a (according to some commentators) rather humorous piece for the Jakarta Globe called “I love you Indonesia, but please stop trying to kill me.” It’s written in the style of a monologue to a slightly abusive lover. You can read it here.
3. During my stint at language school in Yogyakarta, I wrote a piece of mind article about the rewards of studying Bahasa Indonesia. You can also read that one over here at the Jakarta Globe.
The main project I’ve been working on over the last fortnight isn’t live yet, but when it is… I’ll let you all know. All five of you that read the blog.
On an entirely different note, does anyone have any pointers for boosting my blog traffic? Because this is not a niche blog and is more of a “whatever” blog, it’s hard to promote… and I love writing posts and taking photos for it, but the traffic numbers and comments are so few 
This is Ibu Herwati. I interviewed her when I went out to the site of the Sidoarjo mudflow disaster (which I will write more about later…). Ibu Herwati lost her house to the mud, is yet to receive full compensation and now works selling DVDs to disaster tourists showing the mud slowly engulfing the villages in the area where she has lived her whole life.
We talked for quite a while about a number of topics to do with the disaster, which I will write about later. I asked if I could take a photo of her and she agreed, but looked a little reluctant.
“Don’t be embarrassed!” I joked with her.
“But I am embarrassed!!” she exclaimed. “Look, my skin is so black from working out here in the sun.”
In Indonesia, and many other Asian countries, the beauty ideals favor fair skin. Whitening creams are sold by the bucketful and wealthier women often walk under umbrellas to avoid getting dark.
“Your skin is nice. You know, in Australia, many women try and make their skin brown by sitting out in the sun all day,” I told her.
“Really?”
She seemed quite shocked.
“I wish my skin went brown in the sun but it only goes red! Like a tomato,” I added.
“But it is so nice and white,” she protested.
“People always want the things that they don’t have,” I said, unable to muster up much else in my Indonesian.
“We should just be happy with life and what God provides,” she replied earnestly.
My eyes were drawn out to the stinking sea of mud that had covered people’s homes and both my Indonesian and English had run out on hearing this statement that I simultaneously agreed and disagreed with, so I mumbled a yes, pulled the camera up to my face and said “1, 2, 3…”
So, I’ve been feeling pretty shite since having a tooth ripped out of my head this week, but I said I would brave the crowds at Royal Randwick to photograph the pope’s final mass for work. Really the last thing a super anti-Catholic feels like doing on a Sunday morning, but hey.
After finally finding somewhere to park, feverish and white as a sheet I tottered down towards the course. But I first came across a crowd of people gathered at Centennial Park gates… I could see they were cheering for an approaching motorcade… oh, I thought it must be the pope.
It was then that I saw the popemobile further down the road, back door open, ready for loading of pope… the motorcade was going pretty fast, so I charged down the road to the popemobile and managed to beat most of the crowd. Once everyone else realised what was happening, they followed pursuit. I managed to get to the fence next to the popemobile before everyone else and just as the pope was getting into the popemobile.
He looked up to see the crowd running down the hill as he was loaded in and caught my eye. I was literally half a metre away from him.
“Hello!” I said. “Hello” he said and smiled. Then he got into the popemobile and they shut the door behind him. George Pell was in the popemobile as well and looked like he was practically orgasming at getting to take another turn about Randwick in the fully sick popemobile.
Unfortunately I was still fumbling trying to get my camera out of my bag at this stage after my hill sprint and only managed to get shots of him once he was in the popemobile and they were preparing to take off on their journey.
But how hilarious! I exchanged a casual hello with the pope, someone that half a million people were clamoring to see and that I really wasn’t that fussed about.
It was interesting attending the final mass… quite a freaky event. Such a huge huge crowd. I’m still trying to figure out how I am going to describe it for work.
More pics of WYD 2008 on Flickr.
We had a “Very Big and Important Meeting” at work yesterday afternoon. There are “Very Big and Exciting Changes Afoot” apparently. When you hear that, you worry you and all your workmates are going to be sacked as part of a “New and Exciting Financial Streamlining Opportunity” or somesuch (don’t you love corporate speak? This is, after all, a company that nonsensically gives out trees to employees to fight climate change). Thankfully, that was not the case. There will be changes, and they kinda suck. But it’s all deal-able with.
But it was all fairly draining, especially with a full day of people speculating what the meeting was going to be about and stressing in general. On the scale of good to bad workdays, this one was a bad.
Which was probably why I found myself, without any thought behind it, in the supermarket (I’m sorry, I know this is turning into a supermarket and food blog, I promise I will post something else soon!), buying the ingredients to make potato and leek soup on autopilot while narrowly avoiding mega mums and their upper middle class suburbia burdened shopping trolleys. I then went home and made it, without even using a recipe, in some sort of daze.
Soup is such an amazing antidote to all of life’s woes that it seemed like the only answer. It turned out pretty good considering I just threw stuff in at the same time as watching the news, fretting over the work meeting, and eating some nutella on a spoon.
Blending is the best part of the soup making therapy process. I had a huge urge to stick the word “thoughts” on the blender, because it is an extremely apt analogy for emotional turmoil. But I really couldn’t be bothered to be arty.
But I’m feeling much cured today. Soup-er, in fact.
A bit of an in-joke for all those out there who have to suffer through tedious Teeline and all the insufferable 1950′s passages about letters to company directors and reasons why women make good secretaries.
Hope it’s legible.
The large corporation that I work for is trying to become carbon neutral. The solution… buy a truckload of carbon credits, and give every employee one of these;
That, dear readers, is a tea tree.
Great idea, major corporation! Cos I’m sure most of the employees in Sydney would live in houses with large enough gardens to accomodate a tree! In fact, I doubt many of them would live in apartments or tiny terraces with no gardens.
This poor little tree is doomed me thinks. Maybe I should just drive around with it in the car, so my commuting is more carbon neutral. We don’t really have anywhere suitable to plant it.
Nice gesture though. Thanks major corporation!
…random cool things happen. The other day I was out doing a story on a local gelato maker, and I got free gelato (which was awesome). While I was eating it, after I had finished interviewing him for the story, we had a really good conversation, and then he was playing with my camera while we were chatting.
When I got back to the office, here is a cool photo I found on my camera that the gelato maker took.
The photographer ended up photographed. I love it when I get to meet interesting and cool people in my job. I also love it when I get free (awesome) gelato.
