Ari on the web

My dear sir, Kudos to you on your fine accomplishment last Monday. I was completely oblivious to your wily deed for a good half-hour after I stepped off the minibus, until I did the Self-Pat Down of Doom in the office and felt nothing but crestfallen disappointment. I must admit that early in your routine, before I knew that I was the mark, you had me feeling sorry for you. With your shabby clothes and receding hairline, you were struggling to generate much interest among my fellow travellers in your shabby A6 flyers that looked as if they were eighth-generation photocopies on a battered Xerox. Few people seemed interested in the Bandung reflexology service that you seemed to be touting for, and none at all were keen on having you demonstrate your technique on their hands. The dejected look on your face briefly made me feel pity for you. But knowing that I once felt pity for you makes me now feel a pang of pity for myself, or at least for the me of last Monday. So when you wand...

Every six weeks or so, I treat myself to a haircut. Not the ordinary shopping mall barbershop kind, but an authentic Indonesian military-style cut, deep in the bowels of Pasar Cikini, the ramshackle market that's home to a hundred surprises just a short stroll from my front door. It's not the haircut itself that I look forward to - although the buzz cut is a decent one - but the head and shoulder massage that comes with it. It's tough and rough and can leave a few marks, but it's also a fantastic form of stress relief. Many foreigners and well-to-do Indonesians here like to indulge in a "cream bath", where for an hour or two they can be gently pampered, scrubbed and massaged, all while reading out-of-date women's magazines. My massage is not like that - it's like venturing into an S&M dungeon, being roughed around a bit, smiling and asking for more. Lucky for me, this morning was haircut time. So down to the market I wandered, through the mid...

At home and abroad, I lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle, often balking at the chance to do really strenuous things. So when I do put myself to the test, the aches and pains linger long afterward. So it is that three days after undertaking perhaps the most physically demanding thing I've ever done, I'm still moving like an old man shuffling toward a bus. Here's how it happened. Java Lava 's a group of adventurous mountain and volcano climbers, mostly expats, that arranges hikes in different parts of Indonesia. A few weeks back it started promoting a day hike up Mt Salak, about two hours out of Jakarta, near Bogor. The circular told us it was five hours up and three hours down, 1,400 metres vertical - from the 800m start to the 2,200m peak - and a price was provided for children. But it did warn "some parts are steep" and "if you don't know what climbing 1,400m means, perhaps this hike isn't for you". In retrospect, I should have heeded the...

The Jakarta Globe is on the hunt for early-career journalists and journalism students to take up a year-long fellowship, starting later this year. I've been at the paper for a year and had a great time, and I can highly recommend it to anyone else keen to get some professional experience in the industry and watch Indonesia up c lose. I'm happy to answer questions in comments or via email. Here's the notification. Applications close in a week. Be a Jakarta Globe   Fellow! Getting a foothold in the media has never been more challenging for young journalists. Here is an opportunity to work for a year in an exciting emerging market on a multi-award winning daily newspaper and Web site with professional editors. The Jakarta Globe, an English daily in a multicultural environment, is looking for the best young talent it can find. Can you copy edit in flawless English, write and think creatively? Are you curious about the world and ready to work hard? We will...

It's a rite-of-passage for foreign writers based in Jakarta to pen a piece on the horrid state of the traffic. My attempt, in which I merge it with a discussion on the entrepreneurial spirit of Indonesians, has appeared in The Weekend Australian this weekend and is available here . Space crimped the effort a little, so I've decided to publish the full piece here: Soon after you arrive at Jakarta’s international airport and head downtown, you become familiar with two of the city’s defining qualities: the entrepreneurship of its people, and the density of its traffic. With little new public transport infrastructure, the quantity of roads almost static and the number of vehicles steadily rising in line with a growing population and emerging affluence, experts say the Indonesian capital will reach a state of perpetual gridlock within a few years. But these hours and hours that many commuters spend on the road each day have given rise to niche business opportunities that Jaka...

It's been a little over a day since the Sukhoi Superjet-100 went missing over the skies of Bogor, and the news since then has been nothing but gloom . About 50 were on board, and it appears none survived as the Russian-made plane hit the side of Mount Salak. Each of those lives taken was a life taken too soon. Good times never had. Old age never reached. Proper goodbyes never said. There was one name on the list of passengers that was familiar to me. Femi Adi from Bloomberg News (listed as Femi, but it has been confirmed that it is her) was a young journalist I met last May while observing a prayer rally organised in Jakarta by the Islamic Defenders Front to mourn the death of Osama bin Laden. It was a fairly tense affair, with nearly a thousand slightly-riled, white-robed men crammed into a mosque to listen to speakers stoking their anger over the death of bin Laden. Clustered outside the back of the hall were me and more than a dozen journalists, mostly Indonesians...

I've always been fairly messy in managing my personal space at home. I'm happy to let all sorts of trivial items - bank statements, magazines, pill packets, slightly soiled tissues - accumulate on my bedside table before feeling a need to clean them. And when I do finally clean it, I sort through most of it and leave it in a much neater state. Not spotless, but vastly improved. My partner Melanie is different. She's fastidious in her neatness, letting only a handful of items accumulate before feeling the need to sort through them and clear up the space. Once she's cleaned up her bedside table, it sits in a very high state of tidiness, substantially cleaner than my side even immediately after I've completed my "cleaning". It is not unknown for her to assess my side after I'd clean it, and make some smart suggestions ways to deal with the handful of items I've left sitting there. What intrigued me was not so much the difference in the states o...