Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was among the highlights of the first day of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, addressing a discussion on compassion and solidarity.
Soyinka, a Nigerian author and poet who in 1986 became the first African awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, described how compassion and solidarity depended highly on the culture of a country.
He told the discussion of his experience as an African when he was once about to go to Australia.
As he was almost 70 at that time, he said, he was required to undergo a series of medical checkups to ensure he was healthy enough to enter the country, something he deemed as a "disgrace".
"In Africa, people are more compassionate to older people like me," he said, adding he then canceled his trip to Australia.
Soyinka is scheduled for a number of other sessions in the festival, which runs through Sunday.
Indonesian author Seno Gumira Ajidarma shared his experiences as a book writer suffering from political oppression under Soeharto's New Order regime.
He reflected his rebellious thoughts through his works, including the novel Saksi Mata, about violence in then East Timor (now Timor Leste).
In another discussion, themed "Covering the World", Indian author Rahul Jacob shared his experiences as a travel writer.
The author of the travel essays Right of Passage: Travels from Brooklyn to Bali, told the discussion that one thing that motivated him to be a travel writer was that he wanted to represent more Asian views to the world.
"I read a lot of travel essays written by Westerners," he said.
"You have an American view of Bali, an English view of India, but there are not as much of views from Asians.
"So our way of viewing the world is not yet represented."
Rather than telling readers about hotels and restaurants, Jacob writes more about the politics of the places he visits, as well as his views about local people.
As he arrived in Bali in 2005, exactly two weeks after the second Bali bombings, he also criticized travel advisories issued by many Western countries toward Asian countries once there were bombings or terror attacks, something he called unfair.
"Bombings could happen everywhere, it could be in Eastern or Western countries," he said.
"There were also bombings in London, New York and elsewhere. But many of them *Western countries* gave no travel advisories; it's certainly unfair."
He said he was trying to convince people that the situation at a bombing site was actually not as bad as exposed by media coverage in Western countries.
Participants also enjoyed a poetry reading in rice fields, themed "A Walk of Solitude", during which they walked leisurely along a narrow path that crossed rice fields in Ubud.
In the middle of the 4-kilometer walk from Sebali to Tjampuan, participants stopped at a romantic-looking spot to hear Indonesian poet Ahmad Muchlis Amrin read his piece titled "Roncengan", while enjoying a beautiful landscape of rice fields in the mountainous area.
