Insider's Washington, DC

Today's Bastille Day, and though I'm celebrating appropriately with good French food I'm also getting ready for tomorrow's presentation at the Smithsonian. Today's Washington Post Express published a recent interview about the talk, which you can read here.

Druk Yul Y'all

What better way to celebrate America's anniversary than to put Texas and Bhutan side by side on the National Mall? An impromptu research visit to the top of the Washington Monument landed me in this colorful display of Bhutanese dancers, reawakening a lifelong ambition to visit the place. Right next door was the Texas pavilion, so of course I felt right at home. Alas, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is officially over for this year, but I count it as one of the many reasons I love living in Washington, DC.

POST CARD: Seven Hours in Mali

My writer friend Eliza Reid lives way up north in Iceland but still manages to get everywhere and anywhere on earth. As a new mother with an adorable son, Eliza's busy balancing words with walking lessons. She's also Canadian, so it's appropriate to have her guest star today, Canada Day. Here's a snippet from her travels across West Africa.

The Ségou “gare routière” (bus station) is milling with people. I arrive at 7am, buy a baguette with fried bananas and freshly grilled brochettes of beef, then make my way to the ticket booth to purchase the 5500 CFA ($13) one-way ticket to Sevaré, 350 km away.

I chat to the driver and the other bus employee on the trip, in case I need their help later on. One passenger offers to send 60 camels to my husband in Reykjavík in exchange for me staying with him; I scoff and he raises the offer to 80.

This bus is typical of most: the front windscreen is cracked in several places and an A3 sized posted of Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali’s President, is taped to the right-hand side, adding a further obstacle to the driver’s field of vision. West African pop music blasts from the speakers.

My small talk with the staff pays off and they assign me an aisle seat in the middle of the bus (safest) and by one of the small “sunroofs” – the windows don’t open, so the main door and the sun roofs are kept open to provide a small amount of respite from the heat. The colour scheme of the bus is based on a palette of “dirt” with “dust” accents.

The aisles are crammed with sacks of onions and bottles of local beer. The kaftan-wearing man across the aisle from me is muttering quietly to himself with his prayer beads. Does he know something I don’t?

The 9AM bus to Sevaré leaves promptly at 9:50am, tumbling east along Mali’s main tarmac road, the driver honking frantically to announce when we are about to overtake a slower van with people on the roof or a donkey and cart.

I have a good view of the driver in his tie-died shirt from the rear-view mirror. I can see when he picks his nose and his ears and when he yawns and rubs his eyes. I can see when he leans forward to pick something up off the floor or turns around to talk to his friends.

We stop at most of the villages along the way, usually small communities with mud houses and a mud mosque. Women and children clamber onto the bus to sell their wares – everything from sunglasses to plastic sacks of unfiltered water to oily clumps of dough or fresh peanuts. I buy some dough balls and give a couple to a little boy sitting near me. He smiles shyly and accepts.

The landscape is dusty, like seemingly all of Mali, and flat, dotted with baobab trees, huge termite mounds (a couple of metres high), shrubs, and fields of thin ripe millet, looking like anaemic corn stalks.

I can feel the sweat trickling down my back.

Mohammed, the bus company employee not driving, regularly climbs over the sacks in the aisle to inquire how I am. Am I too tired? Am I not too hot?

Nope. Everything’s great, Mohammed. I’m lovin’ every minute.

-Eliza Reid

All Quiet On The Western Wall/West Bank

I don't love taking my picture in front of famous sites because it feels a little gauche and conquistador-ish. But yesterday I felt the need as I visited two very famous yet very different walls--the first in Bethlehem in the West Bank, the other in Jerusalem. Thanks to the most recent peace agreement, travel between the two was a breeze. These days, crossing into California or Canada pose bigger obstacles.

The Sea of Galilee

"For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Matthew 6:21

POSTCARD: Dhallywood Dreams

Laurence Mitchell is a fellow travel writer at Bradt and the author of guides to Serbia, Belgrade, and Kyrgyzstan. He's also a passionate wanderer who takes stunning photographs. To find out more about him, check out his website: www.laurencemitchell.com. I've been following his recent adventures in South Asia. Really, most extraordinary:

Movie-making in the Indian Subcontinent is not restricted to Mumbai and Bollywood: Pakistan has its very own Urdu-language ‘Lallywood’ based in Lahore, and Bangladesh has Dhallywood, the Bengali equivalent, in Dhaka. I took this photograph in Sylhet in Bangladesh’s northeast although really it could have been almost anywhere in the country. It has all the vital ingredients: well-fed moustachioed men, cartoon violence, pretty women with heaving cleavages, expensive cars. Of course, you don’t see any of this on the streets of Bangladesh – it’s an unashamed escapist fantasy world: Bangladeshis don’t want to waste their hard-earned taka on tasteful art-house documentaries that feature modestly veiled women, rickshaws and rice fields.

Sylhet is best known as a pilgrimage centre, being home to the shrine of the 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Shah Jalal. It is also the capital of the district where virtually all of the UK’s Indian restaurant staff hail from. So the rich, north Indian tandoori food that we love in the UK and consider to be ‘Indian’ is actually prepared by Bangladeshis who, as a rule, prefer simpler dishes of fish and rice. Some of this foreign-earned ‘curry money’ eventually filters back to Sylhet, as poor a town as any in this impoverished country. For reasons best known to themselves, Sylhet returnees seem to invest their hard-won savings in the property market – in state-of-the art, air-conditioned shopping centres, which no-one other than their fellow curry-wallahs can afford to shop in. Maybe it’s a case of too much Dhallywood fantasizing?

-Laurence Mitchell

What I did Am Doing last This Summer

A quick update: wrote up my Paris trip for Intelligent Travel (Paris Sans Agenda) and a host of posh Paris hotel reviews for Business Traveler. I also self-righteously penned this piece on How to Pick the Right Guidebook. Wrote a story on Warsaw and another on Moscow and suddenly want to go back to both.

Alas, time for somewhere warm, so I am headed to fair and sunny Israel. In preparation I am reading Jerusalem: City of Longing by Simon Goldhill and enjoying his traveler's prose with scholarly undertones. Also, can't forget this, I made my early summer pilgrimage to New Jersey and took my first frozen dip of the season. I look forward to doing the same on the other side of the Atlantic next week. Hmmmm, Jersey Shore versus Tel Aviv. I'm looking forward to feeling the difference. Also in the cards this summer is gorgeous Connecticut, cool state Delaware, hot-as-blazes Panama, and then 400-year-old Quebec where I shall be celebrating New France.

Travels aside, what I'm really hoping to do is get away and write, write, write . . . without the interruption of the phone and the construction across the street. A quiet room with a cold glass of water and my new computer.

Yes, I have a new laptop and she's my new best friend. More later.