Bangkok

There has always been something somehow familiarizing in standing in a city center new to you and gazing at its expanse.

That's ans impossibility in Bangkok. While there is an official city center, any choice is purely arbitrary.

Bangkok vast, sprawling web of a metropolis, its threads wide avenues, its skeins tortuous alleyways or soi's, streets or thanons and overgrown canals or klongs.

Caught in this web, seemingly at random, are pockets of high-rise, snatches of green sward, sudden kaleidoscopes of fruit and vegetables, glittering temple spires that punctuate a lowering and dust- and heat-hazed sky like punctuation marks.

The architectural extravaganzas of some of the world's greatest hotels and some of the most glitzy department stores cast their shadows over some two-century-old silk-weaving village on a klong that is almost invisible because of a combination of rampant vegetation and encroaching concrete.

There are the aromas of ripe mango and pungent durian, the sharp tingles of chilies frying in street corner braziers, the suffocating smells of heat and dust and the output of car exhausts.

Only the cacophonous and seemingly chaotic traffic, living up to its reputation as 'the most lethal in Asia' in constant; and yet even it belies the serenity of secret gardens, glimpses occasionally through a break in a high wall, with ponds and pagodas and great earthenware pots filled with delicate water lilies and festooned by luxuriant orchids.

To chronicle any city, to enumerate it and parcel if for visitors is impossible; but Bangkok remains as elusive today as it did for Somerset Maugham who noted that every time he left he felt as though it had kept some special secret from him.

While most visitors will arrive at Suvarnabhumi International Airport, they'll get but a taste of Bangkok on the highway ride to their hotel.