Exploring the Other ‘City of Angels’ : For those willing to explore, Bangkok’s exotic charm will define itself in surprising ways.

Sanuk. It’s one of the first things you notice about Thailand. It’s in the big smile that flashes easily; in the “never mind” philosophy. In spite of the hardships of everyday life, better to keep things fun. Sanuk.

“One hundred baht.” “No way, 30 baht.” “Fifty baht, OK?” OK. I jump into the back seat of the “tuk-tuk.” Nicknamed for the sound of its smoke belching, two-stroke engine, the taxi is an indigenous Thai three-wheeled contraption that is part motorcycle, part pedicab. It will zip you up Soi Sip Song or down Klong Toey, halfway across Bangkok for less than two dollars. All the soot you can breathe is free.

Draped around its lifelessly dangling rear-view mirror are dozens of religious amulets and a crucifix donated, no doubt, by some tuk-tuk fearing Christian who felt his prayers had been answered when he survived the trip through madcap Bangkok traffic. Rattling along in a tuk-tuk means, in no uncertain terms, that I’m back in Bangkok.

Squeezed between Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia--Thailand is synonymous with exotic. Yet arriving in Bangkok--the “City of Angels” or Krung Thep in Thai (only foreigners call it Bangkok)--is to find it resembling another “City of Angels”--Los Angeles--during a climatic inversion half a world away.

At first glance, it resembles a gray cocoon wrapped in a gray sky, but begin to explore the streets and the exotic Siamese charm that has enchanted travelers for centuries seems to define itself in front of your eyes. Thai temple dancers in glittering costume appear out of nowhere to perform at a tiny outdoor shrine wedged between the Japanese Sogo Department Store and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. An idle salesgirl suddenly begins to massage my neck as she chats with her work mate, who fetches shoes in my size. At the airport, I glimpse a saffron-robed monk bless the gleaming nose of a brand-new Thai Airways 767.

In Bangkok you never know what you’re going to see around the next corner.

No more typical of Thailand than New York is of the United States, Bangkok is, however, intrinsically Thai in its nonchalantly chaotic character and haphazard layout. There is no single downtown area or financial district. Everything is jumbled together. Mega-malls, giant hotel complexes, main shopping avenues, temples and palaces are scattered, making it necessary to hopscotch from one part of the sprawling city of 8 million to another.

And then there’s the weather. With year-round weather reports a parade of hot and humid, Bangkok was recently rated the world’s hottest city by the World Meteorological Organization.

Even its history simmers. The last in a long line of Siamese capitals, Bangkok was established only 200 years ago. One of its most enlightened monarchs, King Mongkut (Rama IV)--the character played by Yul Brynner in “The King and I”--left the country a heritage much more important than a catchy musical. (Although “The King and I” is taboo in Thailand for misrepresenting the king, most English-speaking tour guides, hoping to strike a chord in visitors’ minds, refer to him as the “ ‘The King and I’ King”). Mongkut spent 27 years as a Buddhist monk, was fluent in Latin and English and, in a very Thai way, quickly modernized and Westernized Thailand in the mid-19th Century so that it established its independence and remained the only Southeast Asian country never to be colonized. It’s no coincidence that in English, Thai means free .

My favorite way to start a Bangkok day is along the broad Chao Phraya River that snakes its way through the middle of Bangkok. I rise early for a table on the river-side terrace of my hotel to watch the wacky armada of craft that fuel the morning river rush hour. Strings of portly rice barges lumber downstream, while brightly painted, gondola-type river taxis called hang yao or “long-tailed” boats zip commuters to work, their six-foot drive shafts sending up rooster plumes of white water. Just upriver around the bend I can see a bubbling orange tropical sun nudge its way up behind Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn.

Bangkok has hundreds of temples or wats and attempting to take on too many can leave your head spinning as you lose track of which wat is what. Early morning is the best time to visit, when the monks are out with begging bowls that are ritually filled by the local people. Most Thai men over the age of 14 spend some time in a temple monastery, which is why you see so many saffron-robed devotees in the streets. They are revered. There are even special “Monks Only” waiting sections at airport terminals so that foreigners, unfamiliar with the custom that the monks are not allowed to touch women, will not sit alongside.

The Temple of the Emerald Buddha (actually made of jade) and the adjoining Grand Palace are Bangkok’s traditional heart and soul: a classic vision of “Old Siam” with gilded spires and sweeping roof lines amid groves of stupas and fierce carved temple guards.

But it is to Bangkok’s wats that you must go to find tranquillity in the middle of the city. Buddhas abound in every conceivable posture: standing, sitting, lounging or lying down. For Buddha buffs: Wat Benjamaborphit (mercifully nicknamed the Marble Wat) is nirvana, containing a collection of 53 Buddhas in styles from throughout Asia, including a rare starving Buddha, skin and bones artfully rendered in bronze.

Another temple, Wat Po, is not only Bangkok’s oldest, it is also the site of the only official massage school in Thailand. The healing art of massage is a Thai tradition and centuries-old charts of pressure points, nerve endings and muscles line the walls.

There is always a line at Wat Po for open-air massage on mats in the shade of trees, but I opted for mine in a less crowded, albeit less spiritual, environment at the Bodie Care Massage in a small hotel whose name is an echo of the once-thriving American soldier R&R; population in Bangkok: The Wall Street Inn.

As with the health and fitness clubs in major hotels, the Bodie Care is a professional “massage only” establishment. I was given a crisply starched pink cotton pajama and shown to a spotless cubicle where I lay down on a mat. Ana, a tiny middle-aged Thai woman asked, “Gentle or hard massage?,” the only English words she knew, and for two blissful hours I was expertly kneaded, poked, flexed and walked on until I tingled all over and was about as relaxed as a de-boned chicken. It was the best $15 I’ve ever spent.

Location in Bangkok means very little. Some of the city’s best restaurants are tucked down dark soi or lanes. The Bodie Care, for example, is on a lane off Patpong Road, Bangkok’s most famous nightclub district, famous for go-go bars and massage parlors with names such as the Pink Pussycat and Darling Massage. Despite the city’s reputation as one of Asia’s sex tour capitals, you are not likely to see evidence of prostitution in Bangkok if you steer clear of areas like Patpong and the presently popular Soi Cowboy lane.

But unlike crime-ridden Times Square in New York, Patpong is safe and cheery, with a zany carnival-like atmosphere. The area, a series of short pedestrian lanes, is also the site of one of Bangkok’s most popular night markets. In the relative cool of evening, vendors sell everything from pad thai noodles cooked in giant sidewalk woks, to stacks of pirated Calvin Klein jeans for $7, to fake Rolex watches for $10 and cassette tapes for $1 (including the outlawed musicals “The King and I” and “Chess,” which contains the banned song “One Night in Bangkok”). Street shopping is a mind-numbing onslaught of designer labels.

Shopping is one of Thailand’s great attractions and all of Bangkok is a marketplace. Although its prices are not as cheap as a decade ago, Bangkok still offers better value than Hong Kong or Singapore do for locally made clothes, silk and handicrafts of teak and brass.

For the intrepid shopper and bargain hunter, nothing is more intriguing than Bangkok’s markets, which rival any tourist attraction for a glimpse of real Thai life. The most famous is the floating food market about an hour’s drive from the city at Damnoen Saduak, in Ratchaburi province. Since the men are out working in the fields, rice paddies or nearby coconut and orchid plantations, the floating market is a waterborne traffic jam of ladies in lantern hats paddling small boats along narrow canals. On board they might have tiny smoking braziers to grill up fresh fish or mounds of vegetables and fruit, including the favorite durian, which resembles a spiky football with an aroma akin to smelly socks.

Yet everybody’s favorite shopping place is the Chatuchak Weekend Market. On my first few visits to Bangkok in the late ‘70s, I loved watching the vendors set up the market on Friday afternoons on the Royal Parade Ground near the Grand Palace--the ramshackle trucks with wobbly towering loads snarling traffic for miles around. Sensibly, the market has been moved from those regal digs to an area near the airport. Yet the classic market has lost little of its wackiness in the new location. The pet section is still a bizarre zoo that includes fighting beetles, combative crickets and, in rows of old Mekong whiskey bottles, bright Siamese fighting fish.

Divided into sections, the Weekend Market is the place to poke about for fabric, ready-made clothes (if the bargains can compel you to buy without trying on), a fantastic array of Thai china, brass and glassware, as well as unusual Asian antiques, for this is, according to a local tourist board brochure, the best place “to buy antiques, especially the newly made ones.”

Since the secret is out and the world has discovered Thai cuisine, the lush, turn-of-the-century Oriental Hotel (which has hosted the likes of Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward), started what has become Bangkok’s most famous Thai Cooking School. Each morning I boarded the tiny teak ferry that crosses the river to a century-old mansion that is home to the cooking school. Stretching over a week of morning classes, the course steamed, sauteed, chopped and carved its way from soups and salads through curries to dessert. (Even if you’re not staying at the hotel, you can drop in for even a single day of classes.)

When I wasn’t learning the difference between mangosteens and rambutans, sorting through a dozen different nuclear chilies, sampling yummy yum talay, I was eating my way through the delights of Bangkok’s restaurants. After watching a rousing bout of Thai kick boxing at the Raj Damnoen stadium, I made my way to a nearby string of eateries known for their classic northeastern Thai cuisine and sampled a spread of crispy barbecued chicken, som tam (a searing salad made from shredded green papaya pounded in a large mortar with dried shrimp, lime juice, roasted peanuts and plenty of chilies) and special rice so sticky it could be used for bathtub caulking.

But the most bizarre meal I had was at the Tam Nak Thai, which, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the world’s biggest restaurant. I sat with some of the 3,000 other patrons on a sprawling network of boardwalks zigzagging across 10 acres of waterfalls and carp ponds. Browsing a hefty menu that read like a Thai food encyclopedia, the atmosphere was the familiar Thai combination of cheerful mayhem as 1,000 waiters clad in traditional Siamese costume and wearing roller skates whizzed dishes from the central kitchen to diners’ tables. Sanuk.

GUIDEBOOK

Exploring Exotic Bangkok

Getting there: Fly direct from Los Angeles to Bangkok on Northwest, Thai Airways and United for about $850 round trip, with advance purchase.

Where to stay: Hundreds of hotels in every class. There is a hotel reservations desk at the airport. Oriental Hotel, 48 Oriental Ave., New Road, (800) 526-6566 or fax 011-662-236-1939; $275 and up. The Asia Hotel, 296 Phya Thai Road, 011-662-215-0808; $130 and up, double. Convenient to shopping areas. The Royal Hotel, 2 Rajadamnern Ave., 011-662-222-9111; $70 and up, double. One of a few close to the Grand Palace.

Where to eat: Bussaracum Restaurant, 35 Soi Pipat, off Convent Road, 011-662-235-8915 or 011-662-233-5152. Oriental Rim Naam Restaurant: Thai meal with high-quality classical dancing on the Chao Phraya River opposite the Oriental Hotel, 011-662-437-9417. Tam Nak Thai, 131 Ratchadapisek Road, 011-662-277-3928. Thanying Restaurant, 10 Soi Pramuan, Silom Road, 011-662-236-4361. Lemongrass Restaurant, nouvelle Thai cuisine, 5/1 Soi 24, Sukhumvit Road, 011-662-258-8637.