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Bedtime. I fall asleep on the narrow couch/bed, but not for long. I awaken from a dream: I am riding through Asia on a bullock cart with no springs. Side-to-side knockings feel as if the train's wheels do not fit the rails. Objects hanging from hooks in the compartment do a wild, herky-jerky dance. Motion-sickness seems imminent and sleep becomes doubtful. I get up and continue my reading of Maugham's Gentleman in the Parlour, his tale of travels in Malaysia.

Breakfast arrives at 7:30 on a tray — juice, yogurt, pineapple, croissant, coffee. Then a long day of racketing along on this one-track line, passing through humid jungle, occasional villages of metal-roof shacks, the bleak, strip-mined remains of abandoned tin diggings. Giant cumulus clouds are volcanoes of steam rising for miles above earth. Many smells flavor the air and make the route more . . .er, exotic? Sweet smoke from burning wood, fish drying, vegetation rotting, water stagnating. These are the scents of another world, a Third World perfume, smells we no longer allow (but which I miss) in ecologically-correct and odorless western civilization.

There is a second-day lunch, some hilly jungle, another dinner, a big lake, many rice paddies, another rough night on the rails, a final breakfast — and then, just before boredom, we are grinding slowly through endless urban slums. The E&O Express has arrived: Bangkok.

Porters assemble our baggage on the platform, a driver in a crisp, white Oriental hotel uniform finds me in the crowd; a crisp, white Mercedes enfolds me in blessed air conditioning. I am on my way through the world's steamiest city and world's worst traffic to the sanctuary of another of Asia's legendary hotels. The map says I am in Thailand, but a romantic traveler would rather still call it Siam — land of gilded temples and dancing kings.

The Oriental hotel has been receiving international guests on the banks of the Bangkok's Chao Praia river since 1873 — when it was a one-story building raised on piles at the water's edge and advertised "comfortable quarters for gentlemen of the sea." This meant an American bar, newspapers, a billiard saloon, boats for hire and three meals. When Joseph Conrad arrived in 1888, he wrote, "In the light of the crimson sunset, all ablaze behind the golden pagodas, I made my way to the Oriental . . . ."

In the century and more that has followed, Conrad was joined at the Oriental by Maugham, Coward, Graham Greene and many another great story teller. Suites honoring the hotel's famous literary guests are still maintained in the original structure. In more recent history, no other hotel that I know has so often been named "Best in the world."

The windows of my room look out upon the River of Kings, Asia's grandest Grand Canal, Bangkok's main street and main sewer, furrowed and made tumultuous at any hour by the crisscrossing wakes from water craft of all sizes and styles. Old rice boats, built of teak, are big and bulbous, with the stately roll of a Hong Kong junk. Or the hong yao, hotrods of the river, long and narrow and swift as barracudas. Their roaring automobile engines drive "long tail" propeller shafts that produce great high-speed rooster-tails. Or passenger ferries, large and small, express and local, navigating routes that go up, down and across the waterway.

Yes, I think, it looks as I remember — exotic.

Tomorrow I shall awaken memories again — but tonight, dinner by the river, a barbecue-buffet with swirling smoke from charcoal fires. Bougainvillea in all its colors is sparkled with miniature white lights along the embankment. Water taxis come and go from the hotel landing, rocking in the passing wakes, their idling engines making deep, gargling sounds. The restless surface of the Chao Praia is painted with reflected colors; clumps of water hyacinth float downstream from the distant River Kwai, black silhouettes gliding across undulating pools of red and purple.

Bangkok is not Singapore, not clean and green, not all work-ethic and industrious bustle. There are no real skyscrapers here and none planned. The city occupies a swamp and settles a few inches into the muck each year. The pervasive smell of sewage is neither explained nor excused.

Bangkok is ever gracious, never in a hurry, a touching, tolerant manana town, paralyzed by traffic, choked by pollution, dusted with a patina of grime. Its palaces and temples are among the most beautiful in the world — and its massage parlors, red light districts and pornography marts are the most notorious — and most interesting — in Asia. Seedy Patpong Street is the city's infamous neighborhood of touch-bars, go-go performers, VD clinics and money changers.

Bangkok's traditional menu of proper sightseeing attractions is limited but unduplicated elsewhere in Asia. Its watery network of klongs (with their colorful floating markets) is unique and more extensive than all the canals in Venice. There is a snake farm (see 'em milked at 11 a.m.), a crocodile farm (see 'em fed red meat at noon), a rose garden (with lunch and a show), over 400 temples. Most visitors cover the main sights in two or three days.

But is Bangkok exotic? Answer: Wow!

The Grand Palace complex, a golden enclave within this gritty city, may be the most concentrated and spectacular eyeful of royal and religious architecture that a traveler will find anywhere on this planet. Staggering. Stunning. Awesome. All of the above: choose your own adjectives. Gleaming gold (real gold), sparkling mosaics, dozens of temples in Thai, Ceylonese and Cambodian styles, royal apartments, hundreds of bejeweled guardian figures, imposing audience halls, an explosion of form and color that seduces tourists into exposing their every roll of film on the first half-day tour. Disney, DeMille and the Arabian Nights combined could not match this.

At Wat Pho, a 16th-century temple/monastery, a colossal, 150-foot-long figure of the reclining (dying) Buddha gleams in brilliant gold leaf as hundreds of the faithful circle, dropping clinking coins into a row of iron collection pots. The reclining Buddha is a money machine.

To be a contributor and a participant, I buy a thin leaf of 22-karat gold from a young monk in saffron robes. He is reading the newspaper while racing to finish a bowl of vegetables and rice before noon (for he may not eat again today). Doing what I see others do, I apply the postage-stamp-size rectangle of gold foil to the face of an already heavily-gilded Buddha image — and then realize this is the moment to pray — or ask for something . . .but what? How about a wish for my first wife's happiness in her new marriage? Hey, why not?

Does Buddha grant favors to Congregationalists? Does exotic mean crazy? Does it mean something we outsiders will never, can never, understand? Does it mean such a kaleidoscope of customs and colors that we are overwhelmed? So much gleam of gold that we can not look directly into its setting-sun glare?

Bangkok is not a walking town, too smoggy, too chaotic, too easy to get lost. Tourists are bussed around in safety. Risks or not, I believe the soul of cities is not found in their museums or cathedrals, but in their streets. Out I go then, soul-searching on a warm afternoon.

Crossing Bangkok's streets is a Thai version of Russian roulette. Traffic cops are about the size of Michael Jackson and wear tight-fitting brown uniforms and anti-smog masks. They contend with gridlock as a condition of life — and provide no noticeable assistance to pedestrians.

Exotissimo Travel (I have found it at last!) posts a short list of "sigh-seeing" [sic] tours — also offers a Thai dinner and dance and the "cheapest hotel room in town" with twin bed: $48.

Nearby, I find a "Marriage introduction service . . .world-class lawyer and detective center . . .marriage arranged for aliens . . .work permits . . .English-speaking detectives available . . . ."

Cooking smells drift out of side streets: bananas baking, satay broiling, fish frying. Also the brothy scent of steaming stews, greasy whiffs from smoking woks, elusive hints of curry in the air, or ginger, or rotting fruit.

I am importuned several times while walking — first I feel a gentle tap on the arm from someone who has sidled up, furtively close, at my side. When I look, a worn and wrinkled brochure is quickly snapped open to reveal photos of naked, expressionless men and women doing improbable things.

"You want beautiful ladies?"

Cellular phones are everywhere, carried by swaggering kids, drivers of tuk-tuks (motorized pedicabs), pushcart vendors, monks, blind beggars, shopkeepers, motorists — in traffic jams or restaurants, on escalators, while riding big, red motorcycles, on the river ferry boats, in barber shops and go-go bars (. . .and in the hushed lobby of the Oriental, where I observe a richly dressed Dragon Lady businesswoman holding her flip-phone to one ear while doing rapid math on a calculator with her free hand.)

I linger on in town, charmed by the gentle Thais, pampered by the famous hotel, finding more to Bangkok than the standard tourist sites. I rent a roaring Long Tail boat to explore the klongs one day; I give over almost an entire afternoon to a spa massage — and an evening to a formal Thai dinner with dancing girls. When time was up, there were still things I hadn't done.

That, I thought, is the way to end a feast — with some appetite left.

I have my last breakfast, on a terrace by the river, in cool shade. The hotel buffet offers Penny Wort juice, papaya pulp, cucumber syrup, jackfruit, stewed or baked bananas, water apples, pachinburi nuts, pine seeds, oat croissants, Assam or Ginseng tea, Chiangmai honey. Also bitter pomelo jam, Phuket ginger, baby tangerine marmalade, carrot jam, hen or quail eggs, egg white omelette.

Exotic? Nah, just like home.