The River of Kings! The Royal Mile! You must have seen it, the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, in either the old film version of ‘The King and I’ with Yul Brunner or the new one with Jodie Foster. It is lined with temples and palaces and, in fancy, it carries the golden Royal Barge with the King in all his scarlet splendour.  In reality though, it’s a muddy, messy, unruly, overcrowded waterway, teeming with craft, floating with rubbish, crammed with barges and dwellings on stilts. But – oh! Still wonderful. It took me a full day to walk through the Old City along the river, from Dusit in the north to the Grand Palace in the south. It was incredibly hot and sticky and noisy and congested and smelly. I loved it.  I loved the fragrant little avenues of stalls in the markets, so narrow that you would have to squeeze into a crevice if someone was coming the other way. I loved the baskets and tubs of every possible type of produce that you can imagine, and much that you can’t:  fish, eels, turtles, creepy-crawlies, vegetables, flowers, gourds, molluscs. I loved perusing the little food stalls where Thais cooked away in woks and on griddles, preparing strange multi-coloured food. I’m an adventurous eater – I don’t mind how many legs or feelers my lunch had before it landed on my plate – so I vowed that I would not eat anything I recognised. It left the field wide open and occasioned some surprises. My only regret was (and it still is) that there were just not enough meal excuses for me to try everything I saw. Despite all this freely available and incredibly cheap food, the people look well fed rather than over-fed and nowhere in Bangkok did I see a fat Siamese.  I loved the juice stalls selling freshly-squeezed fruit – a tart orange, litchi, mango, star-fruit, persimmon and some violently red contraption with pips: the flavour didn’t help to identify it either.  Up and down alleys, along main roads I wandered, taking a detour to sit in the courtyard of a small temple; climbing up to the top of a spire (the Temple of the Dawn has steps that you negotiate on hands and knees – the architects wanted the climb to the top to be hard work to make you reflect on the difficulties of a pure life-path, they certainly make their point!); criss-crossing the river on the ferry, haggling with hawkers for postcards and a rice-paper umbrella to protect me from the sun; making wai to the Buddhas that surprise you in doorways (wai is the gesture of respect that involves putting your palms together under your chin and giving a little bow).  It was a join-the-wats tour as I went from the City Pillar Shrine, which was the most beautiful mini-temple I saw in Bangkok - Emerald Palace notwithstanding - to the broken-crockery Temple of Dawn and all points in between. Most temples, resplendent in gold leaf with mosaics made up of tiny multi-coloured mirrors, had small neat gardens, with orchids and lotus flowers in pots and regimental squares of lawn. This is what I liked most about the Thai people – they are proud of their temples and public spaces and keep them immaculate. Even the most ramshackle little house-on-stilts would have pot plants on the balcony and a tiny gold-and-scarlet-and-peacock-blue shrine. The National Museum explained something that had been puzzling me for quite some time: no-where in the city is there any reference to Anna Leonowens and the fact that her autobiography led to the musical film – ‘The King and I’ – that is synonymous with Siam around the world. According to the museum, Anna was just one of several missionary’s wives who had been hired by King Mongkut to teach English to his multitude of children. Anna’s story gives the impression that it was her civilizing influence that led to the many reforms made by Mongkut and his son Chulalongkorn. The Siamese don’t like this, regarding it as patronising, and they maintain that they were quite capable of modernising themselves without any English help, thank you very much. Chulalongkorn, by the way, is regarded as the greatest Siamese king of all time, and his life story is a fascinating tale. Just after romping through the Emerald Palace with its huge demons and gorgeous gardens, I was wandering through a pavement market, shaded with umbrellas and awnings, and wondering what to choose for a late third lunch, when the wind suddenly cooled and began to blow in a gusty fashion. The sky, which a few minutes ago had been a brazen blue, was now thickly grey. Within five minutes – I kid you not, that’s all it took – the rain came down in a solid sheet. Within seconds every umbrella had suddenly acquired a resident cluster of semi-soaked human beings. As the rain increased in intensity and splashed up from the ground the groups would huddle closer together like penguins on a melting iceberg. For half an hour the rain sluiced down while we shuffled from shelter to shelter, making a mad dash to the next awning and getting drenched in the process. Undeterred, a short way off an unconcerned hawker was selling umbrellas – it was the wisest R25 I spent that day. Now umbrella’d, I was able to damply resume my wat-to-wat Temple Tour. The guidebook mentions about 15 temples in Bangkok – hah, there are thousands of them! Each one is a poem of gold leaf and jewelled colour, with the Buddha inside, the flowers and incense and rows of shoes outside. And each temple has its own little motto as well: I decided to adopt the one that would give me ‘brightful thoughts’.  Across the river in Thon Buri (the sun was back out and the entire city was steaming) the people live on the klongs, or canals. These are all artificial, as is the river itself, and were created several hundred years ago as transport nodes. Siam used to have canals, not roads. It is only recently that the canals are silting up and the city is using road transport. And how! If the greatest thing that strikes you about Bangkok is the temples, then the first thing that hits you is the traffic. I love public transport in strange cities, and got to know the buses of Bangkok. A snaggle-toothed bus-conducter helped me with my stops, laughing at my murderous mis-pronunciation of my destination. The buses are cheap and efficient, and a great way to see the teeming streets and plot out landmarks for the following day. Because tomorrow I was planning to journey to the Ancient City – and I will tell you about it next week.