BANGKOK - For Asian junketeers, the Siamese City of Angels is a favourite destination these days. The rich of South Asia find Thai private hospitals reasonably priced. Middle-class East Asians come here to release their tension at health spas offering tactile pleasures of all varieties and shades of grey. The poor of Indochina flock here to escape the drudgery back home in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. And the Burmese are here in force, escaping their nation's time warp. But for everyone from everywhere, this is the metropolis of mammon. This is where you go into a mall and waste three hours instead of wasting it in a traffic jam.

Thais take very seriously the importance of tourism to their economy. Every effort is made to make visitors feel comfortable in this awfully uncomfortable place. And this is not a forced effort, Thais don't have to be forced to be nice to tourists, everyone intrinsically knows that it is their lifeline.

The floating market must have begun out of necessity in an area prone to flooding. Farmers of the Mekong basin must have had no choice other than taking their produce to the market in canoes or bamboo floats. But the things that the vendors sell during the traffic-jams in the network of canals these days are tourist trinkets.

Thai entrepreneurs have turned apparent disadvantages into assets of tourist attraction by careful infrastructure improvements and intelligent marketing. The water in the canals that once made Bangkok known as the Venice of the East is now dirty (let's not compare it to the Bagmati, though) but its legends continue to be repeated during guided tours in air-conditioned coaches. Even a ride on the sky-train is suggested not as a necessity, but as a tourist experience. It's so hot and humid that the entire city is big sauna at this time of the year, but
hotels boast of the sauna facilities at their premises.

After Singapore's Changi, it's the turn of the Thais to dream of a regional hub. Once complete, Subarnabhoomi, Bangkok's new international airport, will be one of the most modern in the world. Being built at a breakneck speed, it will replace the overcrowded Don Muang, which has been over-run by urban sprawl. Japanese contractors expect to complete the job within next three years. Presumably, this city of 10 million people will be still liveable enough for the millions of visitors that the new airport hopes to handle.

Many Nepali passengers rush through the transit at the Bangkok airport to catch their connecting flight to Malaysia where they hope to find work. But there is no dearth of junketeers like us. Keshav Sthapit of Kathmandu, Budhhi Raj Bajracharya of Patan, and Balaram Sharma of Surkhet are here for the Asian Mayors' Conference organized by ESCAP. Accompanying them are their administrators and a clutch of consultants. Strangely, all the three mayors are from the opposition party, and none is sure of the fate that awaits them back home with local polls in limbo.

At a Nepali evening hosted by Bhabani Dhungana, an ESCAP official and a long time resident here, the mayors' entourage has a gala time. Mayor Sthapit is joking and dancing. Mayor Bajracharya chooses to sing. But Mayor Sharma's mind seems to be back in Nepal where the future of the local government units remains uncertain.

Sharma says it is a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation for the UML, which controls most of the VDCs, DDCs and municipalities at present. He says that the government can neither extend the term of the existing bodies nor let them lapse without shooting itself in the foot. But what Sharma doesn't seem to realise is the ability of the present government to make the impossible look routine. The government can simply let things linger, just as it has been doing with every other major decision and disclosure in recent months.

It's almost midnight when we finish, but on the car ride back we notice the wholesale fruit-market is bustling. The Thai economy seems to have put the recession of 1997 behind. Construction cranes, the indicators of the bubble economy are back.

The classified section of The Bangkok Post has no distress sale ads. What it has in abundance are job openings and package tour promotions. The Thai economy is running a surplus, and the baht is getting stronger. Buoyed by signs of recovery, the Thai premier talks about Asian Cooperation Dialogue to generate more trade within the region. Malaysia's on-again-off-again Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed was so alarmed by Thailand's new-found confidence that he hurried to dismiss the idea with impolite haste last week.

A Thai friend reads my mind and tries to reassure me, "Don't worry. If you work hard and save money, you can build better sky-trains and motorways. But no matter how much money we have, we can't build Mount Everest or Lumbini in Thailand." Had such a comment come from a westerner, it would have sounded patronising. From a fellow rice-eater, it's reassuring to hear that our destiny is what we make of it.

Thais have made mistakes in the past by trying to achieve too much too fast. It's military and police personnel aren't universally loved-their image is associated with the atrocities and corruption of junta rule. There is still much socio-economic disparity, and corruption must be as rampant as the editorials in the daily testify. Thais look towards Korea for inspiration, and have begun to plan the way the Koreans did in the seventies.

For harder lessons, we in Nepal must look towards countries that have recently gone through with what we are experiencing now. As a monarchy, as a former dictatorship, as a country that depends on tourism and agriculture, Nepal could learn a lot from recent Thai history. Maybe the Mayors' Conference will turn out to be more than a junket, our elected city fathers have realised the importance of looking east.