Travel: The Smiling Lures Of Thailand

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What elsewhere one sees only in travel brochures, one finds in Thailand daily. It often seems, in fact, as if ancient gods -- Bacchus, Neptune, Zeus and Venus -- conspired to make the land a composite of holidaymakers' fantasies. Here is a never-never land built on solid ground; a fairy-tale monarchy ruled by a Renaissance King and his classically beautiful Queen; an orchid-scented garden of scintillant temples, lush jungles, palmy white beaches and a capital built along tree-shaded canals; and a gentle Buddhist retreat filled with smiling, gracious people who make "tourist industry" sound like a contradiction in terms. The most pressing problem with the "Land of Smiles" may be simply that it is too hard to resist.

If skeptics are right in claiming that every country has its season in the sun, becomes the flavor of the year for just a spell (if it's 1983, this must be China), this, without question, is the time of Thailand. Suddenly, faraway once-upon-a-time Siam has become the hottest destination in the world. In the past ten years, the number of tourists has tripled. Not coincidentally, the country boasts the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia, itself the fastest-growing area in the world. Last year, to celebrate the 60th birthday of the revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the government enticed, with elegant ads and well-phrased brochures, a record 3.5 million tourists to the kingdom. This year the number promises to surpass 4 million, or three times as many as visit neighboring giant India.

Bangkok alone is breaking world records with its facilities. One of its 17 five-star hotels, the Oriental, is acclaimed by Institutional Investor as the finest in the world; one of its more than 11,000 restaurants is registered in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest in the world; and one of its 63 discos is among the world's three biggest. Here, in fact, is a travel agent's dream: first-class services at Third World prices, exoticism crossed with elegance. With the Thai baht tied to the declining dollar, Thailand has come to mean the "Land of the Free" in more ways than one. Yet at the same time, the sinuous grace of the land is matched by its bilingual efficiency (a visitor at Bangkok's spanking new airport can go from touchdown to taxi in roughly 15 minutes).

Nor is Thailand afflicted with many of the tensions that have brought down paradisal Asian escapes like Sri Lanka and the Philippines. On the map, the kingdom is ringed by countries that sound ominous: the People's Republic of Kampuchea, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. Yet the land itself, for all its cyclone-cycle coups, is a pocket of relative calm and one of Washington's surest friends: the more the government changes, the more the monarchy stays the same.