Bangkok always manages to throw out a surprise or two. I seem to have a love-don't love relationship with the city:

Love the ancient sites, the secret places, wonderful parks, the food and above all the hospitality of my Thai family (their home-made sticky rice and mango, and Pad Thai remain the food highlights of my whole  tour of Burma and Thailand).

Don't love the pollution, the traffic jams and materialism gone mad, better suited to the USA than to this gentle, Buddhist kingdom. But then this seems to be the pattern all over the Far East and South East Asia.  They are superb business people.  I just hope they don’t end up drowning all their traditions in this vast ocean of commercial empire-building.  

You’d think I wouldn’t get to see much in the full three days  I was there, but the family made sure  every moment was utilised.  I arrived from England at 6 in the morning, and by lunchtime we’d dined in a Japanese restaurant and were on our way to see ‘the Big Elephant’. This was to be my first encounter with Airavata during this journey: the king of the elephants seemed to crop up on several occasions in Thailand and Burma.

Airavata is the elephant mount of the Hindu god Indra (king of the gods and the god of storms).  Airavata was the original elephant, who rides across the sky as a storm cloud. He is the progenitor of all the world’s elephants, who once had wings and were also, at one time, clouds.

In Thailand, Airavata is known as Erawan, and there are numerous statues of him as a huge, three-headed beast. On the first morning of this trip I was taken to the bizarre and eccentric Erawan Museum in Samut Prakan. Erawan towers over his base, the museum building: a giant cast in greenish  copper - 250 tons in weight, 29 metres high, 39 metres long. You can’t miss him.

The interior of the museum houses three floors representing the Thai Cosmos, a riot of shapes, colours and carvings from Hindu epics and Buddhist traditions.  All master-minded in the 1960s by Lek Vriyaphant, who wished to preserve his collection of antiques while at the same time honouring the elephant king.

Outside there are gardens and shrines and innumerable Buddhist figures. The place was crowded with groups of school-children as well as tourists and pilgrims.

Our next stop was Ancient Siam. I’d heard of this. It is 200 acres of land, roughly the shape of Thailand, upon which some of the country’s most famous old monuments have been reconstructed either full-size or scaled down. Like the Erawan Museum, it is the brain-child of Lek Vriyaphant.

I expected a theme park, but, far from it, it’s a beautiful place, tastefully designed and constructed, a working, open-air museum. Well worth a visit to give you an inkling of what Thailand is all about.

We enjoyed a fantastic evening meal that evening, at the Bangpu Nature Reserve, watching the sunset over the Gulf of Thailand.

The trouble with going away for any length of time is coming back. After nearly a month away from home and a surfeit of new experiences, a tidy dose of jet-lag to boot, it’s proving a real struggle to get back into the swing of mundane, ordinary life with all its  demands.  I’ve spent two days clearing my Outlook inbox – basically sorting the emails, haven’t really got very far with replying yet. I’ve also chilled out by going through my more than 1800 photos – first draft – they have to be sorted further and labelled.

 I can divide the trip roughly into three parts: Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma. Though to be accurate, Thailand was invaded twice by me – on either side of Hong Kong – plus a brief transit at Bangkok Airport after Burma. However,  I’m going to treat Thailand as one entity rather than a few fly-by-night drop-ins.

 But let’s start with Hong Kong. I’d only been there once before – in 1995, before the British lease ran out and Hong Kong was handed back to China. That time it was a short visit, just two or three nights. This time I had longer – five nights to spend with a friend who has recently moved there.

 For a start my friend lives in what must be one of the most dramatic residential high-rise buildings anywhere in the world. Over 70 storeys high, itself perched on the edge of a hill, needle-thin so that it pierces the sky like an icicle suspended from  heaven's gate. The view was tantalising. I could hardly tear myself from the big, bow windows that  looked down at other skyscrapers below.

 I did tear myself away, of course, and we spent 4 happy days exploring Hong Kong.  I remembered Stanley Market from my previous visit – I’d bought a small suitcase there. This time I succumbed to a blouse and matching jacket.

 Repulse Bay and the tree-covered hills behind the city continually reminded me that Hong Kong is not all high-rise city intensity.  But nature and beauty abound even within the city confines. We visited  the Chi Lin Nunnery, built in wood in the style of the Tang Dynasty – a peaceful haven in the Nan Lian Garden, partly sheltered from the sky scrapers by the Mountain of Compassionate Clouds. What could be better than that?

Hong Kong pulses with vitality and splendid views by day and by night.

But among the great breath-robbing gargantuan temples to modern inventiveness, you can also find little red and gold shrines to honour more ancient, tried and tested gods: here a room-turned-temple to the great Hindu trinity – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, there, nested among rocks between two palaces of commerce, a tiny shrine to Buddha.  At on the corner of a winding street in central Hong Kong, past the posh antique shops, this smoky little gem, its ceilings hung with incense- coils, its alters crammed with fruit and flowers to appease its two residential deities, the Chinese Taoist-Buddhist gods,  Man, the God of Literature, and Mo, the God of War.

Hong Kong’s markets also remind us of an older, slower age. The flower market is really more of a street of flower shops than market stalls. Orchids are a favourite. But there are also some strange fruit.

The fish market is likewise a series of shops. Here you can buy goldfish and tropicals for your aquarium,  all bagged and ready for you to take away, like prizes at a fairground.

My least favourite place was the bird market. Birds are much loved and very popular in Chinese cities. But there seems to be very little understanding of the cruelty inflicted on these creatures of the air by confining them to a tiny cage, however elegant. And worse still, many of the birds were kept in huge numbers crammed together in small holding cages.  The smell, by the way, was horrible.

On the other hand the Jade Market was fabulous. I could have spent all day there. Prices were unbelievably low and the quality of the jade work was excellent. I should have bought more. Too late now…

I spent a happy afternoon at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, seeing, of all things, an exhibition of Fantastic Animals from the British Museum. I explored the galleries of Chinese ceramics. But the greatest surprise was an exhibition of work by modern Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong, which I loved, although it was the last thing I expected to enjoy. He works mainly in pen and ink and achieves so much atmosphere with minimal strokes.

The ‘Jumbo’ floating restaurant sums up the gentle exuberance of a city where chic and opulence sit comfortably alongside older, traditional values ranging from gilded dragons to mouth-watering treats for the pallet, from the gigantic to the intimate.