Who'd have thought that Little Rock, Arkansas, would prove so diverting?

Paris, Rio, Kyoto: We know pretty well what we're going to encounter (or at least to savor) as soon as we set foot in any of those cities; part of their gift, polished over centuries, is for knowing how to play themselves to perfection and how to give every visitor just what she wants and expects. Such places are the equivalent of the traveling world's celebrities, used to projecting themselves compellingly even off-screen. But there's a different kind of charm in those lesser-known towns that will never be regarded as stars, but that can take on almost any role you ask of them: the character actors among sites, you could say. They offer you unexpectedness.

Take -- of all places -- Little Rock, Arkansas (yes, take it, please, as a New York comedian might say). If I knew anything about the capital of the "Natural State" before I went there recently, it was that it was small, forgettable, and, as one distinguished travel-writer had written to me, "intriguingly forlorn and melancholy." Bill Clinton started his political life there, I knew, but that seemed the exception that proved the rule; like many people, I had driven through it on the huge freeway I-40, going across the U.S., and like most people I had taken pains not to stay there.

In short, Little Rock was perfectly positioned to disarm and entertain me as well-worn Paris, Rio, and Kyoto perhaps never could. The first two people I met after I left my hotel turned out to be serious students of Buddhism, one of whom knew and had studied under the one Zen master I happen to know in Kyoto. A brawny guy from Memphis stopped me on the street, outside the Arkansas Literary Festival, and asked me which of Graham Greene's novels I thought his best. Most wonderfully of all, the town I saw turned out to be an unlikely center of irony, and even self-mockery; at the stately Old State House, the proud and distinguished building from 1842 where Clinton had held his victory celebrations, one whole room was devoted to the history of "Bubbas and hillbillies."

Bangkok these days seems about as alien and exotic as its sister City of Angels across the ocean. Hollywood cop films are shot there, New York bars open their second branches on its back-streets and for many a kid just out of college in Seattle, the Khao San Road is as natural a first stop as once the Left Bank was, or North Beach. But in 1983, Thailand still seemed the far side of the universe. And to a boy of 26 who was spending his life in a little room in Rockefeller Center in New York, writing about places he'd never seen, it was an instant initiation into mystery and night-time and the limits of all the things he was so sure he knew.

Men came up to me outside the airport -- and it was a dumpy airport then, worthy of an almost forgotten country -- brandishing pictures of women in bikinis and rooms whose beds seemed to move like the heavens (now those pictures would be much more graphic -- and available to a certain kind of visitor before he'd left home, on the Net). There was a smell of jasmine -- of spices and gasoline and all of them mixed together -- as I headed off in the dusk and clambered into a minivan for the long, long ride into the city. I'd never really set foot in a five-star hotel before when I deposited my luggage with a towering Sikh doorman at the Oriental Hotel and set off into the dark.

The neon was flashing evilly, and irresistibly then. A young woman was stringing her thin arms around me and cooing things in the universal language of desire (for what I represented, if not for me). A Filipino man in the basement of a four-star hotel was singing Grateful Dead ditties on request. No one had heard of Patpong then, or told me that the most alluring women in the street were men.

In most countries of the world it helps to know the language a little before you arrive; in Japan, it can only be an impediment. Words tend to get in the way, and the ideal conversation for most of the Japanese I've lived among for 22 years is one in which as few words as possible are exchanged. The country fashions itself more as a family than a free-for-all, and as in any close setting, if you really know someone, you listen less to her words than to her pauses, her hesitations, her tone of voice, everything she leaves out. The main language to learn when you come to Japan is silence. I got a crash-course in this elusive tongue, harder to translate than Hungarian, when I went with my Japanese sweetheart to the templed island of Miyajima not so long ago. I knew that the place would be packed with Japanese visitors -- we were going on a holiday weekend in early November -- eager to enjoy its celebrated maple trees, its strolling deer and "white raccoons," the Itsukushima shrine set out on the sea, as shrines had been set here for fifteen hundred years. So I found a list of traditional Japanese inns on the island and made some calls several weeks in advance. At one of the numbers, remarkably, the phone was answered by the sweetest and most mellifluous voice I'd heard in years, switching within a syllable to perfect English.

I asked if she had a room available for the first weekend in November.

"Of course," came the trilling answer. "Would you like a Western room or a Japanese?"

"Western," I said, remembering too many nights sneezing on tatami mats.

"Okay. I'll be waiting for you!"

Was that all, I wondered? Was something wrong? I queried her some more, and she said, in the most lilting and almost hypnotic English I'd heard in months, "Our rooms are very small, I'm afraid, but our food is good. I'll be waiting for you."