For two millennia the citizens of Budapest have nursed a passion for bathing. Far beneath them, in geological fault lines, is a watery cauldron, the source for over 120 thermal springs whose temperatures range from warm to scalding. These waters have produced an obsession. It began as a pursuit of health. It quickly became a pursuit of pleasure.

In Budapest the bathhouse is to the inhabitants what the pub is to the English or the coffee house is to inhabitants of American sitcoms. Stripped off and immersed in communal pools, they come to meet friends, to chat, to read the papers, to play chess, to catch up on the gossip. Rather than a couple of beers or a skinny latte and a blueberry muffin, there are steam chambers, hot pools and a vigorous masseur.

Some people kick-start their day in the bathhouse. Others come after work to unwind. For others still it is the mid-afternoon pick-me-up. I bought a swimming cap, a pair of flip-flops and bath towel, and set off into the city's waterworld.


In the vaulted entry halls of the Rudas baths at the bottom of Buda hill, I passed through the turnstiles where a white-coated attendant handed me a key and small white apron. The key was for a locker where I left my clothes; the apron was to wear in the bath. It was a fetching garment which just covered one's privates while leaving the buttocks exposed. Feeling a trifle self-conscious in what could be mistaken for a male stripper's costume, I proceeded into the main baths, pausing first for the obligatory shower.

Fes is one of the great survivors. A medieval Muslim city, barely changed in a thousand years, it offers a vision of a world when the clash of civilisations involved Barbary pirates and white slave traders. Still enclosed within high walls, still threaded by a labyrinth of narrow alleys where mules jostle with robed figures, this ancient city rests on twin pillars -- commerce and religion. And one man has managed to combine the two.

Lined with shops and stalls, the main street of Talaa Kabira is a river of people.


Mysterious figures in robes with pointed hoods gather at the tobacco stalls like extras from Lord of the Rings. Veiled women press into tiny underwear shops, checking out the frilly knickers. Families of pale Berbers from the Atlas, blue tattoos wrinkling on their cheeks, crowd round jewelers' counters to finger the gold chains. Men in loin cloths hurry towards the tanneries. Dark Africans from the other side of the Sahara cast knowledgeable eyes over piles of dried fruit -- figs, raisins and dates.

At a turn in the lane, where two oncoming mules have caused a traffic jam, the butchers' stalls give way with unseemly abruptness to the stone-cutters, perched outside their workshops on low stools, chipping epitaphs into slabs of funerary marble. Beyond, a feverish baker is sliding rounds of dough into a fiery oven on a long-handled wooden paddle while across the lane a loquacious fellow dispenses fresh orange juice, sweet cakes and marital advice to his customers.

When Selim the Sot ascended the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1566, he proposed a new theory of royal governance. Henceforth the greatness of an emperor was to be judged not by bravery or glory, but by indulgence in comfort and pleasure. In Selim's case this meant two things -- women and drink. It was the kind of wheeze that modern leaders can only dream about.

I blame the Topkapi Palace. It seemed to have this corrupting effect on all its inhabitants. Its fragrant luxuries did not exactly encourage effective government. Once Selim had moved himself and his harem of 150 women into the Topkapi, he never seemed to want to come out again. In 1573 the French ambassador noted that in three months Selim had only left the palace twice, and that was to nip next door for prayers. What was it about this palace above the Golden Horn that seemed to cast such a spell over its princes? I hurried along to find out.

For outsiders, entrance to the Topkapi Palace was never easy. In the old days European ambassadors, who were kept waiting for weeks, vied with one another for admittance to the reception halls of the Ottoman sultans. Little has changed. In the Court of the Janissaries, I found myself in an interminable ticket queue vying with a busload of Italians to whom queuing did not come naturally. After twenty minutes I realised I was going backwards. When I finally fought my way to the ticket window, I was surprised to find it was level with my shins, obliging me to kneel and genuflect slightly to ask for an adult single.

The Topkapi sits astride the best real estate in the city, overlooking the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. Walled and secluded, it is a city within a city where, for four centuries, the Ottoman Sultans were pampered and indulged in a series of salons and pavilions that came to be known as Dar-us-Saadet, or the House of Felicities. Once through the gates, I began to feel the Selim effect. Between the splashing fountains and the swirling tilework, it suddenly seemed a good day for doing nothing.

When I was a boy growing up in Canada, Hanoi was the enemy. In those days most foreign visitors to Hanoi were American pilots who had taken a wrong turn over the Bay of Tonkin. Travelling on one-way tickets, they were accommodated at the 'Hanoi Hilton', a notorious prison where room service consisted of a propaganda lecture and a bowl of maggoty rice. Sometimes they appeared on television, rather grim-faced, to say how much they liked the place.

Twenty years on and I was never sure if I should mention the war. It may be the great inescapable fact of the last fifty years of Vietnamese history but it seems to have sidled away with barely a trace. Doi moi, the Vietnamese perestroika, has made honored guests of the former enemy, and Vietnam has become one of Asia's most fashionable destinations.

Peace becomes a country as beautiful as Vietnam. I came to Hanoi through a landscape of flooded paddies where buffaloes waded fetlock-deep through unimaginable greens, and young women in white silks cycled along the raised causeways in a pewter twilight.

The two old capitals -- Saigon and Hanoi -- are a country apart. The former is a city of the tropics, mercurial and corrupt. Few people bother with the post-war name, Ho Chi Minh City, too much of a mouthful even for the politically correct. Saigon may have lost the war but it is winning the peace. A former den of capitalists, it had something of a head start when it comes to market forces and is now busy rediscovering its old commercial hustle. Less brash, more conservative, Hanoi seems to belong to an older world. While Saigon is a city Americans would recognize, Hanoi retains strong echoes of its French colonial past.