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SW: With no disrespect to the magazine I was working for, Conde Nast Traveler, there came a moment about three years ago when I was on a ship, and I was going to Antarctica, Easter Island, Pitcairn and Bora Bora. Before I left New York, I said to my editor at the magazine, \"Look, I'm going to these four places on a boat, and you obviously don't want me to write about all four, but which of those four would you like me to write about?\" And they said, \"There's no doubt about it. We want Bora Bora.\"

Yet it is entirely possible to stay awhile in Ayutthaya - possible, inexpensive, delightful and, for anyone trying to understand the complexities of Thai history, eminently desirable. But to do so you have to make a show of your independence. You must ignore the persuasive arguments of the Bangkok boatmen (though take their offers up by all means for lesser journeys, to the Grand Palace, or the Floating Markets) and insist, though they will advise you otherwise, on a northbound bus, or train, or car. Travel up from Bangkok early one evening - the plains are dull, so there is no need to go by daylight. Take dinner at a cafe in the bustling little country town of Ayutthaya that is the sole living remnant of the old capital, and rise before the sun, and then take a local boat. (A word of warning, drawn from the bitter experience of others: If you were incautious enough to have allowed the cafe owner to flavor your curry with too much of that murderously hot green chili known as prick kee nu, you will have risen long before dawn. So it is as well to demand, in a town that entertains so few Western foreigners at dinner, that the chefs go easy on the peppers.) I took my boat, a slender ''long tail,'' with its propeller set on a pivoted stem to help avoid the floating clumps of water hyacinth, just before dawn. When King U-Tong established Ayutthaya in 1350 he chose a site at the confluence of three rivers - the Lopburi, the Pa Sak and Thailand's Mississippi, the Chao Phraya - and then had a small canal constructed to turn his city into an easily defensible island. The island, lozenge-shaped, two miles by one, is itself incised by dozens of narrow canals - meaning that a boat, and especially a narrow boat, is an essential means of exploring the city. I found mine moored behind my hotel, the helmsman puffing contemplatively on a ragged cheroot. He agreed on 25 baht - a dollar - an hour, and once the deal had been struck and the cheroot tossed away, declared himself proud to be able to show me the city that 16th-century wanderers called the most beautiful in the East. ''They said it was like your Venice,'' said my boatman, who was called Mr. Sak. ''Many canals. Much water. Many lovely buildings. But so many are knocked down by the Burmese. You have to imagine what it must have been like before the Burmese came.'' Of course one can spend pleasant hours wandering in the old city itself. One can start at the island's western end, at the monument to the heroic Queen Suriyothai. (In the great battle with the Burmese in 1549, the Queen, a great feminist, dressed up in men's clothes and fought, on her elephant, alongside her King. In one memorable cavalry charge she saved her husband's life, but died in so doing. The chedi that holds her ashes is one of Thailand's most sacred.) And one can finish at the east, by the Phom Phet fortress, or the attractive Wat Suw an Dararam, a place that is quite lovely at dusk as the monks, framed by the magnificently restored columns and frescoes, chant their plain song devotionals. (And then, being nearby, one can dine at a floating restaurant on the Pa Sak River: there are two, beside the Pridi Damrong Bridge and the road home.) My own preference in Ayutthaya, however, is for the unrestored, the ruin sensu stricto, the kind of place where some of the sadness of the saga of the capital remains embedded in the stone. To see such a place one is forced to look at the river's left bank, not the right. My own favorite - a place that tells the essence of the Ayutthaya story, I like to think - is beside the old Dutch cathedral of St. Joseph (which still stands, and from which you can hear Christian hymns on a Sunday morning, sung in Thai). It is called Wat Chai Wattanaram, and it is a place of silence and forlorn beauty.

Winchester, Simon and Winchester, Rupert. Simon Winchester's Calcutta. Oct. 2004. 192p. Lonely Planet, $14.99 (1-74059-587-4). 915.414704.

LEAD: In this Island there is a Mountain of a vast Height all cover'd with woods and several small Hills which are naked, and enclose many Vales abounding in Rice . . . - Hendrick Hamel, 1668, ''The Description of the Kingdom of Corea'' CHEJU ISLAND, to which Hamel referred, is a vast volcano, the flanks peppered with fumaroles and lesser escape routes - now built into substantial hills themselves - from which steady streams of basalt lavas once eased themselves down toward the sea. The island summit is in fact Korea's highest mountain, Halla-san - 6,397 feet, and at this time of the early spring, quite covered with snow. (British charts once named the peak Mount Auckland. The Royal Navy had brief imperial ambitions for Korea's southern coast, and annexed a tiny island now named Komun-do, and with rather absurd grandiloquence styled it Port Hamilton. Nowadays there are two ratings' graves there, the headstones roped off as a sanctuary, a memorial to a somewhat forlorn and unconsummated colonial idea.) I was far from fit, but a friend who had flown down from Seoul to guide me, a tough young Korean woman named Kim Mae-young, whose firmest friend in Seoul was, she said, one of the country's best-known rock climbers - goaded me: To travel through Cheju without climbing Halla mountain would be an omission verging on sacrilege. I laced my climbing boots, she tied on a dainty pair of sneakers, and we set off on the trail. So we all set off back down again, some to the north of the island, and the hotels of Cheju City, while others, like Mae-young and I, retraced our steps back down to Sogwipo. Late lunch parties had sprung up on the hillside -gatherings of 10 and 15 people getting pleasantly tight on bottles of milk-white makkoli, and singing mournful ballads into the wind. No one climbed alone: The Koreans claim that they dislike solitude, and the contemplative Korean, even on hills where contemplation seems so suitable, is rarely found. Wordsworth is not popular: Wandering lonely as a cloud is an unfathomable Western trait. Mountains, someone explained, are for group enjoyment: ''People don't come here to enjoy nature. You Westerners talk about communing with nature. Here people come to commune with each other. The nature is incidental.'' VISITOR'S GUIDE Getting There

''At first sight [Broome] had nothing,'' he said. ''But deep down, it had everything.'' Deep being the operative word. Broome's brief history - William Dampier visited Roebuck Bay in 1699, but the town itself is only a little more than a century old - has been based almost wholly on the huge oysters that live in abundance 10 fathoms down off this part of the coast. The gold- or silver-lipped pearl oyster is a hermaphrodite, with the confusing habit of changing its gender according to what it had for breakfast. It is a giant, often weighing three pounds, with shells as big as dinner plates. And its insides are plated with brilliantly lustrous mother-of-pearl. M.O.P. is what they call it in Broome, and 80 years ago the oysters of Broome supplied it to nearly all of the world. The oysters had to be pried from the seabed by divers. The lugger owners first used aborigines, often kidnapping them, forcing them to dive for hours at a time. But then they discovered that Asians had a strange, never-understood ability to spot pearl oysters on the seabed. By 1900 Broome's docks were thronged with Malays and Chinese and Indonesians, with Polynesians and Japanese. Broome has an enormous Japanese cemetery, where more than 900 men were buried after diving accidents - ''the bends'' being a bigger local killer than any more conventional ailment. (The town's recompression chamber, donated by a London diving firm, is now a major attraction; it reduced deaths from 33 in 1914 to 1 in 1918.) And there are still Japanese faces around; indeed, Phil Matsumoto is on the Broome Shire Council, and the guidebooks all say that Broome, with its marvelous potpourri of genes, is Australia's most cosmopolitan town. Lord [Alistair McAlpine] decided some years ago that tropical Australia - unpopulated, unspoiled, with cheap land and willing labor - was an ideal place in which to breed wild animals that might be threatened in other, even less developed parts of the world. So he built himself a zoo in Broome, and a wildlife park, and he has employees who look after an ever-expanding collection of exotic beasts. ''I see Australia as a kind of ark,'' he says. ''The conditions are ideal for rearing many of the animals that are being made extinct elsewhere. So I want them to come here. I'll set up gene banks. I'll get people to come up to Broome to view the wealth of animal and bird life that remains on this earth.''

It was a full minute before a sleepy-looking man in the distinctively baggy brown shirt and broad-brimmed cap of the S.Z.D. (Soviet Railway Administration) peered blearily from the doorway. Was this the Moscow train? I asked. He squinted at his watch, clearly not wanting to believe it was nearly time to leave. But then, with a sheepish grin, he shouted ''Da! Da,'' beckoned us up and in, and whispered, as I hoisted in the trunks, ''You like tea?'' We stopped for three days in Irkutsk, drove to Lake Baikal (which our guide, Ludmilla, informed us with grave pride, holds a fifth of the world's drinking water), knocked plaintively on the door of the old Decembrists' house (''Closed for Renovation''), saw the place where they make sable coats that cost a cool $100,000 apiece and visited the outside (but were not permitted inside) of what was said to be the world's biggest mink farm. Our next train was a slow and local mail train bound for Mongolia - no ''soft class'' here, but the conductor gave us all four berths of a ''hard-class'' compartment, with plenty of room for our baggage and for us. The train was full of Red Army soldiers bound for the eastern border - men going with grim resignation from the comparatively easy life of Europe and the Warsaw Pact camps to the bleakness of the Ussuri River and the firebases of the Gobi Desert. They were an amiable bunch and shared food with us. They were entranced with our Polaroid pictures, and with the silver-covered almonds. At night they sang soft melodies, and were delighted when I persuaded the technicians who controlled the train's public address system to put on a Beatles cassette. We all listened as ''Hey Jude'' wafted out across the Transbaikalia Mountains.

To the Editor: I enjoyed [Simon Winchester]'s article ''Exploring Ayutthaya by Canal Boat'' (Travel, June 7). It brought back memories of my own trip to that idyllic spot 10 years ago.

It may not be all [Michael Palin]'s fault. The Sahara has changed. It once hosted caravan trains of 20,000 heavily laden camels, whose owners traded in gold, ivory, spices, silks and slaves. Now the turbanned Tuaregs whose ancestors ruled the fabulous city of Timbuktu 500 years ago take tourists out for photo opportunities, and there's a pipeline being built to carry natural gas from Niger to Spain. The book does have one advantage over the box - at least you're spared those endless sequences of Berber courting dances in High Atlas mountain villages. I'm being harsh. Palin is a decent chap with an eye for the absurd and an appealing line in self-deprecation. At best this is a light aperitif to the wonders of desert travel that whets your appetite for a serious main course.

WINCHESTER, SIMON & RUPERT WINCHESTER. Simon Winchester's Calcutta. Lonely Planet. (Writer and Place). Oct. 2004. c.192p. ISBN 1-74059-587-4. pap. $14.99. TRAV

When I asked the man in Cairns for the name of a dude ranch somewhere in northern Queensland, where I might have a chance to see Australian cowboys doing whatever Australian cowboys do, I got a very peculiar look indeed. It turns out that Australians don't have the phrase ''dude ranch'' in their lexicon, being rather contemptuous of the very notion of the dude, and that, in addition, the word ''cowboy'' is faintly insulting - it means, apparently, the somewhat precious youth who isn't reckoned tough enough to grapple with really mean cattle and so is detailed to look after the dairy cow on the family farm instead. ''I imagine'' said a sailor from the Beagle, when he stepped ashore south of the gulf in 1836, ''the time when this landscape will be dotted with white church spires.'' It reminded him so much of England - rolling green woods, low hills, winding rivers - that he called the place Prince Albert Land, and the flat, salty coastal flatlands the Plains of Promise. No church spires rise here today -only one town of any size, a place called Burketown, with a thousand inhabitants -and the only inhabitants of the outback are station people, like the Stolks of [Escott], and the people who run Punjaub Station, 80 miles down the track, or those at Mount Oscar, at Almora or at Planet Downs. Escott, which runs along both sides of a wide, tidal stream known as the Nicholson River, is, in a way, a memorial to the Britons who first settled here: the English-Scottish Australia Cattle Company bought the land, and gave the station its name (an acronym). It is one of the larger properties, though some absentee landlords have fair-sized spreads in the shires nearby. Len Stolk, who worked his way around Australia after arriving on a boat from Curacao, was hired as a stockman at Escott in 1969: a decade later, when the English-Scottish cattle company decided to pull out, he was offered the chance to buy the property for $69,000. The bank was doubtful, but eventually came up with a loan, which Len Stolk repaid in double-quick time. Escott, he now says with some deserved pride, is worth $7 million dollars, and is one of the more prosperous properties in northern Australia. To make reservations write to Len and [Lyn Stolk], Escott Barramundi Lodge, Escott Station, care of Post Office, Burketown, Queensland 4830, Australia. (The radio-telephone number is 077-437887.) For further information on the region and the country, write to the following: John Courtney, (Gulf Local Authority Development Association, 79 Abbott Street, Cairns, Queensland 4870, Australia; 070-511420), the Cairns Convention and Visitors Bureau (Post Office Box 5851, Cairns, Queensland 4870, Australia; 070-517366) and the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation (Suite 1728, 3550 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles Calif. 90010; 213-381-3062).S. W.