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This is my fourth trip to the and the trek here is becoming all too familiar - a plane to Zurich, followed by a three hour train journey into the Swiss mountains (on three different trains, each smaller than the one before).

The Davos elite get cars direct from the airport, but I'm told the road has been blocked by an accident and the journey is taking about as long as ours.

Whatever mode of transport one takes though, the journey is a visually stunning one but is sufficiently circuitous to make one wonder if it will ever arrive anywhere - which nicely symbolises the World Economic Forum itself.

Because what will occur over the next five days is not a very focused event at all. It is a festival of debates, dinners and drinks parties - private meetings and whimsical talks, all spread across a medium-sized secure ski resort. Like the journey up here, it is well worth viewing if you get the chance.

But beginners to the World Economics Forum have to understand there is no single Davos experience, and there is no single Davos community either. There are numerous tribes who interact only at a minimal level.

There are the bankers and economists (in greater abundance than last year); the foreign policy wonks; the NGOs and social entrepreneurs (the WEF is big on doing good); there are the big corporations (whose subs pay for the event) and there are always a few presidents and prime ministers. (I won't refer to them as politicians; when they arrive in Davos, they are all treated as global statesmen.)

The great thing about the event is that by holding it in this location, one of the coldest and most slippery places on the planet, everyone is forced to wear big boots and bulky coats that make them look like the Michelin man. The event thus strips the most portentous people of their dignity.

The theme of the forum this year is "Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild". Rebuild what you might ask? Well, it's the world that the conference organisers have in mind. The forum never lacks ambition.

However, for the Today programme the biggest theme of the week is probably that of rebuilding the global financial system.

It had seemed possible that the world was succumbing to the temptation to engage in very little reform of banking on the dubious grounds that you do nothing during a crisis as the system is too fragile. And you do nothing after the crisis as the system seems to work.

In fact though, President Obama's announcement last week on banking has put radical reform back up the agenda. Regulators and bankers will meet across the atrium here and ideas will undoubtedly be exchanged.

A second theme is the world economy after "The Great Recession" (the phrase being used by the conference organisers). Since this time last year, extreme measures have been taken by governments and central banks and the treatment has worked; the world economy has stabilised and things have gone rather better than many feared.

Alas, now we have to work out how to cure the world economy of the treatment - in particular the fiscal policies that have left embarrassing deficits.

Indeed, one might argue that if the original problem in the world economy was that jobs and output were underpinned by unsustainable private borrowing and spending, we have only improved things with unsustainable government borrowing and spending. It's as though we've cured ourselves of heroin addiction by weaning ourselves onto methadone.

The policy challenges created by government deficits and loose monetary policy will be much talked about here.

Needless to say, there are many other themes too.

In the wake of the Port au Prince earthquake, I'll be interested in a session here on making humanitarian assistance more effective. Surely we can prepare for events better than we have done. The only problem for the forum is that many of the people you would want to hear from on this issue are probably still busy working out how to help Haiti.

Finally, aside from the serious issues here, there is a pretty well-constructed programme of scientific and artistic activity. There are expert-led sessions on everything from alzheimers to extra-terrestrials to viruses. Psychology and neuroscience have had a presence here for many years and 2010 is no exception, with lectures on imagination and perception among other topics.

And cultural figures are always a big feature too. We will be interviewing the charismatic Chinese pianist Lang Lang and Margaret Atwood who are both in town for the week.

There's certainly a lot to do in five days and a lot to talk about.

It is of course easy to be cynical about this event. It can be seen as a junket. And this year in particular, it can be seen as a forum where the people who got the world into trouble have the temerity to think they can plot a way of it.

Of course it is both these things.

But it's still very interesting.