Krazy Khao San Road
There is no limit to the colorful variety of activities that draw your eyes in all directions. Almost everything happens on the sidewalks or the canals and rivers…floating markets with fruit and vegetables andflowers, vendors selling everything under the sun…mostly made in China with even cheaper labor than Thailand…everything from knock-off Rolex watches to corny T-shirts. There are people eating, taking care of children, even sleeping…girls in short skirts waiting,hoping…buildings are being built (construction goes on 24/7), metal shop workers cut metal with no protective glasses, owner�s new Toyotas are parked inside their places of business after hours.
Freak Show on Khau San Rd. (�backpacker� area)
There are two web sites that give you the down and dirty on Bangkok, philipwilliams.freeservers.com and stickman.com, bangkokbob.com, all expat web masters who have lived here for some time. Even the website for the Thai student association lists these web sites as two of the best. Here is Philip�s description of Khau San-I couldn�t do it better:
�Khao San Rd in the Bamglampoo area of the city has become almost world-famous helped by the exposure it received in the movie �The Beach.� The 100�baht a night dog-kennel does exist and if you remember the magical scene from the movie where the brilliant Robert Carlyle talks to the hero through a dividing wall of chipboard and torn wire-mesh,you already have a decent idea of the standards of those rooms. Frankly if you can stay ONE day in Bangkok, and be willing to return to a room like that after a hard day pounding the city’s hot sticky streets, then you�re a far better man than I am.�
Both sides of the sidewalk are lined solid with vendors and food stalls that only allow very thin people to maneuver the narrow walk space sideways and with people going both directions it is quite a trick. Negotiating the streets is not helped at all by being stopped every 100 meters by an Indian tailor just because you are wearing a pair oftrousers (this is a man who obviously dresses up) �special deal for you Sir.� But the uniqueness of Khao San is in the range of services that are offered by the enterprising Banglampoo folk. These include fake I.D cards, fake university degrees (for the would-be English teachers), body piercing while-U-wait, and street-side hair braiding for those looking torecapture the 70�s Bo Derek look.�
These days, however, the hot look is dreads and along the sidestreets you can watch Thais use a crochet hook to absolutely ruin a lovely girl�s hair! Bob warns me away from making any judgement but the fact is that locals everywhere are very wary of this traveler look. Yes, we are backpackers but hopefully not what the locals the world over consider unwashed ingrates. In Avignon France we wanted to stay at a lovely little Inn so Bob called ahead on the phone. No vacancy, the guy said immediately. But Bob kept talking and finally at the end of the call a vacancy miraculously became available. We felt that the innkeeper was �screening� his clients and he probably was.
�It�s a fun place to while away a few hours watching the travelers with their long straggly beards and bushy armpits,� Stickman says on his web site. �And that�s just the women. You should see the male of the species. But fair�s fair, the Khao San Rd Thais have a remarkably high tolerance to all the idiosyncracies of these travelers and you rarely see them get hot under the collar because some scruffy kid is losing it over apparently being cheated out of 5 baht. I take my hat off to the Thais in that respect.� The Israeli’s are the worst.
Bob and I think that many of these travelers rarely leave the area while in
Bangkok because we hardly ever see them. But fair is fair here too. Not all in this age group who truly are looking scraggly from traveling are selfish ingrates looking for a free ride. (My apologies to two of my sons-one who stayed in �The Green House� on Khao San several years ago and the other who likes the Koh Samui beaches. My hat is off to Josh who spent a month eating toasted insects and completely immersing himself in the culture in a small Isan village in the north of Thailand near the Laos border.
Tags: Bangkok, Khao San Rd, Thailand
Zoe