So just where is Khao San Road, an alleged hippy haven of cheap rooms, traders of dreams, night- and daymarkets and wall-to-wall marijuana?
by ALEX PITHIE
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first came to Bangkok 25 years ago and they told me then that ‘it’s a must-see’. It was…kinda. Heaving I guessed with visa fugitives, pimps, hustlers, on-the-run scam artists, losers, dope peddlers, Congolese drug mules, randy college kids finding themselves with or without a condom, off-duty cops, on-duty cops, Euro trash playing pool, thieves marking time, misplaced soccer dickheads saving up for more lager, and tanned Jews forcing prices down and the goyem out.
So just where is Khao San Road, an alleged hippy haven of cheap rooms, traders of dreams, night- and daymarkets and wall-to-wall marijuana?
Straight off, pretty it is not. And neither is it obvious, tucked discreetly away like the girly bars of Sukhumvit and Silom, hidden well out of site behind the otherwise stately detail of the very main street.
It’s in a part of this great city where the idea of greatness dominates and where the magnificent throughfare Rajdamnoen Avenue is home to the excesses of royalty and mild-tempered religion alike. Here temples and palaces have absorbed as much as money as might have built the poor of Thailand a thousand universities and with enough left over to put the first Thai on the moon – clutching his master’s degree of course. The saving grace of the architectural excess of days gone by is of course that today they look quaint, exotic and awe-inspiring enough to pull in the snapping tourists with lots of cash and cameras, equipped with an appetite for the mythical, mystical memories of Old Siam’s past.
To find Khao San you switch right off the main drag – temple town – and within a few yards you are already wised up to the fact that someone somewhere is doing a very good job of putting this cheap ass, 27 th wonder of the world on the map.
Two kosher restaurants within a city block!
Enter and relax and watch from your roadside beer bar. At any time of day – but best near evening in the narrow, crowded pedestrian street – it is game on!
A Romanian train driver, grinning his way in to the hearts of the accommodating Thais, trips over a massive blue-rinsed midwest matron trawling hard for any prostitute to scowl at and disapprove of while very white, sockless Soviet pimps on vacation ask for directions from already-confused, pot-smoking Arab dockers busy ogling sexy Jewish chicks here on R&R from National Service on the Gaza Strip. A gaggle of unshaved smelly Iranian postmen hunt for obliging cheap thrills and in the process grill a posse of Irish fiddlers and their Thai chicks out looking for short gigs and long, free beers. Fat New York tax accountants with bad shorts and stroke-ready sweat-wet heads blow their fees on ubiquitous carved Red Indian icons and “genuine”Burmese rubies, then queue in the heat for Limp Bizkit look-a-like tattoos on their flaccid white biceps. Pouting Greek dudes escaping the beach get their sun-bleached hair pleated and beaded like Swedish girl scouts, both grinning in the mirror when not scoping out the chicks queuing to lay their asses when the brading is done. A pair of retired Texan coke dealers get to know the ladyboy hookers, all muscles and cheap perfume and ready to take it in any orifice anywhere in town for ‘a mere 1000 dollars’, bringing a smile to the Dallas blow monkeys’ faces and giving the giddy transvestites accidental hard-ons, turned on as they are by the appeal of crazy sex-starved rednecks and the smell of warm greenbacks.
Don’t ask me how many money-changers there are here or where to score the best Ganja or who does the best Thai food or why there are more Rolls Royces in this street than on any other in this a city of 15 million punters, or where the best live music is or which is the best place to send e-mail or to ‘phone home or to get laid or get a fake I.D. or get your hair braided or buy the best gems or silk gear or silver jewellery or thongs or the coolest T-shirts…
That would really take away the fun of this very fun street which quietly connects in a gentle but safe labyrinthine way to other cool alleys and smaller streets, where there is even more to see and touch and eat and feel and smell and enjoy.
It’s bit busier during Songklan or Thai New Year and that’s definitely worth missing, believe me!
