Khao San Road is Not for Me
Part One of the Hipster Handbook to the World
By Claire Brownell
Posted December 11th, 2007.
We were introduced to Khao San Road by a drunk Englishman. As we walked down the street to our guest house with our packs, fresh off a 35-hour flight from Toronto, he stumbled into our paths and declared, "Khao San Road is not for you!" I'm not sure what inspired that declaration — our startled looks, our dirty clothes, or just drunken intuition — but he was right. Khao San Road was okay. Just okay. It was not for us.
Khao San is the backpacker nexus of South East Asia. Pretty much every twenty-something doing a budget trip in the region starts and ends their travels on this road in West Bangkok, Thailand. Lined with cheap and dirty guest houses, street vendors, neon signs and people, it's hard not to stop and gape at the spectacle even if you've already walked down it 30 times that day. Its atmosphere was described by our guidebook as "carnival-like," which I guess is pretty accurate. It's a carnival designed by enterprising Thai to attract a very specific niche market. The exotic yet familiar decor of the bars and restaurants and the wares for sale at the vendors' stalls are an interesting insight into what decades of young people from all over the world escaping adult responsibilities attract to this one specific place through the economic forces of supply and demand. Apparently, that's generally knock offs of Western designer label mall rat clothing, hemp necklaces, and plastic buckets of Red Bull and vodka.
So if Khao San Road is the result of years of entrepreneurs fine-tuning a playground tailor made to appeal to people like my travel mates and I, why isn't it for us? There are two main reasons why Khao San went from novelty to total drag after a few days. Reason one is the constant hustling. Walk ten feet on the strip looking like an obvious foreigner, and ten people with hassle you to buy something or go somewhere. One of the main appeals of South East Asia to Western backpackers is the unbelievable exchange rate, so to swindlers and fast talkers you're a walking ATM if they can just figure out how to make a withdrawal. The most obnoxious hustle of all was the constant invitations to take us by tuk-tuk (three wheeled taxi) to a "ping pong show," followed by a wet puckering noise made by smacking their lips together. Use your imagination to guess what that is. In addition, expeditions to markets in other parts of Bangkok made us realize that vendors on Khao San were capitalizing on the fact that many backpackers can't rouse themselves out of their drunken stupor to comparison shop outside of the strip. In fact, we rarely saw backpackers anywhere but Khao San. The drinks, flashing lights, cheap-ish clothes and exotic-ish feel were surprisingly effective at keeping travelers from finding out there was cheaper, cooler stuff elsewhere.
The second reason why Khao San Road was not for us was its constant and depressing appeal to the lowest common denominator. I was hoping Khao San would be a cultural melting pot of the cool, new, and underground from all over the world. Instead, it seemed to continually riff on the same theme — familiar enough to be comforting, no matter where you're from. "Exotic" enough to keep you from wondering why you didn't just stay home. It was like a relationship that started out with passion and high expectations that quickly became stale and ended in an awkward break up. Sorry, Khao San. It's not you, it's me. I am, after all, from Toronto. I can't just toss off years of being trained to scoff at drunken singalongs to Oasis and Metallica, multi-coloured dread extensions, and trance mixes of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." It's true, we had some good times with your one-dollar tall boys of Beer Chang you sold and opened for me at the 7-11, and you did supply me with a pretty sweet 70s wall paper print tote bag. However, I feel that our long-term goals are not compatible. But hey, let's keep in touch: do you have Facebook?
Which makes me wonder if maybe it is me. Maybe I've absorbed more of the notorious Toronto hipster elitism than I like to admit. After all, everyone else seemed to be having a good time. Once my friends and I got a few drinks in us, we started relaxing our standards and going with the flow of the crowd's attitude: "It's shiny and loud, it must be fun." And watching some chick launch ping pong balls out of her gitch would have at least made a good story (that's what a ping pong show is, if you hadn't already guessed). In the end, the ideal is a compromise. Khao San Road could use some finely honed and up to date Toronto taste, and I can stop being such a snob about bad trance music and Oasis. They've sold more albums than I ever will, anyway.