Good Night & Safe Sex

We were sort of in the neighborhood one night after dinner and Larry mentioned that he had never been to Khao San Road. Khao San Road is Bangkok’s Backpackers Ghetto, home of the cheap guest houses, cheap breakfasts, banana pancakes, and cheap package tours. You can get rasta hair extensions, a tattoo, a fake press card or a cheap bus ticket to Cambodia.

We took a tuk tuk to the target destination and were greeted by a giant sign saying “Good Night and Safe Sex” which is both good advice and appropriate on Khao San Road. The street is closed to road traffic at night, but this does not include motor bikes, so getting really drunk would still be really dangerous in terms of crossing the street.

We picked a bar that had tables right up to the street so that we would have a good view of the action. While we did see the occasional new arrival over-loaded with a gigantic backpack in back and a smaller, but still obscenely large day pack hanging on their fronts, doing the old ‘Guest House Hunt,” it seemed that there were probably more folks like us, coming to see the backpackers in their natural habitat. It was almost like mid-America going to see what’s going on at Height Ashbury. There were even families with young children wandering around and checking out the scene.

I could not help but wonder what kind of impression these people give to the Thais. The next morning we went on a bicycle tour. We were the first to be picked up and the other couple was to be picked up at a guest house in the Khao San Road area. This proved to be kind of an adventure because so many of the guest houses have similar names and our guides drove to several before finding the correct one. Now I will admit that despite the seedy reputation of the area, many of the guest houses in the area appeared to be down right cute (looks can be deceiving, see crappy guest house description in Lao section). Our unplanned tour of the Khao San area gave us the opportunity to talk with our guide who explained he loved the area because seeing all the foreign backpackers was like going to a foreign country. I refrained from telling him that when the backpackers get home their mothers will make them get haircuts and jobs and that this is not what backpackers look like in their natural habitats.