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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
As he leaves Southeast Asia, our Vagabonding correspondent reflects on the evolution of the middle-class travel revolution.
Oct 12, 1999 | Three hours before I'm due to fly out of Bangkok, I take one last stroll down the swirl of sights and sounds that is Khao San Road. This is my final visit to Thailand's famous backpacker ghetto, and -- since I've spent more than 20 nights here since arriving in Southeast Asia last December -- I have returned to savor this place one last time.
Out in the street, young travelers from countries such as Switzerland, Israel and New Zealand nurse beers at plastic tables, while others line up at food stalls to sample sliced pineapple, vegetarian noodles and banana pancakes. Tuk-tuk drivers hail passengers at the corner, while Indian tailors pace the sidewalk in front of their stores, chanting their standard mantra ("Sir, try a suit. Very good price, sir."). Sidewalk vendors hawk jewelry and cigarette lighters, bootleg tapes and fake press passes; storefront vendors sell souvenirs ranging from Nepalese jackets to Balinese masks to novelty T-shirts that read "SEX INSTRUCTOR (First Lesson Free)."
In the alleys, uncertain dogs jog through the shadows, unowned and omnipresent. Placards advertise tattoo parlors and laundry services, traditional massages and hemp-fiber clothing. Colorful stickers on travel agency windows advertise bus and ferry services to Phuket, Ko Samui, Ko Phi Phi and Chiang Mai. Backpackers crowd into dingy Internet cafes to check their Hotmail accounts and surf the Web for travel updates, while suspiciously healthy-looking kids prowl the street with small cards that read "I want to go to school. Please give me 10 baht." Video movie noises rumble out from open-front restaurants, blasting that time-honored Hollywood litany of screams and explosions, of people calling each other bastards and sons of bitches.
Sometime next spring, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie called "The Beach" will forever change the way people see this corner of Bangkok. As the hype surrounding the release of the movie kicks into high gear, reporters from around the world will descend on Khao San Road to make their own wide-eyed assessments of this scene. This publicity, along with the movie itself, will inject a new romantic stereotype into a place that is already over-romanticized and over-stereotyped.
Everyone who lives or travels in Thailand, it seems, has their own assessment of what Khao San Road represents. Local Thais, whose opinions are fueled by a sensationalistic press, consider Khao San Road a place of drugs and licentiousness, of freaks and cheapskates. Bangkok expats dismiss Khao San Road as host to a steady rotation of unwashed cretins who call each other "dude" and sit around comparing tattoos. Upscale tourists avoid the place as instinctively as they would seedy neighborhoods in their own hometowns.
But perhaps the harshest critics of Khao San Road are the backpack travelers themselves, who consider the place a watered-down version of Asia -- a tie-dyed front for conveyor-belt tourism, an insipid gathering place for pseudo-hippies and hipster wannabes. "The Khao San Road scene is way too clichi for my taste," I once overheard a young traveler confide to her friend. They were both sitting in a cafe on Khao San Road at the time.
In reality, Khao San Road is a place that slithers inside its own stereotype. As Alex Garland wrote in "The Beach," the novel on which the movie is based, Khao San Road is "a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand; a halfway house between the East and the West." Khao San Road is not designed to be a static, aesthetic part of Thailand, but a pragmatic duty-free zone -- a neutral territory that has learned to continually reinvent itself in the image of what young budget travelers want.
In this way, Khao San Road stands as an apt symbol of a travel revolution that began a decade ago and has almost been completed.
