Bangkok (Lonely Planet) - Andrew Burke [59]
Th Khao San – pronounced ‘cow sarn’ and meaning ‘uncooked rice’ – is perhaps the most high-profile bastard child of the age of independent travel. Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. For its first two centuries or so it was just another unremarkable road in old Bangkok. The first guesthouses appeared in 1982 and as more backpackers arrived through the ’80s, so one by one the old wooden homes were converted into low-rent dosshouses. By the time Alex Garland’s novel The Beach was published in 1997, with its opening scenes set in the seedier side of Khao San, staying here had become a rite of passage for backpackers coming to Southeast Asia.
The publicity from Garland’s book and the movie that followed pushed Khao San into the mainstream, romanticising the seedy, and stereotyping the backpackers it attracted as unwashed and counter-culturalist. It also brought the long-simmering debate about the relative merits of Th Khao San to the top of backpacker conversations across the region. Was it cool to stay on KSR? Was it uncool? Was this ‘real travel’ or just an international anywhere surviving on the few baht Western backpackers spent before they headed home to start their high-earning careers? Was it really Thailand at all?
Perhaps one of Garland’s characters summed it up most memorably when he said: ‘You know, Richard, one of these days I’m going to find one of those Lonely Planet writers and I’m going to ask him, what’s so fucking lonely about the Khao San Road?’
Today more than ever the answer would have to be: not that much. With the help of all that publicity Khao San continued to evolve, with bedbug-infested guesthouses replaced by boutique hotels, and downmarket TV bars showing pirated movies transformed into hip design bars peopled by flashpackers in designer threads. But the most interesting change has been in the way Thais see Khao San.
Once written off as home to cheap, dirty fà·ràng kêe ngók (stingy foreigners), Banglamphu has become just about the coolest district in Bangkok. Attracted in part by the long-derided independent traveller and their modern ideas, the city’s own counter-culture kids have moved in and brought with them a tasty selection of small bars, organic cafes and shops selling a head-spinning array of irreverent T-shirts. Indeed, Bangkok’s indie crowd has proved to be the Thai spice this melting pot always lacked. So when you’re drinking on Khao San at about 11pm and you start to wonder if you’re actually at a major music festival, there are enough Thais around to remind you this is Thailand, not Glastonbury.
Not that Khao San has moved completely away from its backpacker roots. The strip still anticipates every traveller need: meals to soothe homesickness, cafes and bars for swapping travel tales about getting to the Cambodian border, tailors, travel agents, teeth whitening, secondhand books, hair braiding and, of course, the perennial Akha women trying to harass everyone they see into buying wooden frogs. No, not very lonely at all….
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During the era of military dictatorships demonstrators often assembled here to call for a return to democracy, protests that ended in violence and death on 14 October 1973. Such protests, and the resulting loss of life, gave the monument a legitimacy it had previously lacked.
While you’re in this area, if you head north from the Democracy Monument on Th Din So you’ll see many shophouses that date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the entire block to the northwest of the Democracy Monument belongs to Wat Bowonniwet,