Hi-So | Frivolous Universe

KHAO SAN ROAD: In the wedge-heeled footsteps of Susan Orlean’s bawdy Bangkok dispatch, “The Place to Disappear”

By: Kim Philley

17-04-2012

All languages are welcome on Bangkok’s Khao San Road, including Drunkard. — Susan Orlean, “The Place to Disappear”

They thought Khao San was horrible because it was so crowded and loud and the room in the guesthouse was so dingy, but it was brilliant, too, because it was so inexpensive, and there were free movies playing at all the bars, and because they’d already run into two friends from home.

It was as if the strangeness of where they were and what they were doing were absolutely ordinary: as if there were no large, smelly drunk sprawled in front of them, as if it were quite unexceptional to be three Scottish girls drinking Australian beer in Thailand on their way to Laos, and as if the world were the size of a peanut-something as compact as that, something that easy to pick up, shell, consume, as long as you were young and sturdy and brave.

peekaboo-shoulder dress: Terminal 21, Bangkok

navy leather wedge sandals: custom-made for my size-41 feet at mosstories, Terminal 21

If you spend any time on Khao San Road, you will come to believe that this is true. Finally, the hairdresser glanced at the man, who had not moved. “Hello, sir?” she said, leaning toward his ear. “Hello? Can you hear me? Can I ask you something important? Do you remember where you’re from?”

jingle-jangle earrings: Lumphini street stall

dozen roses: some Khao San rando handed them to me

Thailand, the most pliant of places, has always accommodated even the rudest of visitors.

éléphant! Stop going up Pedro’s butt!

For hundreds of years, it was the junction between Chinese, Burmese, Indian, Khmer, and Vietnamese traders. Many Americans first came to know Bangkok as the comfort lounge for troops in Vietnam, and, later, as the capital of sex tourism. Starting in the early eighties, when foreigners started trekking to such places as Myanmar and Tibet and Vietnam, Thailand took on another hostessing job, because Bangkok was the safest, easiest, most Westernized place from which to launch a trip through Asia.

Altogether, they have turned Khao San into a new sort of place-not really Thai anymore, barely Asian, overwhelmingly young, palpably transient, and anchored in the world by the Internet, where there is no actual time and no actual location.

I have a persistent fantasy that involves Khao San. In it, a middle-aged middlebrow middle manager from Phoenix is deposited at the western end of the road, near the Chanasongkhran police booth. He is a shocking sight, dressed in a blue business suit and a red tie and a white Oxford shirt, carrying a Hartmann briefcase, and wearing a Timex. He wanders through the snarl of peddlers’ carts and trinket booths. First, he discards his suit for batik drawstring trousers and a hemp vest and a Che Guevara T-shirt, or knock-off Timberland cargo shorts and a Japanimation tank top, and he sells his Timex to a guy with a sign that says “We buy something/camera/tent/sleeping bag/walkman/backpack/Swiss knife.”

owl t-shirt: Hey Pilgrim, Chatuchak Weekend Market, Bangkok

braided gold earrings & bracelet: mosstories, Terminal 21

gold-plated Hanuman amulet: Chinatown, Bangkok

He then gets a leather thong bracelet for one wrist and a silver cuff for the other, stops at Golden Lotus Tattoo for a few Chinese characters on his shoulder, gets his eyebrow pierced at Herbal House Healthy Center, has blond extensions braided into his hair, trades his briefcase for a Stssy backpack and a Hmong fabric waistpack, watches twenty minutes of “The Phantom Menace” or “The Blair Witch Project” at Buddy Beer, goes into Hello Internet Caf and registers as “zenmasterbob” on hotmail.com, falls in love with a Norwegian aromatherapist he meets in the communal shower at Joe Guest House, takes off with her on a trek through East Timor, and is never seen again.

Something about Khao San Road makes you feel as though it could eat you alive. The junkies and the glue-sniffers lurking in the alleys are part of it, and so are the clean-cut kids with stiff, Ecstasy-fuelled grins dancing at the cafs; the aimlessness that pervades the place is both pleasantly spacey and a little scary when you glimpse an especially blank face. Travellers do vanish in all sorts of ways.

The day begins at night on Khan San Road . . . . Around midnight, I ran into the South African English teacher from Taiwan who had been on her way back from massage school in northern Thailand the other time I’d met her. Seeing her again was both a shock and not a shock, because Khao San is so transitory a place that you imagine each encounter there to be singular, but then you realize that the world is small and this particular world of young adventurers is smaller yet, and that there is nothing extraordinary about seeing the same people, because their great adventures tend to take them to the same few places over and over again. Her name was Elizabeth, and she and I stopped at a street vender and bought corn on the cob and sat on a curb near My House Guest House to eat. This time she’d just come back from a full-moon party on the southern Thai island of Koh Phangan, a party of two thousand travellers, most of them high on Ecstasy or pot or psychedelics, painting a herd of oxen with Day-Glo colors and dancing for hours on the edge of the sea.

I HEART BANGKOK canvas tote: Chatuchak Weekend Market

She now had a terrible headache, but she didn’t think it was from the drugs or the late hours. She blamed a Sikh psychic she’d met that morning on Khao San who had tricked her into paying him a hundred dollars so he wouldn’t curse her karma.