When I visited Bangkok’s iconic backpacker travel ghetto Khao San Road during my round-the-world “No Baggage Challenge” back in 2010, the experience was, at the time, something of a “walk down memory lane” that channeled an earlier chapter of my vagabonding career.
Indeed, eleven years before I made that 2010 video dispatch, I wrote a Salon.com essay about the quirky intrigue of Khao San Road, asserting that Bangkok’s storied backpacker ghetto was “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.”
From what I can tell that still holds true — though I’ll admit that in 2024 I didn’t stick around long enough to make a truly empirical assessment. In fact, it occurs to me that Kiki and I visited Khao San Road as “meta-tourists” — that is, travelers who visit a specific space to touristically observe other travelers.
Twenty-six years after I first experienced it, Bangkok’s Khao San Road still stood out as a quirky international tourist zone, a place that (to quote Alex Garland’s 1996 backpacker-noir novel The Beach) serves as “a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand; a halfway house between the East and the West.”
Yet at the same time Khao San Road remains an iconic part of Bangkok — a distinctly globalized commercial district that, in for all of its seeming inauthenticity, is an authentic expression of Thailand.
Kiki and I didn’t linger very long on Khao San Road — we had other places we wanted to visit in Bangkok — but we did have some food and drink and watch the scene swirl around us for a few hours.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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