Khao San Road, Bangkok: from low-rent slum to ‘flashpacker’ central to counterculture relic – will gentrified party strip be saved by a revamp?
- Ask the Lonely Planet writer who helped make Khao San Road backpacker heaven, and he denies it’s the guidebook that ‘screws places up’
- But there’s no question a street once famous for its cheap rooms and tourist touts went upmarket as it became a trendy party zone. Still, what use is nostalgia?
The Khao San Road of 1992, when I first stayed there, looked very little like it does now, as the Bangkok tourist strip undergoes major renovation that is set to be completed in February.
Back then, the road was lined with ramshackle guest houses divided up into rooms with plywood walls, shared bathrooms and ceiling fans that cost around US$3 per night to rent.
Travel agents sold bus tickets and package tours for places like the Crocodile Farm and Floating Market, next to street vendors peddling knock-off music cassettes and fake university degrees. Besides shopping for cheap beachwear, the only entertainment on offer came from bars and restaurants that played Hollywood action films at night, or blasted out the same old cassettes of The Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Some guest houses sold weed and heroin to the backpackers, many of whom were punks and hippies. Some bars stayed open 24/7. Plenty of foreign criminals, drug traffickers and illegal migrants lived in the area, staying one step ahead of the police, who conducted 4am raids in the guest houses to try to catch them.
Locals scorned the strip as a “salum” – Thai slang for slum. By then, Khao San Road, once known for the rice mills which gave the road its name, was well on its way to becoming the starting point and finishing line for youthful excursions in Southeast Asia, thanks in no small part to the Lonely Planet guidebook.