Bangkok (CNN) – Once upon a time, locals sold rice on Bangkok’s Khao San Road. Lots of it.
Barge after barge rowed and later drove down the vast Chao Phraya River to the mouth of the Banglamphu Canal, where he poured thousands of tons into jute bags for neighborhood wholesalers.
Smaller vendors opened stores south of the canal, where an alley of land became so dense with the rice trade that King Chulalongkorn ordered a suitable road to be built in 1892. At just 410 meters, the cobblestone strip was not large. enough to be named after a Thai historical figure or principle of national construction, unlike other urban roads, so it was simply called Soi Khao San (Milled Rice Lane).
While Banglamphu thrived on rice profits, the district expanded into clothing (including Thailand’s first ready school uniforms), buffalo leather shoes, jewelry, gold leaf and costumes and costumes for the Thai classical dance theater. The local demand for entertainment has given rise to two musical comedy houses, Thailand’s first national record label (Kratai) and one of the kingdom’s first silent cinema cinemas.
However, just 100 years later, an invasion of international backpackers has almost completely eclipsed the culture of the local market. Starting as a trickle in the late 1970s, when Bangkok was the end of the Asian hippies trail, the influx became a tidal wave in the 1990s.
Hostels proliferate
I don’t think anyone could have predicted the inexorable evolution of the road and the surrounding neighborhood.
When I first walked Khao San Road on a research trip to the first edition of Lonely Planet’s Thailand guide 40 years ago, it was filled with two-story shophouses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
At street level, there were lines of shoe stores, Thai-Chinese cafes, noodle vendors, grocery stores, and motorcycle workshops. Owners or tenants lived above.
Some rice traders have remained steadfast, but as 10-wheel trucks have replaced river barges, rice transport and trade have mostly been moved elsewhere.
While Yaowarat, Bangkok’s Chinatown, was the main commercial focus for Chinese traders and residents, and Phahurat served the Indian community, Banglamphu was clearly a more Thai kingdom. Around the corner on Chakkaphong and Phra Sumen roads, artisan shops still made costumes and masks for classical Thailand’s dance-drama artists.
The first (1982) and second (1984) editions of the Lonely Planet Thailand guide.
Joe Cummings
I spent a long, hot day taking notes on the Grand Palace, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Wat Phra Kaew), the Temple of the Reclining Buddha (Wat Pho) and the Giant Swing, all within a kilometer of Khao San Road.
These are arguably the main tourist attractions in the city, so when I noticed two Chinese-Thai hotels on Khao San Road, I immediately thought of recommending them in my guide as a convenient base for travelers. Almost identical in their modest amenities, the Nith Chareon Suk Hotel and Sri Phranakhon Hotel cost $ 5 a night at the time, and catered to Thai merchants who bought products wholesale in Banglamphu to sell inland.
In a narrow alley nearby, I was even more thrilled to find VS Guest House, recently opened by a Banglamphu family who takes guests to their vintage 1920s wooden house for $ 1.50 per person. Further exploration of the alley revealed two more similarly priced family pensions, Bonny and Tum.
Rintipa Detkajon, owner of Khao San Road inn
These two hotels and three guesthouses made up the sum of the accommodations on Khao San Road that I listed in the first “Thailand: a travel survival kit”, published the following year, 1982.
When I returned, a year later, to update the information for the second edition, five other guesthouses along or near Khao San had appeared, so I dutifully added them to the 1984 edition.
From that point on, whenever I returned to Banglamphu for the half-yearly update of the guide, the number of places to stay multiplied exponentially. Within a decade, options proliferated, block by block, from Khao San Road to other streets and alleys in the district, until the hotels and guesthouses for backpackers reached more than 200.
“The Beach” effect
In the mid-1990s, the neighborhood was a global phenomenon, the largest backpacker center among the three Ks – Kathmandu, Khao San and Kuta Beach. In addition to housing and feeding the world’s largest transient backpacker population, Khao San Road has become a candidate for a world record for its black market for unlicensed cassettes, CDs and DVDs, fake identities, counterfeit books and imitation brand bags.
Dozens of bucket shops offered unparalleled bargain fares on little-known airlines that flew imaginative routes to virtually any airport in the world.
Alex Garland, an unknown writer at the time (now famous for directing sci-fi films “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation)”, further boosted Khao San’s bad boy reputation with his 1996 cult novel “The Beach” . Based on Garland’s own travels in Thailand, the first seven chapters take place on Khao San Road, where Richard, a young English backpacker, meets an eccentric Scotsman who calls himself Daffy, who gives him a secret map of the “beach”.
Before the pandemic, Khao San Road was a popular place for travelers and locals to celebrate Songkran, the Thai New Year festival.
PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL / AFP / AFP via Getty Images
The novel describes a room in a typical Khao San guesthouse at the time: “One wall was concrete – the side of the building. The others were Formica and bare. They moved when I touched them. I had the feeling that I leaned over. against one it would fall and perhaps hit another, and all the walls of the neighboring rooms would collapse like dominoes. Near the ceiling, the walls stopped and covering the space was a strip of metal mosquito net. “
A film adaptation directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonard DiCaprio hit theaters worldwide in 2000, and probably introduced Khao San Road to a larger audience than the novel or my Lonely Planet guides.
In the same year, Italian electronic music producer Spiller released a video of his dance track “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)”, filmed in Bangkok with a prominent scene at the end, where Spiller and singer Sophie Ellis-Baxter danced in a Khao underground Club San Road.
A New Yorker article that year described Khao San Road as “the travel hub for half the world, a place that thrives on the desire to be somewhere else” because it was “the safest, easiest and most westernized place from where launch a trip through Asia. ”
Khao San Road today
According to the Khao San Business Association, in 2018, the road received an impressive 40,000-50,000 tourists a day in high season and 20,000 a day in low season.
With those figures, it was no big surprise when the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority announced in 2019 that it was investing $ 1.6 million to transform Khao San Road into a regulated “international pedestrian street”.
Started perhaps in part to counter Khao San’s somewhat unpleasant reputation, the project was due to be completed in late 2020, with a re-paved road and trails, and retractable bollards designating spaces for 250-350 licensed Thai lottery sellers. .
Vehicles would be banned from 9 am to 9 pm daily.
Former Lonely Planet author Joe Cummings is with VS Guest House owner Rintipa Detkajon during a visit in January 2021.
Ian Taylor
When the coronavirus pandemic forced Thailand to close its borders in April 2020, international tourist arrivals dropped to zero almost overnight. Khao San Road partially recovered when domestic travel reopened in July, however, and when the renovated Khao San was launched in November 2020, weekends found the road full of young Thai people, as well as fewer expatriates.
The pubs along the street, which normally had 80% European customers, have become almost 90% Thai.
A vibrant 10-day series of light installations, called Khao San Hide and Seek, drew a steady crowd in November. The facilities were complemented by live performances by almost 20 bands. Local studios conducted workshops focused on the traditional arts of Banglamphu, such as embroidering khon (classic Thai dance drama), preparing khaotom nam woon (sticky rice triangles cooked in scented pandanus leaves) and making thaeng yuak (fresh carved banana trunks) in intricate patterns, for use in funerals, monastic ordination and other Buddhist ceremonies).
The neighborhood suffered another setback when a second wave of coronavirus cases increased in early January 2021. The government quickly ordered the closure of all entertainment venues in Bangkok, and once again Khao San Road emptied almost completely.
When I visited a Khao San desert again that month, I decided to stop at VS Guesthouse, the first and oldest hostel still standing. All the other guest houses in the neighborhood that I passed that day were tightly closed, but to my surprise the VS’s vintage wooden doors were open.
I talked with the family members who own the house, now in the fourth generation. Rintipa Detkajon, the eldest of two sisters who now look after the home, recalled how her late father, Vongsavat, began welcoming foreigners around 1980, allowing them to sleep on the family’s living room floor.
“I was about 16 when our first guest, an Australian, spent the night,” she said. “Foreigners at that time traveled very calmly. They were interested in history and culture, unlike the young people we see today, who seem more interested in getting drunk and partying.”
The family has enlarged the wooden house over the years, reaching a peak of 18 rooms. They now operate 10 rooms for $ 10 a night. On the day I visited, only one room was occupied by an American who was staying for a long time.
I asked Rintipa about the lack of business due to the pandemic.
“It’s not just us, it’s the whole world,” she said. “We are all in this together. This is our home, so we will survive.”