After our adventures on a Tuk Tuk we decided that no trip to Bangkok would be complete without a night out on the infamous backpacker ghetto, Khao San Road.
About a 15 minute walk away from our guesthouse through a myriad of stalls selling everything from deep-fried squid to Billabong boardshorts is the top of this crazy place with cheap beer, cheap food and cheap merchandise for sale the length and breadth of the street.
After negotiating our way through the annoying street sellers we found a roof top bar that looked over the street itself so what better way to people watch then from a birds eye view.
This proved very interesting – it seems that street selling is not really permitted along what seems to be the street with the most street sellers in Bangkok! Go figure.
So let me set the scene; Both sides of the street are lined with shops and each of these shops tends to extend their store by about 3 metres out onto the street with racks of whatever it is they sell. Along with this there are these mobile cooking trolleys serving up all sorts of interesting food and these things are randomly positioned the whole length of the street and along with these there are random other guys who roll out a kind of rug and layout whatever it is they’re selling neatly on this rug. So when all this is set out as described the street is an atmospheric jumble of street selling – that is until the cops come along.
Remember Henry Street around Halloween, when as kids we all wandered about whispering to ‘Toblerone’ sellers to see if they had any rockets or bangers only for someone to shout ‘leg it!’ quickly followed by the street seller suddenly taking off like a bat out of hell pushing their old style prams filled with dodgy goods?
Well that’s exactly the situation on Khao San Road but on a much larger scale and it happens regularly. So we’re sitting with our great view with our great beer watching this live. X-Factor wasn’t a patch on the entertainment this provided. From our seats we could easily see the cops coming well before they did and suddenly like someone pushing over that first domino, as soon as one seller packed up their goods or pulled in their extra 3 metres of clothes rails or started ‘legging it’ up the street with their mobile kitchens (complete with 300 degree deep frying facilities) just like the ‘Toblerone’ ‘ol ones they all followed suit and at incredible speed.
By the time the cops casually passed by our point there wasn’t a single seller in site nor a single extra rail of clothes pulled out past the edge of the footpath and as soon as those cops passed by, the street sellers were back almost in a reverse domino effect. This event repeated itself several times – we couldn’t understand how it could be worth so much effort.
Despite Khao San’s awfulness it will remain in my memories for quite a while.
R.
