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- Which country are you from?
- U.S.A.
- What are your future travel plans? (Be specific)
- Visit Thailand every 6 months as I always do in the past many years.
- Are looking for someone to travel with?
- Yes
- If 'yes', are you looking for a male or female travel partner?
- Female
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- Send your Email to me at sirat2345@yahoo.com I will tell you everything. Do not forget to send me your name, photos, and telephone numbers. I will call you.
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Asia > Thailand > Bangkok
Day Out | Bangkok
A Hippie Haven Goes Upscale
August 19, 2007
Bangkok Travel Guide
Go to the Bangkok Travel Guide »IN the 2000 film “The Beach,” Leonardo DiCaprio's character travels to Thailand, and, like countless backpackers before him, stays in a dingy guesthouse on Bangkok's legendary Khao San Road. But if the movie were shot today, Mr. DiCaprio would encounter not only rough-and-ready tattoo parlors and street vendors selling cheap banana pancakes, but also up-market amenities: a spa offering body wraps and salt scrubs, for instance, and, inevitably, a Starbucks.
Visitors to Khao San Road “are more hi-so now,” says Pattamon Yaidaeng, invoking the local term for “high society.” She would know, having worked at the front desk of Buddy Lodge Hotel (265 Khao San Road; www.buddylodge.com) since it opened five years ago. Rooms there, costing up to 2,500 Thai baht a night, or about $83 at 31 baht to the dollar, are fairly basic, but certainly more comfortable than a typical Khao San Road hostel. Amenities, some at extra cost, include Wi-Fi, a gym with personal trainers available, a sauna and a rooftop pool.
A stroll down the street reveals the changing tourist demographic. “I thought it would be more of a backpacker ghetto, but it's not,” said Mandy Hunter, a 40-year-old audio-visual technician from Birmingham, England, who was staying on Khao San Road with her husband and their teenage daughter.
The interior of Shewa Spa (108/2 Rambuttri Road, where Khao San connects to Rambuttri; www.shewaspa.com) proves Ms. Hunter's point. Its atmosphere is sedate, with dark wood paneling; the body scrub and massage with cucumber and turmeric is 700 baht.
Of course, the old Khao San mystique has not disappeared. Travelers can still get their hair braided on the street, dine on noodles from street carts for less than $1, and buy cheap T-shirts and counterfeit designer sunglasses. You can find Crocs-inspired footwear in a rainbow of colors (189 baht), as well as Havaianas-inspired sandals (220 baht), at RIS Tours, a cramped travel agency midway down the street that sells goods from its storefront (206 Khao San Road, 66-2-629-3563).
But you can also find more expensive souvenirs. At Shop 125 (125 Khao San Road, 66-2-282-5223), a dark red, Thai-Oriental-style hand-finished ceramic tea set complete with a wooden box and tray is 2,390 baht. And at It's Happened to Be a Closet (32 Khao San Road, 66-2-629-5271) — a boutique, salon, Italian restaurant and bakery jumbled together in a single cozy house — the Thai designer Siriwan Tharananithikul sells items like a handmade red leather purse adorned with a swirl of multicolored snaps (12,500 baht) and a gray zip-up sweatshirt with an embroidered dragon (9,250 baht).
Khao San Road's restaurants have become as globalized as the international tourists who flock to them. Tom Yum Kung (9 Trokmayom Jakapong Road, on the western end of Khao San; www.tomyumkungkhaosan.com) is named after the country's famed spicy prawn soup (180 baht) and situated in a restored Thai house with a leafy patio . It also serves local favorites like fried grouper with hot sauce (220 baht). But you can today sample a variety of world cuisines. Scoozi Pizzeria (201 Sunset Street, Khao San Road; www.scoozipizza.com), for instance, does a brisk business, as do several roti and falafel joints along the main drag. Scoozi is on Sunset Street, an alley that bisects Khao San Road.
That's where you'll find the Starbucks, set in a restored mansion. On a recent Tuesday evening, a smartly attired Asian tourist in his mid-20s sat in the quiet back room, sipping coffee and perusing The International Herald Tribune. Outside, a group of dreadlocked tourists with multiple body piercings hung out on the street, chatting and listening to thumping house music, before rejoining the meandering crowds on Khao San.
Hopefully that one of these days I will buy a guesthouse on Khao San, and live here in Thailand permanently. I already have some land properties near the new Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport which I do not know what to do with it yet.
I stay on Khao san road everytime I come to Thailand, I think it is the best place in the world. Seriously!!!
Thanks John.
Sirat
sirat@usa.com
www.myspace.com/sirat9999
I live in Washington, D.C. USA But I visit Thailand every 6 months.
Send Email to me. We need to talk.
All the best, Sylvie