The Thao-San road freakshow

The ‘Thao San Road’ is a part of Bangkok that acts as a kind of ‘decompression’ chamber for newly arrived jet lagged backpackers, sugar-daddies looking to ‘adopt’ a Thai women for a week (and play pretend Husband & Wife), spotty-nosed penny-pinching Gap Year students, and the odd wandering vagabond. Not surprisingly the area is also a veritable watering hole for touts, hawkers, taxi-drivers, Tuk-Tuk drivers, scantily clad femme fatales looking to snag a foreigner with their luscious eye-lashes, and all manner of other specimens of the genus Homo Touristus Leechus. The guidebook warns you to be on your best guard. It gives you tips on how to avoid being scammed and how to prevent your wallet from being taken on a voyage of discovery by the Tuk-Tuk drivers – an art-form they seem to have perfected.

Here’s an extract of a conversation I overheard:

[Tout] “When you arrive?”

[Tourist] “Just this morning” (big mistake. Should have said it’s been a week at least)

[Tout thinking] Mmm…fresh off the boat. I smell ready ching-ching

[Tout] “Where you go?”

[Tourist] unable to extricate himself from the conversation and looking around wide eyed in a torpor of befuddlement “Err not sure yet. Still deciding to be honest” – Game over.

Imagine you’ve just arrived from the airport. To be then suddenly dropped off or ‘decompressed’ in the middle of the Thao San Road is bound to give you the bends; for jet lag is snagging your brain, a million horns and a thousand importuning hands clambering for your attention, your heavy rucksacks (one behind and one at front – what do these people carry?!) weighing you down, the clammy heat – it’s all fraying your senses so you just go along with the first tout that says "Hi, welcome to my country oh distinguished guest!" - big mistake. They’ll take you to a second rate guest-house where the toilets don’t flush, the showers squirt a strange brown looking liquid that looks like a stool sample, and where you’ll be sharing your bed with giant beetles with armour plated backs (so you can't kill em with your slippers). And the tout that takes you there will be getting a hefty commission for all his troubles.

For one person though recently arrived from Pakistan, Bangkok is a breeze. There’s nothing quite like Pakistan to prepare you for Bangkok, and to be honest, for anything else the world has to offer! Cue Bono:

"I'm not afraid

of anything in this world

There's nothing you can throw at me

that I've not already heard"

In Pakistan you can sense the edginess. It scratches your nerves and scours your nails. There’s a desperation born of uncertainty and economic woes that never fully relaxes you – a sense of danger. It’s in the air, on the faces, you can hear it in the taxi drivers speak, and it's in the news. Bangkok however is like Disneyland in comparison. You walk the Thao San Road wearing an impenetrable force-field. Nobody can get to you. All attempts at finding a chink in your armour fail woefully : verbal assaults reflected, sales-pitches bounce back, street patter of the con artist vaporised with a wave of your hand, and the breathless whispers in your ear promising "fucky-fucky?" become nothing but a limp fantasy (on their part!). You traipse though the thorny city-light infused morass untouched, untainted and invincible. Where weaker Earthlings scuttle on the shores and loose their bearings, you my friend, reign supreme. You are the Super-Fly and the smile etched on your face says it all.

It’s a relief for once to be somewhere where stuff actually works like the cash machines for example or the electricity or the showers. Contrary to what people might think the food dished from the roadside stalls won’t kill you. What it will do infact is make you come again for more. It’s fresh, wholesome, and rather delicious and not to mention easy on the wallet too. Outside dining is a must; there’s nothing quite like sipping hot-burning noodle soup whilst a chugging Tuk-Tuk rattles by in a blast of smoke and screeching metal.

At night the bars are desperately touting special offers (60 baht for 3 shots et al), restaurants are pulling punters by having foxy chicks hold out their menus and the kitsch sellers are wallowing in happy-hour kitsch land. There’s fake DVDs, CD’s, brothels masquerading in the euphemism ‘massage parlour’, dodgy gem stores, street artists, beggars, blind men, hooting ice-cream carts, curb-crawling taxis, drunken revellers, and those indefatigable mini-skirts – everything is for sale. But not your soul. Even the books that you buy can be sold back to the vendor after you’ve read them – at half price. So you hand back ‘Bram Stokers Dracula’.

But then you wonder: is this Thailand? For the average beach bumming Aussie it probably is, but for you this is a tourist zoo and you find yourself wanting to escape from its shackles. You don’t have to go far though. If you continue in any straight line, and keep going, eventually you’ll end up in one of the ‘local’ areas. You know you’re not in a tourist trap because nobody takes a second look at you. Also nobody comes up to you whispering that they have something to sell. At first it can be a little hard on your ego:

Heh! I exist you know? Hey guys I am here! Hello! Cogito ergo sum?

But nobody seems to be listening. After a while you realise, in a flash of profound insight, that actually this is not that bad. You start liking these out-of-the-way havens, the little alleys damp and covered in magical spidery fog lights. At night-time you follow the local people; hiding behind garbage cans if they look back; you follow them as if they’re a-little scuttling rats, to see which nooks and crannies they’ll go and hide in. Where do the ordinary folk of Bangkok go after a hard days selling crap to tourists? Lo and behold! You stumble into another Bangkok. A simpler Bangkok of genial working class folk; tame, timid and with goofy smiles. The smiles warm you. The cheap food warms you even more - you’re surprised to get some change back from a 50 Baht bill. You smile back goofily at the vendor. You’ve been here a week but it seems that only now have you finally arrived.