First impressions...
Khao San road, Bangkok... you get here at 3 in the morning and the streets are still alive... some guy tries to sell you edible cockroaches, grasshoppers, and scorpions. Thai teens play guitar and drink beer on the side of the road, and you wander down on your mission for that 3 dollar a night room. The air is thick with moisture, hot, and polluted.
I feel like i'm in a movie, "the beach," as I had already met this beautiful French-Canadian girl. We hung out for two days while she waited for her boyfriend. I better get away from them before we have a secret affair, only that I would end up a psychotic mad man in the jungle, stalking some Thai pot growers with machine guns and trying to foil their operation. But like the movie, I have a cinder block room with no windows, just slits, and a fan on the ceiling.
In the day, Khao San road is teeming with backpackers -Swedish, English, Israeli, German, Canadian, Australian etc. I feel the cliché that we must represent to these people; they call us Farang. After getting fed up with bad blaring techno and American war movies that play at top volume in many of the cafes, you hustle a tuk tuk. [ A tuk tuk is a open buggy / taxi thing.] You realize that you put your life in danger every time you get in one, as the driver realized that he can make more money if he gets you to your destination faster. Every tuk tuk driver wants to take you to a ping pong show or a Thai 'massage' parlor / brothel. They just insist that you want to watch a nude Thai woman shoot a ping pong ball out of her vagina or smoke a cigarette with it. You say no over and over again, tell them your destination, and they still want to take you to a show. We went to Patpong street and wandered ever so slowly through the narrow, crowded night market. We pass go go bar after go go bar. Each one looks the same, Thai girls in bikinis dancing with go go lingham poles. You could pick one if you liked.
And from every direction, these men come out at you to hustle you into a ping pong show. They begin to seem like the same person, pestering you over and over again. You want to just forget pacifism and knock one in the face. We went into an underworld theme club called 'Lucifer' when I realized that we had indeed crossed over into some level of Dantes Inferno.
Back to the street, a blind man walks and sings with a change cup held out. Beautiful hill-tribe women with elaborate headdresses sell crafts. A one-legged old man drags himself across the street with change cup held out. [You figure he lost his leg to a land mine, perhaps on the Burmese border.] A cockroach crosses your path and a prostitute comes out at you with her only english, "Do you want?" You're not sure if she's a man or a woman. She calls out at you later and you realize that she is a man ['lady boy'].
In the early morning Buddhist monks make their rounds with offering bowls. In the day, you can find solace in the many Buddhist temples that testify to the enlightened mind that is also here in this city of indulgence.
And meanwhile, every other television reminds us that the war has started...
Steve Harkless
Last modified: June 20, 2003
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