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Watching the weird go by

Have you ever wondered what happened to that weirdo you met on a train in France once? Or all those bizzaros who've hung out in Germany? You know, those people who are so unsettling that they're best forgotten. Well, chances are they're in Bangkok now. Bangkok has the highest freak rate per capita of all the major Asian cities (recent studies have shown). I'm not sure why this is. Its undoubtedly connected to the thriving sex trade and most likely influences by Thailand's open door policy to tourists of every kind. But whatever the reason, Bangkok is certainly a magnet to the strangest of the strange. Its the French Foreign Legion of cities.

There are expensive hotels catering for the wealthy package tourists, but a good portion of the clientele at these places comprises older weirdoes with money. At the budget end is the Khaosan Road. Twenty years ago this was just another Bangkok street with a few cheap hotels and restaurants. Now its a breeding ground for young Western travellers, from the unbearably cool to the simply unbearable. Every shop front offers something to tourists: food, drink, clothes, jewellery, chopsticks, CDs, tattoos, sunglasses, postcards, cheap tours. There isn't anything you can't get on the Khaosan Road (except sex. You have to go to Pat Pong for that) There's even a Boots Chemist. I think that it is meant to be a low-fat, Asia-lite experience for the reluctant traveller: "Come to Thailand. Its not all that different from home." But of course it's different! It's Asia, not Europe. For all the Manchester united jerseys and Nestle ice cream, it will never be a mini-Europe- just a living freakshow.

Arriving at the Khaosan Road (even having read and seen The Beach) is a very curious experience. It appears as if someone with god-like influence thought to himself "Let me see now... how can I create a living nightmare contained on one street?" and immediately set out to do just that. This patron of freaks has a wonderful sense of kitsch, but at times his crazy imagination goes a way of its own that's all too much. Music blares out of every restaurant and the atmosphere assaults you at every step. For the most part you can walk anywhere in the road because they've stopped traffic except for tuk-tuks (auto rickshaws) and deliveries.

Even still, after years of stories about the Bangkok Hilton, drugs are quite a draw to Thailand for tourists. Hotels on the Khaosan Road have notices with details of visiting times in the local prisons and how to get there, along with pleas for visitors from Western inmates serving long-term sentences. Of course the stories from these prisons are horrendous and terrifying. It all fits the image of Bangkok as dangerous and exotic, a dream for most and a living nightmare for the unlucky few.

Meanwhile, strung-out white kids sit about in the sun, drinking too much, taking too many drugs and generally behaving quite obnoxiously. That's the difference between the Khaosan Road and Chinatown. Khaosan Road foreigners come to holiday in Bangkok with money, even if it is Daddy's Credit Card. Their existence here is fuelled by money, not by the Chinese search for economic prosperity. That makes it an invasion, not a fair cultural mix. And coupled with the arrogance of youth, the air practically tingles with aggressive Western superiority.

Backpackers have a certain image that is alternative or slightly left-of-centre, trendy to the last. They're seen as adventurous, almost pioneering souls for having visited foreign lands. They trade in the underground, revolutionary images of rebellious youth. It is largely a game. Backpacking is by its nature simply an break from everyday society, an extended holiday before the commitments of marriage and mortgage become all-too inevitable for most.

There are those hard-core types who grow beards and wander barefoot around Asia forever (never straying too far from Bangkok!) But your typical common-or-garden Khaosan rodent is on a month long holiday from an office job in Birmingham or stopping over for a taste of exotica on his way to Australia on a gap year. The sort who'd never visit a prostitute at home. When he hits Bangkok much innocence is shed.

The thing to do in Bangkok if you're young, white, male and up for a laugh is to go immediately to the nearest pub and, after a few bottles of Tiger or Chang beer, get chatted up by much-too-young Thai girls. You may or may not go for the sex option, but you will part company with your hard-earned bhat. That's for sure. Now, I don't know what planet these people come from but I think that's weird! What twentysomething with a good education and his life spread out before him offering untold adventures and opportunities should have to pay for sex?? That's not an adventure but a loud admission of sexual failure. If you have to trade in money because your own sexual charisma doesn't cut it in your luck with the ladies, it surely must be time to have a look at your life and perhaps make some changes?

The older, stranger, men are another story. They look as though the only way they could date a beautiful, young, Thai woman is though sheer force of economics. They seem proud of their spending power in compensation for lost sexual prowess. You think its probably too late for them anyway: old men way past their prime. We can indulge their strange whims. But the young men with their strength and virility intact, paying for sex! What kind of world are we living in at all?

The Thai hot season takes this strange stew to boiling point. Europeans cruise the sauna-like streets in search of sex and inebriation. Street-vendors scream, tuk-tuks whizz dangerously close, rabid looking dogs pant in the shade. You can manage about two hours of movement in daylight hours, less with a hangover, so mostly you just wait for sundown and tonight's party. You have to eat, so you drag yourself to a restaurant past the madness: sweating, marvelling, hating, wondering.

At times it all gets too much and you sit for a drink with the weirdoes, feeling like a lost soul. But for all their strangeness, they're friendly; they want to know where you're coming from, where you're going. You hear tales of border crossing and bribery, drunken nights in Koh Samet, meetings with ladyboys. It's amusing, it's a holiday and there is a certain kitsch value in meeting people you would normally cross the street to avoid.

You sit back, crack open another beer and watch the weird go by.

by Laura Mackey
25th April 2001

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