My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  In 1985, Bonny and Anek Rakisaraseree noticed how many budget travelers—mostly young French and Australian men—were drifting around Bangkok, so they opened Bonny Guest House, the first on Khao San catering to foreign wanderers. Locals were not even permitted to rent rooms. Dozens of other guesthouses opened soon afterward, most with forbidding signs in the lobby saying “Not allow any Thais to go upstairs.” Drugs were fantastically cheap and available and quietly tolerated, despite wishful signs saying “We do not welcome use or possession of heroin in guesthouse.” More than a third of Thailand’s seven million annual visitors are young, and undoubtedly many of them pass some time on Khao San. Some are Americans, but even more of them are from other countries: Australians having what they call their “o-s experience,” their overseas experience, which begins in Sydney and ends six or eight months later with requisite Rough Guide– and Lonely Planet–advised stops in Goa for Christmas and in Nepal for a winter trek and in Angkor Wat for sunrise; hordes of Israelis, fresh out of the army—so many, in fact, that the best kosher food and the only Hebrew bookstore in Thailand are on Khao San Road. There are such large crowds of Japanese kids that a few guesthouses are de facto Japanese only, and you can buy a logo T-shirt of any Japanese baseball team from the vendors on the road. There are French and German and British and Canadians.

  Altogether, they have turned Khao San into a new sort of place—not really Thai anymore, barely Asian, overwhelmingly young, palpably transient, and anchored in the world by the Internet, where there is no actual time and no actual location. Khao San has the best foreign bookstores in Thailand, thanks to the books that backpackers sell before heading home, and it probably has the fewest prostitutes in Bangkok, partly because the guesthouses frown on overnight Thai guests and partly because, one backpacker explained to me, most of the travelers would rather have sex with one another than with someone for hire. Khao San is now the travel hub for half the world, a place that prospers on the desire to be someplace else. The cheapest tickets on the most hair-raising of airlines can be bought in the scores of bucket shops that have collected in the neighborhood. Airlines you’ve never heard of, flying routes you never imagined, for prices you only dream of, are the staple of Khao San travel agencies. The first time I ever heard of Khao San Road was from an American backpacker whom I met on a Bhutanese airline flight from Calcutta to Bangkok. He’d bought his ticket on Khao San Road. “I told the travel agent I didn’t care how or when I got there,” he said. “As long as it was cheap, I was ready to go.”

  I have a persistent fantasy that involves Khao San. In it, a middle-aged middlebrow middle manager from Phoenix is deposited at the western end of the road, near the Chanasongkhran police booth. He is a shocking sight, dressed in a blue business suit and a red tie and a white Oxford shirt, carrying a Hartmann briefcase, and wearing a Timex. He wanders through the snarl of peddlers’ carts and trinket booths. First, he discards his suit for batik drawstring trousers and a hemp vest and a Che Guevara T-shirt or knockoff Timberland cargo shorts and a Japanimation tank top, and he sells his Timex to a guy with a sign that says, WE BUY SOMETHING/CAMERA/TENT/SLEEPING BAG/WALKMAN/BACKPACK/SWISS KNIFE. He then gets a leather thong bracelet for one wrist and a silver cuff for the other, stops at Golden Lotus Tattoo for a few Chinese characters on his shoulder, gets his eyebrow pierced at Herbal House Healthy Center, has blond extensions braided into his hair, trades his briefcase for a Stussy backpack and a Hmong fabric waistpack, watches twenty minutes of The Phantom Menace or The Blair Witch Project at Buddy Beer, goes into Hello Internet Café and registers as “zenmasterbob” on hotmail.com, falls in love with a Norwegian aromatherapist he meets in the communal shower at Joe Guest House, takes off with her on a trek through East Timor, and is never seen again.

  THE SIDEWALK VENDORS changed a little every day I was on Khao San. The road has a jumble of small businesses—travel agencies, Internet cafés, souvenir stores, bars—and the sidewalk and the edge of the roadbed are lined with stalls offering bootleg tapes, bogus Teva sandals, Hindu-print camisoles, and flyweight silver jewelry, along with the hair braiders and the banana pancake makers. A few spots had more transient occupants, and except for the daily twitches in the exchange rate at Khao San’s foreign currency shops, they were one of the only things that distinguished one day from the next. The morning I arrived on Khao San, a nerdy Thai teenager had got a foothold halfway down one block, between Shaman Bookstore and Nadav Bead Shop, and was peddling electronic pagers. The next day, he was gone, and a chatty young woman was there selling handmade burlap handbags. I began to think of the days that way—as “burlap bag day” or “pager day”—to help tell them apart. One morning—it was miniature mirrored disco ball day—I stopped to check my e-mail at Khao-San Cyber Home, a computer center set a few paces back from the sidewalk beside a stand of banana trees and a fishpond full of carp. On the street, the open-air Siam Oriental Inn was blasting a Swedish-dubbed version of The Phantom Menace on wide-screen TV, while across the way Buddy Beer, also open-air and also maximum volume, was showing Wild Wild West, and at the big bootleg-cassette booth next door an early Santana album screeched out of tinny speakers. The sounds collided like a car wreck, and even early in the day the wet, warm air smelled like Michelob and pad thai.

  Inside the Khao-San Cyber Home, though, it was mercifully cool and quiet. In the front room were eight computer terminals with Pentium III microprocessors, a large and solemn photograph of King Bhumibol Adulyadej on one wall, and a Buddhist altar in the corner across from the front door. I left my shoes by the landing and padded across the floor to an open computer. On my left, a thin kid with a blond braid was instant messaging someone in Australia. On my right, two girls were squeezed together at one terminal, tapping out a message in romanized Japanese. The more slowly and more uncomfortably and more dangerously you travel around Asia, the more rank you pull in backpacker culture—in other words, it’s much cooler to go somewhere by cargo boat or pickup truck or milk train than to fly—but when it comes to computers, Khao San is all speed. The first Macintosh computers in all of Thailand appeared here, and one Internet service owner complained sourly to me that backpackers refused to use anything with Pentium I microprocessors anymore, so he had to upgrade all his machines to Pentium IIIs. There are so many Internet outlets on Khao San Road now that the price to use a computer is probably the best in the world, and certainly the best in Asia—around three cents a minute, compared with, say, five dollars a minute, which is what I paid to check my e-mail in Cambodia. In the past, a six-month odyssey through the Far East might have meant a few letters home and the rare long-distance phone call; now it’s possible for a few cents to e-mail friends and family every day, order clothes from the Gap, and even read your local newspaper online. Some computer centers on Khao San stay open twenty-four hours a day.

  Hello Internet Café was the first in the neighborhood. Khao-San Cyber Home is one of the most recent. Until eight months ago, it wasn’t a cyberhome at all: It was an actual home of an actual Thai family, the Boonpojanasoontorns, who had been living on Khao San for many years. Until Chanin Boonpojanasoontorn learned about the Internet when he was at college and pushed the family to capitalize on their location, Khao-San Cyber Home computer center had been the family’s living room. Urasa Boonpojanasoontorn, the second youngest daughter, was behind the desk that day, and from time to time her father toddled by on some household task and then disappeared behind a door again. Urasa is twenty-five and has a round face and a square body and a quick, crumpled-up smile. She was wearing a white polo shirt and pleated khakis—nearly a nun’s outfit on Khao San Road, where the skimpiest camisoles and the filmiest skirts are the usual backpacker gear. Urasa and her brother and sisters grew up playing soccer in the middle of the street with the other neighborhood kids, buying candy at the stores that back then stocked everyday groceries and household goods.

  “When I was in seventh grade,” Urasa said to me, “I went outside and everything was different. The forei
gners had arrived. It happened so fast! It was such a quiet place before. There were no foreigners. It changed, like, overnight, and I never went outside again.” Her parents were afraid of the backpackers. Once the neighborhood changed, they insisted that the kids come home directly from school and stay away from the street. I asked her what they were afraid of.

  “They thought the backpackers had a different lifestyle than us,” she said carefully. “Their language and their behavior were different. There were boys and girls traveling together, and the problem of drugs. And when I first saw the way the backpackers dressed . . .” She hesitated. The door behind her desk opened, and I could see her father in an easy chair, watching TV. “The way the backpackers dressed was shocking. My father and mom thought it wasn’t good. I can’t say what happens in other countries, but if I saw a Thai girl dressed like that, I would think it wasn’t good.” She brightened and added, “Sometimes it was fun to hear the music from the bars. It wasn’t sad when it changed. There was no more playing in the street, but then I grew up and I had other things to do. I studied hard. It’s different from your culture. I had a tutor for two hours every day after school and on Saturday, too.”

  The front door opened and three Israeli girls in pastel tank tops came in to use Khao-San Cyber Home’s international long-distance service. They took off their shoes and left them by the door, a Thai tradition that most shops on Khao San forgo. Urasa decided to uphold it because she wanted her customers to see a little bit of her culture, her lifestyle, even though it meant that some backpackers in twenty-four-eyelet hiking boots chose to check their e-mail somewhere more lenient. A similar impulse accounts for the Buddhist altar and the king’s portrait, though not for the enormous framed Michael Jordan poster beside her desk. “He’s mine,” Urasa said, tapping the glass above Jordan’s eye. “I never heard about him until my sister went to college in Illinois, and she said to me, ‘Urasa, you have to see this man. He is a god.’ ”

  SOMETHING ABOUT KHAO SAN ROAD makes you feel as though it could eat you alive. The junkies and the glue sniffers lurking in the alleys are part of it, and so are the clean-cut kids with stiff, Ecstasy-fueled grins dancing at the cafés; the aimlessness that pervades the place is both pleasantly spacey and a little scary when you glimpse an especially blank face. Travelers do vanish in all sorts of ways. The first cybercafé I stopped in had a ten-thousand-dollar-reward sign on the wall that said, “Have you seen my son? He was backpacking around India and was last heard from in May 1997 from Northern India.” Urasa said she sees lots of lost souls. One day, an American girl came into Khao-San Cyber Home to call her mother and could hardly talk because she was crying so hard. “She had lost her boyfriend,” Urasa told me. “He disappeared from her in Nepal.” Sometimes visitors planning another kind of trip are busted and subsequently relocated to Bangkok’s Ban Kwan Prison. Guesthouses often post lists of foreigners who are locked up on drug charges and encourage you to visit Lyle Doniger of Australia, or Alan Jon Davies of Britain, or any number of Americans and Danes and Italians at Ban Kwan if you find yourself with nothing to do one afternoon.

  The day begins at night on Khao San Road. Usually a soccer game is being broadcast from one bar, and five or six movies are being broadcast from the others, and the cassette dealers are demonstrating the quality of their bootleg tapes by playing Global Trance Mission or Techno Trance Mania or Earth, Wind and Fire at top volume. Kids clutching copies of Bangkok Groovy Map & Guide and Teach Yourself Indonesian and Teach Yourself Card Games for 1 and The Swahili Phrasebook amble up and down the street. They emerge from the guesthouses—and their bottom-dollar rooms with wafer-thin walls and battered mattresses—to collect in the cafés for ten-cent plates of curry chicken and “Stogarnov steak” and beer and to shop. The first Thai head of state to travel outside the region was King Rama V, who visited Europe in 1897. He brought back Waterford crystal from Ireland, Sèvres porcelain and Baccarat goblets from France, Murano glass from Italy, Royal Crown Derby plates from England. When you visit Khao San Road, you can bring back Indian undershirts decorated with Hindu imagery, Australian Billabong sweats, Nike jackets made in Indonesia, rubber-platform faux-fur thongs from another planet, Game Boys from Japan, and a used copy of Memoirs of a Geisha that was published in England and sold to a secondhand bookstore in Bangkok by a New Zealander on his way to Vietnam.

  Around midnight, I ran into the South African English teacher from Taiwan who had been on her way back from massage school in northern Thailand the other time I’d met her. Seeing her again was both a shock and not a shock, because Khao San is so transitory a place that you imagine each encounter there to be singular, but then you realize that the world is small and this particular world of young adventurers is smaller yet, and that there is nothing extraordinary about seeing the same people, because their great adventures tend to take them to the same few places over and over again. Her name was Elizabeth, and she and I stopped at a street vendor and bought corn on the cob and sat on a curb near My House Guest House to eat. This time she’d just come back from a full-moon party on the southern Thai island of Koh Phangan, a party of two thousand travelers, most of them high on Ecstasy or pot or psychedelics, painting a herd of oxen with Day-Glo colors and dancing for hours on the edge of the sea. She now had a terrible headache, but she didn’t think it was from the drugs or the late hours. She blamed a Sikh psychic she’d met that morning on Khao San who had tricked her into paying him a hundred dollars so he wouldn’t curse her karma.

  I felt sorry for her, so I treated her to a bowl of noodle soup from a stand at the western end of the street. We were, at that moment, on the very edge of the rest of the city. Thirty paces away, on Chakrabongse Road, were a dozen bridal shops where Thai girls shopped for their big white gowns; a few paces beyond that was the temple, Wat Chanasongkhran, where monks in yellow were chanting their daily sutras. All of it seemed surreal and sort of irrelevant and much farther away from Khao San Road than almost anywhere else in the universe, including outer space. Elizabeth had a travel tip for me. The Phantom Menace was starting at one a.m. at Buddy Beer, and if she finished her soup, and we hurried, we could make it back for the opening scene.

  EVERYWHERE

  Part Three

  Homewrecker

  Recently, my friend Gene asked if I’d let a friend of his use my apartment while I was away. I declined, and then, later, he mentioned that the person needing a place to stay happened to be Tina Turner. I was sorry I’d said no, because even though I don’t know Tina personally, I had just seen the movie about her—What’s Love Got to Do with It—and I think that it would have been cool to have her stay in my apartment. It’s a two-bedroom on the Upper West Side, which I have decorated as if it were owned by a midranking official of the Chinese Communist Party. I like how it’s turned out.

  However, I don’t know if it would be to Tina’s liking. In the movie, Ike and Tina’s apartment (or mansion, or whatever) has a different look from mine, but maybe Ike did their decorating.

  I’m a size 2, and I bet that Tina is also a 2, or maybe a 4 on her fat days. I’m sure she’d end up rummaging around in my closet—something I ordinarily wouldn’t like, but I’d love to be the person who turned Tina on to J. Crew plain-front relaxed-fit khakis. On the other hand, if she visited on a fat day and tried on something of mine and split a seam, would she fix it? Or would she hide it and hope I’d never notice? Or—worst of all—would she throw away the ruined outfit and then let me spend the next year of my life trying to figure out where I lost my pants? I’d hate having to worry that some celebrity who hadn’t worked out her shame-and-denial issues was going to be destroying my stuff and then pretending it had never happened.

  Also: Does Tina Turner cook? I’ll bet that she doesn’t cook a lot but that she has mastered one fancy party dish—something that’s not actually hard to make but looks complicated, like smoked-bluefish pâté or nachos. It’s become her signature dish: Whenever she goes to pot lucks, people see her coming up th
e driveway and instead of saying, “Hey, here comes Tina,” they say, “Hey, here comes that smoked-bluefish pâté,” or, “Here come the nachos.” Anyway, my kitchen is typical for New York City, so there wouldn’t be much for her to see, except that I have one cupboard absolutely loaded with cans of water-packed tuna. This could have a downside. It might tempt her to just “borrow” a few cans, with every intention of replacing them at some future date, and we all know how often guests spend their vacation running to the grocery store to replace what they’ve filched. The answer is: not very often. I also have these great boar-bristle hairbrushes that I think a show business person with a lot of hair and an elevated hair consciousness—for example, Tina Turner—would adore. Unfortunately, I’m not crazy about sharing combs and brushes—this is something I was taught as a child—but if Tina had just shampooed and had forgotten her own stuff, she would probably use them, even if I had specifically asked her not to. No comment. I’ve done it myself.

  I think my neighbors would like Tina, but I’m not sure they’d like her clattering around the apartment in those spike-heeled pumps of hers. I would have to ask her to limit her clattering—she could borrow my socks if she wanted to, but I would appreciate their being washed afterward. Moreover, if she had friends over—I’m assuming her friends also wear noisy shoes—she’d have to insist that they also take theirs off, but they’d have to bring their own socks. If she’s too uncomfortable to ask them to do something like that, then maybe she ought to get new friends, or maybe she should look for somewhere else to stay. Isn’t that what hotels are for?