I had a 23-hour stopover in Bangkok on the way back to the UK. The flight from Oz didn’t quite connect with the flight to London so the airline put me up in a hotel in Sukhumvit, right next to the Nana Skytrain station.

It was kind of bittersweet being in Bangkok. The first time I visited was back in 1986 when dad and I went off on an adventure through Nepal, India and Burma. We flew into Singapore, caught a plane to Bangkok and set off from there.

We stayed up on Khao San Road, in a crappy hostel/hotel down a tiny covered lane, with a monkey on a chain that dived for your head every time you came in the door. We spent our time sorting out cheap airfares to Nepal, eating banana pancakes and buying pirate cassettes. (If my memory serves me correctly I was still into Bruce Springsteen back then.)

By the time I checked into my hotel in Sukhumvit this time it was still only 11 am so I decided to pop up to Khao San Road for old time’s sake. I caught a river boat up to Phra Arthit, the nearest dock to Bang Lampoo, and followed a couple wearing matching cargo pants, Teva sandals and amulets to the most famous backpacker road in South East Asia.

The first thing I noticed was that Khao San Road has been paved. The metre-deep potholes filled with fetid water breeding every bacteria known to man have gone. It has also been pedestrianised. Drunk backpackers can stagger out of bars now safe in the knowledge that they’re not going to be run down by an errant Tuk-Tuk.

There’s a Macdonalds, a Burger King and a KFC. Pirate tapes and CDs have been replaced by a guy with a laptop who’ll download any song onto your iPod for a very reasonable price. The hotel I stayed in with dad has been knocked down, along with every other hovel in a 50-metre radius, and replaced by a multistorey hotel. And the Hello Bar, a late night fav of mine, is now a shop selling bags, wooden carvings and t-shirts.

I’m not saying all this is bad. I’m not one of those travellers who bore people by insisting they should have visited somewhere twenty years ago when it was more ‘real’. (At least I hope I’m not) It still felt like Bangkok. You could still buy an ice-cold Singha for the price of a packet of crisps back home. And I spotted more than a few first-timers wandering around with big dopey grins on their faces, high on the exhilaration of being somewhere so different from home for the very first time.

One thing hasn’t changed though. Thai tailors still have rather strange ideas on what is fashionable. Like this corduroy suit I spotted on Rumbuttri. A backpacker would have had to have taken an awful lot of mind-altering drugs to think that wearing that to interviews would help him get a job when he got back home.

It would have made my dad laugh.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.