Khao San Road is a strip of about half a mile, and every square inch of the strip is covered by hotels, restaurants, bars, travel agencies, and internet cafes. Even the sidewalk ITSELF is covered by stands with knockoff Polo and Diesel shirts, fake Raybans, and pirated CDs. In all of the bars and restaurants you see travelers hanging out, eating, talking, and drinking thai beers. They are from England, Australia, France, and America, but they all share one thing in common. Actually, a lot of things in common. Dreadlocks, a love for pot, tatoos, american movies, and Bob Marley. Ok, I'm obviously generalizing, but you get the picture.
At Khao San Road you can go the entire time without speaking anything but english or suffering culture shock. You might as well be back in London or Sydney or Portland with burnout friends, because it is basically the same thing. It isn't even much cheaper, since the Thais know they can gouge these people that don't know any better.
Anyway, I'm done with that rant. I just feel that Khao San stands for everything I am against in a travel experience. It does little to expand your mind to go to another country and not meet locals or try to experience life the way the locals do. As someone told me, book your tickets, get your visas, send your emails, then get the hell off of Khao San. Good advice, and I'll leave it at that.
Bangkok itself I did like. It is a massive city, that just seems too big to navigate. As far as "tourist" attractions, I would not rank it that high against some other places I have been in s.e. Asia. But as far as a fun and modern city goes, I would rank it very high. The restaurants in Bangkok are very good, and the nightlife is good as well.
You can get around Bangkok for very cheap by eating at stalls on the street, or you can also go to very fancy clubs and restaurants and western style malls and cinemas. One of the interesting things about going to the movies in Thailand is that you stand for the national anthem to honor the King before the movie.
One of the very interesting things to do in Bangkok is to eat off of the stalls in the street. You can taste a number of Thai dishes for pennies and a lot of it is quite good. Some of the more interesting things that I saw for sale were fried cockroaches and scorpions, and cobra blood and bile. I pretty much stuck with the pad thai, bbq, fruit shakes, and sticky rice.
When Vince and I got out of Khao San and moved to a nicer neighborhood uptown to Sukhumvit, we both felt it was a huge improvement. Since we both like cities with a lot going on , we both felt much more at home here and wished we would have spent our entire time in Bangkok there.
One of the very cool things we did was to go see a Thai boxing match. We sprung for front row tickets, and by front row we weren't in the front SECTION (which we suspected) but literally in the front ROW. It wasn't cheap-about 35 bucks apiece-but we figured, hey, when are we going to see Thai boxing again?
It was worth it. In Thai boxing there are a lot of fights, 12 on a card, and we later found out the "main events" are from fights 6-9. We did notice that after fight 9 a lot of people started streaming out of the arena. We didn't see a whole lot of difference in the undercard and the "main event" fights, since they were almost all good.
In Thai boxing is that just about everything is legal. Except for biting, eye-gouging, and striking in the groin, anything goes. This means elbows, kicking, and rabbit punches are fair game.
Even though the fights are brutal, the fighting is very honorable and the sportsmanship is first rate. The fights begin with both fighters performing a ritual dance (a little too long for our liking) to honor everyone in their boxing family as well as the sport itself. After the dancing, they go for 6 rounds of 3 minute fighting. Very entertaining fighting.
The fighters are all little guys. The "heavyweight" fight on the card that night were two fighters that were 133 lbs. Most of the fights are between guys that are a little over 5 feet and 100 lbs. But man, are they tough.
After a typical first round of the fighters feeling each other out, the action gets intense. They really go at each other without much hesitation, and even when a fighter is losing, there is rarely much defense or backing down. Fights are also not stopped and a dazed fighter is not given any quarter. Because of this there are a lot of knockouts, and we saw 3 in a row.
Seeing the bravery and toughness of these guys was something else. The skill was also incredibly impressive and the quality of the fighters was first rate. Many say the fighters from Thailand are the toughest in the world, and seeing them first hand, you would definitely not argue.
Almost as entertaining as the action in the ring are all the Thais outside the ring. They resemble the floor of some crazy asian trading floor as they shout and bet throughout the fights. They try to sway the judges by yelling when their fighter strikes the opponent. When the fights get heated, the betting also picks up, and the crowd starts to go crazy. When a fight is really good, the crowd is buzzing, there is paper everywhere as bets are made, and when the fighters land punches and kicks the crowd goes wild. A funny part of this is between rounds a lot of the guys go down and scream instructions to the fighter they have bet on, and seem to truly believe that the fighter is taking direction from some random guy in the audience. It is pretty hilarious. Vince and I both thoroughly enjoyed Thai boxing and would highly recommend it.