Rice Sack Road: Where your money's been

On Thanon Khao San everything is for sale, nothing has a permanent price and you almost never know what you’re actually going to get.
It’s quiet in the morning, like a hall the night after a wedding. The real Khao San road, the one you see in pictures and the one of which all foreigners tell stories, doesn’t open until darkness perches above this most peculiar place.

You could buy most anything on the street from your chair in a pub. One man sells gigantic butane lighters, bigger than most books. He walks up to your table, flicks the knob and watches your face as the huge flame flares into the air. “Cheap for you,” he says. I always wondered what anyone would do with a lighter that size.

Three women walk back and forth down the street and as far into the restaurants as the owners will let them go, all dressed in fake traditional northern hill tribe outfits: colourful stitching on cloth from head to toe. In their hands and their arms and their shoulders are their wares: wooden frogs that croak with the stroke of a stick, plain beaded necklaces and metal bracelets, all of it really from a warehouse down the road. They’ll make the frog croak in your face for minutes while you tell them no and while they pretend they don’t know what you mean. I always wondered if they ever sold anything.

An old, old woman sits on the corner of the end of the street, her legs twisted and crossed. She’s wearing white and even though her body is half on the pavement for hours, her clothes are clean. Toothless, her gums bleed onto her face. She holds out her hands when people pass and most drop a coin or two into her wrinkled, bent palms. She’s pitiful and she knows it and you’ll never forget her heartbreaking face. You buy a memory of her. I always wondered where she sleeps.

Little boys, shoeless, run up and down the sidewalk carrying a green vase filled with plastic flowers. They turn in the wind but the streets are so crowded there’s no such thing as wind. You can get lost by mid-afternoon when all the street vendors set up their booths and plastic tarps come over your head because it’s a never-ending maze of pirated CDs, fake teaching certificates, massage girls trying to lure you onto their beds, hair-braiders, spring-roll makers, fortune tellers, Indians trying to lure you into their suit stores, fisherman pants, fake jewellery, Singha beer t-shirts and tuk-tuk drivers trying to lure you into their noisy three-wheeled vehicles.

When daylight fades Khao San unveils its true face. Mini-bars pop-up on the road selling ‘buckets’ – white buckets filled with Sangsom, Thai rum, coke and red bull. Having one is dangerous and having two is deadly. The girls who pour the lethal beverage yell at passersby ‘we no ID’ ‘special cocktail for you’. It’s special all right. I made the mistake of attempting two at Kho Phi Phi on the night of the full moon party and had to ride a ferry for two hours, followed by a bus for two and a train for 12 first thing the next morning. I think buckets are half the reason you’ll always find one guy completely passed out, shirtless and likely wallet-less lying on a sidewalk the next morning, sometimes until the next night.

Thai girls dressed in skin-tight dresses with beer logos all over stand outside the doors of the actual clubs where naïve men and women, but mostly men, experience the Thailand they were looking for. Inside the girls strike any fellow not already taken. They throw back their long, long black hair and shove their little boy-like asses in front of hands and legs and crotches that aren’t their own. Once they’ve been offered a drink, they’re set. You can see the same 70-year-old fat and balding British guys or the young guys fresh off the plane walking around, holding hands with their hookers for days. I always wondered how much they paid.

But I wondered more how much travelers paid for the lady-boys. They start strutting down the street at 8 or 9 p.m. Their mismatched bodies, with penises and skirts, big feet and high heels, make-up and facial hair; well, they’re for sale too.

When the night is over and you’re counting your change, you have to wonder where your money’s been.