The Upscaling of Khao San Road
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.20.07 | 7:57 AM ET
Photo of Khao San Road circa 2003 by In yesterday’s New York Times, World Hum contributor Newley Purnell highlights all the ways travelers can now blow their budgets on Khao San Road, Bangkok’s famed backpackers hangout. The once dingy “decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand,” as Alex Garland described it in “The Beach,” now contains a spa offering body wraps and salt scrubs, as well as a Starbucks, Purnell writes. The changes should come as no surprise, particularly in the wake of Khao San Road’s central role in “The Beach.”
In a piece for Salon in 1999, just before the movie version of “The Beach” was released, Rolf Potts wrote:
In a few more months, the middle-class travel revolution will end as all middle-class movements do: with assimilation. Once “The Beach” hits the theaters, the notion of independent world travel will be officially mainstreamed into the Western psyche—and the world as we know it will be conquered for the umpteenth time.
Yet that doesn’t make things as “spiritually empty as they might seem,” Potts continued. “In a personal sense, the world has only grown larger and wider and wilder. Travel is and always will be an act of faith and creativity—even more so as it comes to resemble the lives we lead at home. And, while the social implications of globetrotting may have become hopelessly complicated, this merely allows us to reclaim travel for what it should be: a private act of discovery.”
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
nobitalk 09.12.08 | 3:18 AM ET
lol i love Khaosarn Road