From the street behind the temple....no pictures till tomorrow

For those of you that know Khao San Road in Bangkok, I'm on a little back alley behind the temple, at one of the 1 baht/minute internet glass-enclosures. I've just bought an air-con sleeper berth to Nong Khai on Sunday - this is the border town for Laos - at a bargain of less than 20 dollars. I've been warned not to take the word 'air con' lightly - I'll need a good sweater on top of the blanket they issue, just to stay warm enough to sleep.

So, another crazy circus-like Saturday night is mine to spend in the Khao San Hippie Emporium (well, most real hippies I met have been avoiding this place since the late eighties - preferring to sleep out of town, like Ayuttaya and places like that)- it should prove to be a nice counterpoint to the insanity of Seoul nightlife.

Khao San, in fact is quite a phenomenon, so much so, that originally it went from being a place that 'decent' Thai people would avoid like the plague (unless they needed to make money, which of course is always a good thing here) to a three-ring freak show that draws their daughters in by the droves, hoping to meet a handsome blond Dane, or a wild and crazy Italian, or a mild-mannered and polite/presentable Canadian or American...Perfectly 'decent' Thai girls came to see this place as a great place to travel the world without ever leaving home.

After all, nothing was going on here morally that hadn't been going on for hundreds of years elsewhere in Thailand - but this one at least had a flair, a twist of the exotic and different.

Indeed, it is hard to ascribe any nationality to this place. Khao San will someday probably be seen by scientists as the best proof of some of the more objectionable aspects of String Theory. I'm referring to the eleven dimensions proposed by the theory. Khao San is definately in one of those eleven dimensions; which one, nobody can be sure of - but it definately is not in our current dimension.

I'll try to update more later, either with pics from Bangkok or from the last Burma trip.