First scence of the movie "The Beach" when Leonardo DiCaprio was on the tuk-tuk showed us a busy road that looked like a colony of foreigners. The road is the centre of backpackers in Thailand and it has now become the most popular tourist attraction in Bangkok. That place is very famous, everyone knows "Khao San Road".

When you step into the road, located in Bang Lamphu, you feel as if you are stepping into another world. Khao San Road is the place where you can find people from different countries around the world. Most of the tourists who came to Khao San Road said that they knew about this place from their friends who have been there before. The road is very close to major tourist attractions such as the Grand Palace and Rattanakosin island. The road itself is an attraction too.

Khao San Road provides many kinds of businesses. You can see an endless supply of guest houses, travel agencies, used book stores, and the booming internet cafes. You can also see many bars and restaurants where new Hollywood videos are shown all day long. As the centre for backpackers, it is a good starting point for them to get to know Bangkok and Thailand.

Friendships grow easily on Khao San Road. Just eating in the same restaurant, people soon find themselves talking about the places they have been. According to the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Khao San Road can accommodate 8,000 tourists a day. The high season is between January and April with the peak period at Songkran time. Then the number of tourists staying in the guest houses rises to 10,000 a day. Khao San Road offers all kinds of services to the tourists, including visa applications for Indochinese countries. Not only foreigners, but also many Thais come here for an inexpensive tour to other provinces.

Besides guest houses, food, travel services, and souvenir shops, Khao San Road is now the centre of silver ornament exports for the whole country. One good thing about Khao San Road is that, unlike Patpong, no sex-related businesses are allowed on the road.

Mr. Noppadol Chivara-monaikul, president of the Khao San Road Business Association, who was born and grew up in the neighbourhood said that he had never thought that the road would become like this. “Just 20 years ago, nobody would dare walk at night on the road because it was very dark. Now, the road seems to be busy all the time.” He said business on the road gets bigger every day. Seven years ago, buying a store cost only 100,000 baht, but today the rental rate alone is 70,000 baht per month. According to the TAT, the average spending by a tourist in Thailand is 3,600 baht per head per day. The figure on Khao San Road is just 1,200 to 1,500 baht.

[source from thailandguidebook.com]

Khao San Road: Where to Stay

Buddy Lodge hotel Bangkok
Sawasdee Khaosan Inn hotel Bangkok, Chinatown
Viengtai hotel Bangkok, Chinatown
Rambuttri Village Inn and Plaza
Trang hotel Bangkok, Chinatown
Golden Horse hotel Bangkok, Rajdamnern
De Moc hotel Bangkok

Khao San Road: Overview

If Bangkok is a city where East greets West, then Khao San Road is the scene of their collision, the place where they jostle for superiority and poke one another in the eye. With travellers from every corner of the modern world, sleek clubs playing sophisticated sounds, eclectic market stalls, converted VW cocktail bars, and foods tamed to suit the Western palate, it may seem clear who won the fight. However, whether you're a hard-up farang (foreigner) or open-minded Thai, its irrepressible energy and carefree vibe makes it well worth a visit.

It's in fact over 20 years since this area first morphed into a ghetto for backpackers of all ages, colours, and creeds. However, while the crowds look much the same, the famous road does not: over the last five years or so the place has undergone a slow, subtle makeover. The tired-looking bars and dilapidated flophouses of yesteryear have disappeared or gone upmarket. Bars and restaurants are now trendy, style-conscious affairs, decked out with exciting menus and imaginative interiors. And, the neighborhood's accommodation has been tweaked toward the upper-budget market, with comfort, air-con and decorative flair the new buzzwords.

The end result: a sleeker, shinier, more commercial Khao San Road, a place no longer the preserve purely of shoestring travellers, looking for a mattress in a box and surviving on a diet of banana pancakes and buckets of Red Bull and Thai whisky. Bourgeois backpackers, open-minded young families and hip-young Thais now complete the scene, all of whom come along to soak up the area's atmosphere, while in the process enriching it.

Don't be worried that the place has lost its soul though. Dig beneath the thin veneer of progress and you'll see the place has retained the raucous, gritty charm that made it famous: the sprawling neon signs that light up the street at night are still here, as are pushy tuk-tuk drivers, street vendors peddling everything from fried insects to croaking ornamental frogs, and drunken revellers, lost in the neon glare, staggering its length late into the night. And lets not forget the common and yet still compelling sight of bewildered new arrivals hunting frantically for a place to rest before sundown, or of strutting Thai beauties prowling the streets in search of a new 'tee-rak' (loved one).

Most importantly of all, the air of youthful abandon which permeates the place 24/7 is still here, unashamedly and comfortingly intact despite the seemingly unstoppable influx of fast-food outlets (Starbucks, McDonalds and Burger King) and incongruous shopping malls. In fact, though most use it as a convenient spot to re-configure after a bout of island hopping, or as a base from which to launch an assault on the city's temples and markets, it's true to say that Khao San Road has become an attraction in itself, albeit one with a raw, uncouth, cosmopolitan feel that isn't textbook Thai.

[source from bangkok.com]