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Kho San Man

Rhymer1
2005-03-30 21:53:07

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I was worried. By the time we came to leave Indonesia ・in a sort of culinary equivalent of Stockholm syndrome - I壇 actually started to like the food・mmm monotony. I don稚 really know what happened, but somehow, in our last few weeks in 選ndo・I started to crave the bland stuff I壇 been railing against. Morning, noon and night would see me queuing at the warung, desperate to eat exactly the same fried rice-based meal.

But Bangkok quickly cured me of this. The Thai devotion to matters gastronomic astounding, easily up there with that of France and Italy. Food vendors are everywhere and selling everything: from donuts to savoury rice puddings to excoricatingly hot curries. After the vapidity of Bali Bangkok also had real life: what energy! What animation! This, I thought, is where we should have come instead. Even the Kho San Road (so often dismissed as Backpacker Benidorm) seemed to have an agreeable bustle and purpose to it. Perhaps, I thought in my star-stuck state, it even represented a genuine sociological phenomenon; whatever, it certainly deserved more of a chance than most gave it.

Well, it got it. On our second day there, we both developed mild food poisoning. No really big deal, you understand, nothing like the week of oyster-induced evisceration that had crippled me a few Christmases back. But enough to ensure we had neither the energy nor the inclination to leave the area of our hotel, some two streets back from the Kho San. Thus, we had the chance to examine the environs Kho San in far greater depth than we would have otherwise done.

And, my God, it is an awful place. Once upon a time it must have been OK. But nowadays the people who throng it are now largely a sort of traveling pond life. Initially, I fought this thought ・you池e one of them, I told myself. But I soon realised I had no more in common with most of this lot than I have with the kind of wankers who ask you ...