TOW #20 - The Place to Disappear

On Khao San Road in Bangkok, the long journeys and varying languages of drug seeking adventurers collide.  While still a part of Thailand, Khao San Road is a melting pot of tourism, catering to the varying needs of the young travelers who spend time here.  In her essay, The Place to Disappear, Susan Orlean outlines the necessity of a place where time doesn't seem to matter, yet everyone is temporary.  The nearly invisibility of this area is also exactly why it is important.  While great cities and permanent artifacts are great, the horribly loud and tacky class of a place such as Khao San Road is incredibly important to the world.
Young travelers, such as backpackers and party-seekers, learn to move from place to place with excellent grace, and mostly without a trace.  Each person in a temporary stop like Khao San Road has an incredible story to share, and a lifetime of memories usually made within a few months.  At most, a few years.  The small noodle shops and pulsing clubs are filled with 20-somethings searching for themselves, fresh out of Israeli army service, or circling back to the US after work in the Peace Corps.  Khao San Road is a place where these experiences clash, but not in the negative sense of the word.  It is a "jumping off" place, where journeys end and others begin.  Not really anywhere, but everywhere all at once.  Here is where young men and women can find the cheapest flights from the scariest of airlines, or simply stay in a guesthouse starting at $7 per night.  The stories that all collide at this place is what makes it so important.
Without really being anywhere, Khao San Road is familiar and comfortable.  Visitors are often dealing with various issues, but are smart and kind to the locals, and abide by their traditions.  Every single type of person can be found here, and it has become a melting pot of unimaginable depth.  Having a place where it's hard to be found and it's hard to know why you're there exactly, is precisely why Khao San Road has become such an incredible place.  The collision of ways of life have provided a scene that is not typical, yet fascinating to come upon.