Khao San: After the hype comes the reality - once "billion baht" street" deserted in the daytime

[bkk6060]

I never got the attraction. but I am older.

Just seemed like a bunch of loud cheap charlie backpackers getting drunk in the early afternoon, buying cheap T shirts and food and vendors offering what appeared to be fake licenses/ID's.

 

[Acharn]

9 hours ago, mr mr said:

 

for what ? 

 

does the headline not state that the place is deserted at night. that's a clear signal to open longer. 

 

sawatdee kap.

No, it doesn't. It says the place is deserted during the daytime. It'll never recover since PM Prayut, while head of the junta, ordered it to be cleaned up. The kind of tourists who went there (and did spend money, although not a lot per capita) do not do "cleaned up."

[bkk6060]

7 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

It always amuses me when a farang claims that Thailand is doomed without them. Every farang could vanish tomorrow and IMO only the bar girls, families and the tourist companies would miss them. Thailand survived just fine prior to 1970 and will do so again if it comes to it.

Chest out I guess their $750 a month pensions make them feel rich, important and superior.

[Redvic]

9 hours ago, mr mr said:

 

for what ? 

 

does the headline not state that the place is deserted at night. that's a clear signal to open longer. 

 

sawatdee kap.

No!!!! It says deserted in daytime before 5pm. Back to school for you. Or new reading glasses. ????????

[Don Chance]

Time to pull out the power scrubber and degreaser those floors and walkways!

[DTL2014]

i applaud efforts to tidy the area up - and i think the thought put into the colonial style architecture is great too  - lets hope they can maintain it and it doesnt look too rough in a few years as the climate and pollution takes its toll..

 

[multatuli]

9 hours ago, Pottinger said:

Well, cry me a river; many traders made huge profits in such tourist spots around Thailand during the good times, which extended for years. If they did not have the foresight to save and plan for the future then my sympathy only extends to those at the bottom of the food chain, who never had the chance to establish themselves.

Foresight is not in the thai dictionary

[Magenta408]

Speaks for the country in general. The WHO said to shut everything down and many profitted while the large majority suffered greatly. It's not a secret. It's well known. I wonder how the plunderers feel having done this to their country - oh yes, of course, it was a little virus.

[Cat Boy]

Khao San was gutted long before Covid-19 as part of the crack down on street vendors, cleaning up the area and trying generally to make Bangkok and Thailand more like Singapore. And all the fun and uniqueness vanished almost overnight. There's been no reason to go back to Khao San since 2013. Civilization as sterilisation isn't a justification for leaving home

[RocketDog]

7 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

It always amuses me when a farang claims that Thailand is doomed without them. Every farang could vanish tomorrow and IMO only the bar girls, families and the tourist companies would miss them. Thailand survived just fine prior to 1970 and will do so again if it comes to it.

Surviving and prospering are quite different things as any low-income family will tell you. 

Prosperity is quite superior to mere survival. 

Any way you want to frame it tourism brought a lot to Thailand. 

[trainman34014]

10 hours ago, Pottinger said:

Well, cry me a river; many traders made huge profits in such tourist spots around Thailand during the good times, which extended for years. If they did not have the foresight to save and plan for the future then my sympathy only extends to those at the bottom of the food chain, who never had the chance to establish themselves.

You are forgetting that the average Thai lives for today and in the main looks no further forward than tomorrow !

[dpcjsr]

In July 2018, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), in an attempt to clean up Khaosan Road, announced that street vendors would be removed from the thoroughfare from 1 August 2018. The BMA intends to move them to a nearby area and restrict their trading hours to 18:00 to midnight.

 

2 years later it is a disaster. 

 

Coincidence? 

[Jonathan Swift]

10 hours ago, ezzra said:

Even today's 'billion baht' not what they used to be before, but as the world turns, so are the fortunes of many places and i'm sure that Khao san Rd. will once again will go back to its former glory...

Not until there is a vaccine and it becomes safe to let foreigners back in. At least 1 - 2 years, quite unpredictable. Visa on arrival is no longer allowed, nor are the standard tourist visas. The tourists won't spend 300,000 to 100,000 baht on quarantine which is now where the "billion baht" is going - into the pockets of the ASQ hotels. And certainly no one in their right mind is gonna shell out a fortune for those ridiculous new "special" tourist visas. The real money comes from large populations of just regular people spending their limited vacation budgets

[mopoan]

When the tourists eventually return, i hope the vendors will appreciate them, and won't look at them as walking wallets with never ending money...

[ib1b4]

7 minutes ago, dpcjsr said:

In July 2018, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), in an attempt to clean up Khaosan Road, announced that street vendors would be removed from the thoroughfare from 1 August 2018. The BMA intends to move them to a nearby area and restrict their trading hours to 18:00 to midnight.

 

2 years later it is a disaster. 

 

Coincidence? 

That was the nail in the coffin for Khaosan road! But it is easier to blame the Covid virus than to admit what is the truth.

 

[Jack Cook]

8 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

It always amuses me when a farang claims that Thailand is doomed without them. Every farang could vanish tomorrow and IMO only the bar girls, families and the tourist companies would miss them. Thailand survived just fine prior to 1970 and will do so again if it comes to it.

Then you are too easily amused. 20% of any economy evaporating is is not good in anybodies book. It will bust the place. It’s not 1970 anymore. 

[Magenta408]

While the place was humming and buzzzing, my young daughter did experience a wonderful occurence, she learned, courtesy of aux-pairs and part-time, inexpensive but qualified teachers, Spanish and French and some tennis. . Grazie mille Seneor Prayuth or was that Seneor Takhsin?? It's all so confusing.

[biplanebluey]

`What we really need to help our own people is someone who generally and sincerely cares for them and is willing to help them.For typical examples are the military nessesaties all the Ships,submarines and now really fast and totally absurd are the so expensive aircraft.We already have fast military war planes in Udon Thani and I often stand and watch them do only circuits around town and think to myself--------- I wonder what that little jaunt around cost  just in fuel never mind the maintenance. Come on you military minded millionairs there are millions of hard working people here that have been ruined through no fault of their own---do something for them to get over this terrible chrisis.Do something sensible and sincere

[whitfield]

It might also help if the police didn't collude on the scams.  

[billd766]

4 hours ago, ChipButty said:

I've been to Udon 20 odd years ago hardly saw any farang, I think farang did play a big part in putting Udon on the map

I did a lot of work all over Issan including Khon Kaen, Udon, Nong Khai during the mid 1970s working or Motorola building the cellular network for DTAC. I didn't see many farangs back then either.

[JesseHumphry]

An unbelievable number of SMBs are tourism-based. 

Without tourism from people who are willing to spend money, those businesses are screwed, along with the jobs they provide and the money the spend in turn. 

Losing 15% of a nation's economy is just unprecedented; we're talking about a drop off of an entire sector of business that just turned into a big, gaping hole. You lose 15% of the hull of a ship, you sink. 

Bringing in the notoriously stingy Chinese against focusing on Westerners who actually like to spend money and spend more per-person than the Chinese probably ever will...that doesn't make much sense to me. The Chinese have the advantage in pure numbers and that's about it. 

But Thailand has been shooting its tourism sector in the foot for years now, culturally. When you prefer to scam people out of money instead of cultivating a rich tourism industry that values the consumer, you get what you get. 

I mean the whole country is backwards. Look at condos. Demand is subterranean; why are prices going up? 

[Gandtee]

9 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

It always amuses me when a farang claims that Thailand is doomed without them. Every farang could vanish tomorrow and IMO only the bar girls, families and the tourist companies would miss them. Thailand survived just fine prior to 1970 and will do so again if it comes to it.

But in the meantime? Those bar girls, families and tour company workers will suffer. It would be interesting to to see records of any increase in crime crime since the start of covid.

[Truth Will Set You Free]

In simple words;  nothing last forever.........????????????????????????

[thaibeachlovers]

1 hour ago, Jack Cook said:

Then you are too easily amused. 20% of any economy evaporating is is not good in anybodies book. It will bust the place. It’s not 1970 anymore. 

What happens will happen ie it doesn't matter what we think is important in the real world. People will survive, things will probably be different, but an economy will happen, even if a lot of people have to make do with less. Humans have survived the Black Death, wars, revolutions etc, and it's always traumatic, but we move on.

 

It's a good time to be a farmer- people always have to eat.

[thaibeachlovers]

30 minutes ago, billd766 said:

I did a lot of work all over Issan including Khon Kaen, Udon, Nong Khai during the mid 1970s working or Motorola building the cellular network for DTAC. I didn't see many farangs back then either.

Get out of the very few places that are reliant on foreign tourism ( which is the vast majority of Thailand and it's people ) and foreign tourists have never been significant. Many places see very few foreign tourists. I lived in Lamphun, just half an hour from Chiang Mai and foreign tourists were virtually unseen, but it catered to many Thai tourists.

IMO the most affected will be young people that may have to stop buying unnecessary things like Apple phones, and maybe even give up phones altogether, if money becomes short. That really would be a shock to them, LOL.

[thaibeachlovers]

3 hours ago, hotchilli said:

That's twice more than me... did I miss anything?

Not a thing.

[Catkiwi]

10 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

LOL. Note the last word is not "night time"

Khao San: After the hype comes the reality - once "billion baht" street" deserted in the daytime

 

Apparently, KSR was already taken over by Thais before the corona, and the bagpackers were staying in the side roads off it. It was always, IMO, a rip off place and I for one will shed no tears for its demise.

Hopefully the tourist bus companies that ran buses ( they sometimes had thieves in the baggage compartment stealing from the bags- a common complaint by bagpackers that lost money and passports etc when I was posting on Lonely Planet ) from KSR will have all gone out of business. I did travel on one after floods prevented the trains from running from Surat Thani, and I was not impressed at all. Good riddance to them, IMO. Government buses are way better.

 

I used to go there in the last century to remind myself why I didn't stay there.

Backpackers.

[thaibeachlovers]

Just now, Catkiwi said:

Backpackers.

?

[Nout]

1 hour ago, mopoan said:

When the tourists eventually return, i hope the vendors will appreciate them, and won't look at them as walking wallets with never ending money...

How long did you stay there?. It was not like that when I was there!

[Catkiwi]

3 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

?

Backpackers not bagpackers...just saying.