Guide to Khaosan Road and Old Bangkok

A New Addition to Nancy Chandler's Famed Thailand Maps

Mar 5, 2009 Susan Cunningham

Everyone loves Nancy Chandler's colorful, detailed maps to Chiang Mai, Bangkok and the Weekend Market. Finally Rattanakosin and Khaosan get their own.

For more than thirty years, tourists have been relied on Nancy Chandler’s pink and yellow maps to discover what’s curious and useful in Bangkok and Chiang Mai. In cute cartoons and chirpy descriptions (“A great little music joint!” “Lucky fish mobiles”), Chandler shares her enthusiasm for Thai things.

Chandler was a U.S. artist living in Bangkok when she drew the first maps. Since then, the Chiang Mai and Bangkok maps have seen many editions, additions and deletions as Nancy Chandler Graphics blossomed into a full-fledged company. It now produces greeting cards, coloring books and mugs that display Chandler’s signature tropical-colored images. Chandler these days spends most of the year in San Francisco. Daughter Nima runs the Bangkok office and keeps a running record of what’s new, renamed, torn down or closed doors. Some of her updates can be tracked on the company’s website.

Toys, Wigs and Jade

In recent editions, the main Bangkok map has had a section devoted to block-long Khaosan Road (also known as Khao San Road, Kaosan Road and Kao San Road) and its environs in addition to the close-ups of Weekend Market and Chinatown. “But with more and more small boutiques and little restaurants popping up and an increasing number – of not just travelers but also Thais and expatriates – hanging out in Khaosan, we felt it finally deserved a map of its own," Nima explained.

As with the older maps, most of her recommendations aren’t places or things created with tourists in mind. They’re family shops on a side street selling spices, toys, wigs or rubber stamps. A small jade museum. A traditional dance school. And, last but not least, the tastiest food stalls.

But the Khaosan (which means "milled rice" in Thai) portion of the new map differs from the older maps in providing information geared to tourists’ most basic needs for food and shelter.

Guesthouse Price Ranges

In fact, with this map, tourists probably won’t need a Bangkok guidebook at all. They can arrive straight from the airport, pick up a map at a kiosk on Khaosan Road and start hunting. Extending far beyond the Banglampoo neighborhood, the scores of area hotels, guesthouses and bed-and-breakfast lodgings are listed in three price categories. A room ranges from less than 300 baht at the low end up to 1,000-3,000 baht at the high end. Included are telephone numbers and their locations on the map. (Many guesthouses now have websites and can be booked ahead online or by phone, Nima found, but usually reservations must be made at least one week in advance.)

None of this accommodation rivals the international branded and five-star luxury hotels farther down the Chao Phraya River and around Sukhumvit Road, which are the usual focus of slick travel magazines.

But Bangkok residents will be surprised how cushy most of these places are. Most uptown Thais still think the area is inhabited by threadbare backpackers squeezed into unisex dorm rooms. Most lodgings have air-con, some have pools (riverside, rooftop), some have gyms and pools. Some have flat-screen TVs and internet access in rooms.

Kick-boxing and Halal food

Outside, radiating from Khaosan Road, amid the vendors of pirated CDs, the tattoo parlors and hair-braiders are dental clinics, a Bangkok International Hospital outpatient clinic, used bookstores, DHS and UPS shippers, Starbucks and Swensen’s, a kick-boxing gym and a rock-climbing wall. To name just a few, there are restaurants featuring halal, Israeli, Japanese, Korean, Italian and Irish pub food. There are fortune tellers, at least three spas and a vegetarian cooking school.

In the evening, hip-hop, old rock, ska and blues blare at dozens of venues – in live, recorded and DJ’d forms. Some of the coolest music clubs are frequented by students at nearby Thammasat and Silpakorn colleges, and not by foreign tourists at all. In short, there’s little reason to wander as far as the real downtown areas of Sukhumvit and Silom Roads.

And what do the original proprietors think of all the changes in the past few decades? Do they regret the foreign occupation? “Anyone still in the neighborhood is there for a reason,” Nima believes. “If a mom-and-pop shop is still on Khaosan, it is raking in the money.”

Old Royal City

As for the old royal city on Rattanakosin Island across Rajadamnoen Klang Road, it has undergone comparatively little change in the past few decades, Chandler says. There is still a dearth of cafés for sun-stroked pilgrims (though try the Navy Wives’ Café on Maharat Road near the intersection with Na Phralan Road. Or farther south, near Tha Tien dock, look for Amorosa Rooftop Bar).

Walkers will still find a few oddities they missed the first or fifth time around, such as the little Prison Museum, a shop selling rare Thai desserts or the street of shops selling monks’ bells and bowls. The most exciting addition, opened in 2008, is the historical Museum of Siam, housed in a gracious early 20th-century building that used to be the Commerce Ministry. With traditional toys and interactive exhibits, here’s finally a museum that children enjoy.

Nima also highly recommends the new night tours of ancient Wat Pho (or Wat Po). “It’s a completely different experience of touring this temple, with area off limits during the day open to the tour,” she says. Tours run only during the tourist season, roughly from November through April. Check out the Nancy Chandler website to make sure they're still operating.

The copyright of the article Guide to Khaosan Road and Old Bangkok in E Asia Travel is owned by Susan Cunningham. Permission to republish Guide to Khaosan Road and Old Bangkok in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.