In the early morning you could forgive Khoasan Road for being just another dirty, grimy, haze filled street stuffed with an oppressive blanket of heat that you could easily slice with a blunt knife. But it doesn't take long for the road to transform itself into a bustling, thriving, busy street market where canny Bangkokians ply their wares to the young and the beautiful of the far off West. Everything but sex is for sale in Khaosan road, and even that can be found if you know where to look.

So they say.

Bootleg CDs cost little more than a dollar a throw, DVDs twice that much, clothes by Armani, Kashoggi, Diesel, all fakes, are available for the price of a few paltry cents. Sure the quality isn't really there, but if you are rich enough to afford Kashoggi then you wouldn't be seen dead wearing it twice or even wearing it once. This is the street for the modern young, or to be more accurate, the modern young rich. They roam the road during the day, lingering over the silver and the gems, the clothes at 50c a shirt or sarong. Gaudy 'Nemo' hats, vast butane lighters the size of a book, some shaped like penises, garish maps of Thailand, Laos, Burma and Cambodia and velvet gold-stencilled pictures of elephants and fat Buddhas all hawked by hopeful vendors, just like the day, in a restless churn of endless, grinding monotony.

And heatbreakingly sweet small children, surely no more that five or six offer you tissues or shoe shines or stangled stemmed roses. Even a single male observer like me gets offered a rose at night by a wide-eyed child sucking on a pop-filled plastic bag, not really unerstanding that roses are for lovers, and not for a wandering no-one with nothing but memories of a life time of lone-wolf existence. Mountain hill women, possibly Karen, wander tinily, weaving between six foot tall nordic giants, trying to sell their dainty leather and silver bracelets, necklaces and anklets. And everywhere the pounding of techno, rap, house and throb - a music that I have no idea actually is exactly, but it's so, well, throb. More, slowly walking hawkers,  sell wind up colourful swooping kites-birds, helium balloons on strings pulled taut as long as the Mekong, and everywhere the angry chattering of the belching and annoying tuk-tuks as they belch for business from unwary visitors along the milling throng of the road.

Khaosan Road is the place for all the prettty young things, stopping off for a night or two to stock up on music and clothes before heading off to the pristine, white sanded beaches of south and south central Thai kingdom. And oddly enough they all look the same. They seem to arive prepared for the part; loose shirts, fisherman pants, designer vests, leather bracelets and necklaces. Every person has a henna tattoo, hair extensions, head bands, anklets and toe rings. They all look as though they've seen 'the beach', for they seem disinclined to reading, and they are all seemingly blissfully unaware that they all have adopted a uniform that can only be collectively termed as 'beachniks'.

It would be fair to say that there are so many fashion victims wandering Khaosan Road that a state of emergency could be decalared and the Red Cross wouldn't bat an eyelid in sending out emergency parcels of ordinary jeans and Tshirts. The victims are all invariably young, flat stomached, pretty,confident and totally disinterested in anyone other than themselves. Such are the vainglorious years of youth. They mutter darkly about the never shifting, stiflingly humid heat, the horrible Western food (they don't do 'foreign') and shrilly haggle over a few scant pence, with obvious feigned contempt for counterfeit goods and their sellers that they could only dream of owning back home. They never see the hunger in the eyes of those that they wish to thrust a bargain upon, the long drawn hours and cramped crowded coridoors that they virtually live in, in an endeavour to earn a crust, sleeping beneath their counters, wishing that they too could live with such effortless breezing ease as the pretty young Western things that drive such hard bargains with the merchants livelihoods.

The young, the spoilt, the rich and the beautiful brats that haunt the stalls surrounding KhaoSan road.

Perhaps, once upon a long time, I too was like they.

Across the road from where I sit watching the live long day, sketching my words, watching the world move beyond me while I like a vulture brood over my prey, I spot across the road, transexuals or transvestites, ladyboys as they are called here, as they prance and preen, astonishingly beautiful and sensual, moving with the subtlety of a bomb, with their exaggerated feminine movements, the drama of the hair toss and hips swaying like a warped pendulum, as they pout and smile and coo with false coyness at fascinated passer bys'

They are always looking at themselves in their small hand mirrors, adjusting their tight fitting clothes to sexual perfection, as they flirt outrageously with anyone that pases. Perhaps it's unsurprising that so many men, young and old, stop with a lingering look, their heads turned at this impossible, desirable, display of overt feminine sexuality strutting before them and seemingly available. Some men leave with these exotic creatures, one wonders if they know, or are about to find out, or even if they care. The day ticks on, and from my observation post the day wanes and shifts towards night.

Sex is used everywhere to lure people in for somethiong as astonishingly simple and uncluttered as a beer. Girls with adolescent bodies clad in school uniforms or gymslips, slip their arms through hungry males to entice them inside. Sex isn't realy on the menu on Khaosan road, but young Thai women discovered long ago that the promise of sex sells well before the marketeers latched onto its primal power.

Khaosan Road is like Ibiza or the Greek Islands of Europe, filled with the young, beautiful, sex obsessed gap years, but curiously without the overt drunkness, vomit strewn streets and arse revealing lewdness that has ruined the geography of the many beautiful Southern Mediterranean destinations. Every other bar shows poor quality latest release bootlegged DVDs most of the night or day, so if you missed the latest blockbuster, this is the place to catch it on scrawny grained poor quality reproductions, day or night for Khaosan Road never really closes. There are nightclubs aplenty, yet curiously, not all have dancing licences, the authoritarian government has yet to be convinced that relaxing dancing licences won't send the entire country into a mad downward spiral of immorality.

And just as in most authoritarian countries I have travelled through, everyone ignores the diktats anyway. People pretty much tend to do what they want whatever the face of government. I remember in Lima, Peru, going to a restaurant on their general election day. Drinking is banned on this day, to make sure that people don't get too drunk to turn up at the polling booths. So instead, they all go to bars and hide their drinks under the table. I actually drank a whole bottle of a remarkably good Chilean Merlot at the restaurant, interweaving a forkful of food with a duck under the table cloth to wash it down. It added a whole new slant to the phrase 'drinking oneself under the table'. Yes I know that's worth a groan. There are of course noteable exceptions where such stringent laws are ruthlessly enforced. But not in Peru, and not back here in on Khaosan Road.

The slipping dusk has now become a full throated night. I'm happy and content, I've eaten and drunk well, bumped into a few transitory conversations, and watched with wonder the long narrow beach where Western waves meet Eastern shores. Next to me are three middle aged lads, a bit worse for wear.

One I can hear with that awful slurring drunken drawl, any minute now you know he's going to tell his two companions that 'they're hish beshthest matesh int the whole fuckin' world', along with the strewn empty bottles of spirits scattered across the table. I ignore them and turn back to the fruit sellers and noodle fryers and the hubub beneath the flickering neon and watch with ease as the throng shifts slowly through the barely cooler night that followed day.

Suddenly there's the sound of breaking glass.

Snapped out of my reverie, I suddenly see, among the raised angry voices, that the slurring drunk on the table next to me is now standing, waving a jagged broken glass knife, threatening his companions his strange Scottish brogue. Then there is that silence of sure doom, where everything fades but that moment in time. His companions tried to stop him but he just waved the glass at them with slashing movements, and they backed off. Then with a couple of swift motions he suddenly slit his own throat.

He staggered forward, blood spilling everywhere, fell off the pavement and fell forward like a sack of stone, his head hitting the road with a sickening crack.

Then he was still.

Another day in paradise, along the Khaosan Road.

yechydda,