A further update on the Thai political troubles

Following on from my Easter post earlier today and my post yesterday, it is with great sadness that I have to report that the political troubles here in Thailand have now gone from very bad to even worse, with the government moving decisively against the anti-government protesters by arresting their leader and declaring a state of emergency in Bangkok just over an hour ago. See this article in Yahoo! for more details.

This is extremely serious, and I would therefore advise any foreigners in Thailand to now stay out of Bangkok for safety reasons. Luckily, my wife Su and I live some distance from the capital, but even so things are getting a bit scary all round now. And, as I said in my previous post, it is actually the Thai New Year tomorrow, which clearly won't be a very happy one now, at least not in the short term anyway.

All this trouble seems to have come very quickly from almost nowhere - just a few weeks ago, there was only a relatively small group of peaceful anti-government protesters in Bangkok, and pretty much everyone here thought that life had more or less gone back to normal. How wrong we all were!

Su and I are heading off out of the city to our home in the family farming village tomorrow morning, where I think we'll stay until things return to something like normal.