People’s Alliance for Democracy protestors blockading airports at Krabi, Phuket and Hat Yai, closing roads, stopping trains, fresh produce become scarce in Bangkok, and hour after hour of Thai news discussing nothing else on TV.

Shocking pictures of stockpiles of Kraton (not sure how you spell it, basically a plant that gives a high similar to amphetamines), guns and ammo confiscated by the police, and the army sitting cooling their heals.

It’s only a matter of time before the government decides it is going to have to lose face over this, and order in the troops. Last time the army hit the streets in the name of politics they pulled off a bloodless coup, I can’t see them resolving this current mess without pulling the trigger.

We were planning a three week vacation, we have cancelled these plans now, we don’t want to risk getting caught up in anything on our travels.

So it was visa run time again today, actually this was a bad one, not because it was difficult but because it was the last one I can get away with on my Current non-immigrant B visa from the UK. This means that I have to return to the UK no later than the 1st of September to get a new one. It will have been 15 months since I was last in the UK, and I am not sure I am looking forward too it. Certainly I could do without the cost of the trip.

Anyway, this was my first visa run to Cambodia, and it was easy, it took me 3 hours. I jumped on my motorcycle and rode 65km to the Cambodian border at Chong Chom, spent 30 minutes crossing over and back and then came home to Surin, so much easier than the old Burma visa runs I had to do while I was living on Koh Phangan!

I just found these pictures on my mobile phone, I had forgotten I had taken them, they are from our Thailand tour earlier this year. The picture of Leon on the left, was taken somewhere in the mountains on the way to Khon Khaen, we had just driven through a hill tribe village, and stopped to buy him that rather colourful hat he is wearing! The big orange thing behind him is Nuth’s head, ok Nuth’s scarf, not here head.

This part of the journey was just crazy, steep hills and our little sarleng having to tackle them in first gear, we started a short 50km run across the mountains with a full tank of gasoline, when we got to the other side, we were running on fumes, and it had taken us something like four hours to do this one small stretch. I guess once we got to the other side you could  say we had finally reached Isaan, things definitely changed once we had driven down the far side of the mountain, the language for one, they don’t speak Thai in Isaan, they speak a mixture of local dialects.

I also found this picture, it’s a view of the infamous Bridge Over the River Kwai, which was the site of the death railway prisoner camps, back in the war. This is in Kanchanaburi, which is a strange place really, a lot of the visitors are here to see the war cemeteries, where thousands of allied troops are buried, a lot of older people, possibly coming to visit the last resting place of their fathers or grandfathers. The war museum is quite shocking at times, especially some of the photographs and models of the slave camps, really terrible things were done to the prisoners, it’s no wonder not many of them survived. We actually took a trip on a train along the death railway, it’s all very peaceful now, certainly no indication that tens of thousands of people died building it.

I just worked out how to insert a cool map, so here is a map with the location of the town I now live in. The marker sits right on top of my apartment block, you can zoom in to take a look.

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We are about 400km east of Bangkok, right in the middle of one of the largest rice farming areas in South East Asia, very poor though, people starve here every year.