Eyewitness to injured at Bangkok protests

From the perspective of an ambulance rallying point at Phrapinklao Bridge in Bangkok, it appears that the police got the worst of this evening's confrontation with Red Shirt protesters. I saw approximately 60 people loaded into ambulance boats to be ferried to hospitals, and the injured police outnumbered civilians about 2:1. A few of the injuries appeared quite significant. Earlier in the evening, crowds on the bridge had unguarded access to several military vehicles on the bridge and vandalized them. One American couple I talked to said they saw protesters near Khao San Road throwing "molotov cocktails" and firing guns at the police.

First, these caveats: I don't speak the language, I don't know the ground, I talked to almost no one, and I tried to honor the spirit of my promise to my family to stay clear of the protests by keeping some distance when the action came to me. My understanding of what I saw is necessarily very limited, and the broader pictured painted by the professional media is already different from what I observed in one spot.

I didn't get close enough to get very good pix in the dark. I have some video but won't be able to upload it until I'm at a better computer set up.

At about 5 p.m. Saturday, I walked out on to Phrapinklao Bridge to see if I could observe the protests in the distance down Phrapinklao Road, which was closed to four-wheel traffic. (Motorbikes and tuk-tuks seem to be able to go into barricaded streets.) About that time, some protesters were beginning to cross on foot toward the rallies. About 6 military vehicles -- buses, jeeps and trucks -- were left unattended on the bridge, apparently by police or soldiers who had walked into the city earlier. Navy boats, some with cannons, were patrolling below the bridge, and a military helicopter flying over the protest area occasionally came near. The pedestrian traffic began to accumulate to jeer the boats and helicopter and then began to vandalize the vehicles parked there -- tires flattened, wires ripped out from under the hood and water poured into the oil reservoir. Children were playing in the driver's seats of the buses. Later in the evening I saw one of the buses on fire.

At about 7 p.m., ambulances, usually a pickup truck with about 4 medics riding in back, began rallying in the street underneath the bridge, heading toward the protest sites and returning with the injured to carry them to ambulance boats waiting at the pier underneath the bridge. About 5 boats were queued up in the water at a given time.

Police or soldiers in riot gear were the significant majority of who I saw brought in. Many limped to the pier under their own steam, their injuries not apparent, presumably affected by tear gas. All the police I saw had riot gear -- usually still wearing shin guards and shoulder guards. I saw two elderly men short of breath, which I also assumed was from tear gas. Many other injured were carried on stretchers. Some were quite bloodied up. I saw one civilian being given chest compressions. Two civilians were laid down on the cement to be bandaged instead of being taken directly to the boats, and their hair was soaked in blood. One police or soldier apparently had a broken leg that needed to be splinted before he was moved.

For about one hour, I counted about one arrival every 3-4 minutes. Beginning about 8 p.m. and for about 30 minutes, the arrivals started to pour in more frequently. There were usually more than 2 ambulances on the scene at a time, and it was quite chaotic getting the injured to the boats. Sometimes, a tuk-tuk or hired motorbike would arrive with passengers who were apparently asking after the wounded and then running down to the pier. About 8:30, the ambulances on the scene began to leave without unloading their injured and other ambulances raced by without stopping, presumably to another rally point or hospital.

It began to quiet down under Phrapinklao Bridge at that point. In places the pavement was stained with blood and littered with rubber gloves and bandages. Piles of shields, batons and other riot gear were left behind.

As of 10:30 I can still hear an occasional siren on Phra Athit Road.

I never heard any explosions or gunfire from where I was.

I also saw signs of violence earlier in the day. In a taxi on the way to Phra Athit Road ffrom the northern part of the city at about 3 p.m., the taxi got stuck in a traffic jam near the western end of Si Ayuthaya Road, which was blocked to four-wheel traffic. As I walked a few blocks south through the jam, I couldn't see the protests in the distance. An ambulance became stuck in the traffic near there, and while it was stuck, a motorbike driver came up Si Ayuthaya with a passenger holding a bloody bandage to his head. When a medic jumped out of the ambulance to help him in, I could see that his shirt was already bloodied from a previous case.

During that time, some local people were standing around on the sidewalk watching in the direction of the protests and listening to handheld radios, looking more concerned than they had earlier in the day and yesterday. But for the most part, the rest of the city has seemed remarkably unaffected by the protests in their midst. I've had 3 different taxi drivers seem genuinely surprised after a month of protests to find themselves stuck in traffic. Street markets and other commerce are carrying on like normal, even quite near the protests. Whenever a few soldiers are seen waiting around, nobody pays any attention to them. Tonight, just beyond the line of ambulance boats and navy boats, regular dinner cruise boats continued passing back and and forth. Some TVs and radios in public places are tuned to the news coverage, but not all.

Over the past couple weeks in the north and even in Laos, I frequently saw people gathered around televisions in bus stations and cafes to watch "red shirt TV," the channel broadcasting the protesters speeches. That's the same channel that the government forced off the air two days ago and again yesterday after the protesters briefly took control of the TV station and had it back on the air.

-Robert

Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk

You know that weird problem when you meet your close friend's other close friend for the first time and you get off with the wrong foot with each other and it never really gets sorted out but hardens into real animosity? They're probably perfectly nice, and it's probably just the result of a simple misunderstanding. But you can't help it. You just don't like that person very much, and you have to try hard to get along civilly with them when circumstances force you together. And they probably think the same about you.

That's me and Ayutthaya. I think Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk.

Even a state of emergency beats hanging around there. I caught the first minibus out this morning to Bangkok.

-Robert

Khao Yai National Park

The pair of shoes I brought that were supposed to last the whole trip and serve for town and trail are now the color of leech guts. I think I'll do some shopping when I get to Bangkok.

I left the weird little camp in Nong Khai on Monday morning not sure where I was going. I had a couple destinations to the south in mind and headed for the bus station armed with too little information and hoping for the best. I found a bus to Pak Chong, the jump-off point for Khao Yai National Park and grabbed that. Unfortunately, it was a local, second-class bus and took 10 uncomfortable hours. Plus the porter put me off in the wrong town a little north of Pak Chong. For awhile I had no idea where I was. I spent another hour wearing my backpack on the back of a motorbike at highway speeds before I got to the guest house.

I have to say, for any other travelers headed this way, I second the recommendation of the two guest houses mentioned by Lonely Planet here -- at least on the grounds of friendliness and helpfulness. The place I landed at didn't have enough guests for a tour the next day, and very generously steered me to the next hotel, even though it lowered their chances of eventually getting up enough for a tour. The owner also gave me a lift to the train station this morning.

The day-long trek in the park was incredible. It was a slow, quiet hike in the morning through jungle and hilltop grasslands, mostly on the look out for birds. Our guide was a genius at setting up his telescope in a hurry to give us a look, and he had a knack for working the controls on strange cameras to get pix through the telescope. We spotted long-tailed broadbills, great hornbills and wreathed hornbills (which make a tremenoundous whooshing sound when they're flapping their wings), macaques, a family of white-handed gibbons and tons of butterflys. I spotted one insect that our guide had never seen before, so I'm going to pretend I discovered it until I learn otherwise. I had a kind of pincers on the tail that grabbed at a stick when we prodded it. We played with a cottony-looking kind of caterpillar that can jump from its perch and float off in the wind.

And we saw leeches. So many that our guide was kind of freaking out. I had more of them on my shoes and ankles than I could count sometimes, and in places the ground was so thick with them it looked like beard stubble. (They stand on one end and wave the other end in the air looking for something to jump on.) I foolishly wore black pants, so I couldn't tell if they were getting above my leech socks or not. We got out the industrial strength DEET that I was carrying and did an experiment and determined that it helped, and I emptied my precious supply sharing it with the pair of Swedes I was with. They were built like Olympians and perfect in every other way, so I doubt leeches would bite them anyway.

The leech socks seemed kind of besides the point when we went looking for crocodiles. We spotted one, but only the bottom half of it. The other 5 feet were in the shade where we couldn't see it from our distance. We also spotted baby and adult monitor lizards, which looked tough enough to bully the crocodiles, and Indonesian water dragons.

After lunch we had a long rest at a gorgeous waterfall. Not safe for swimming, unfortunately. Then the rest of the day and early evening was spent driving around looking for wild elephants. They are common enough in the park that sightings are frequent, but we didn't have any luck. We did see guar, sambar deer and barking deer and more birds and primates.

It's a gorgeous park and was a privilege to see it. I would love to get deeper into it on an extended stay. I missed seeing the nightly exit of masses of pink-lipped bats, which would be in the tour on a second day.

My train leaves the tiny Pak Chong station for Ayattuya in a few minutes, and that should be my last major stop before a few days in Bangkok and flying back to Saigon.

-Robert

Vientiane and crossing the border

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I couldn't connect with Vientiane. I was there from late on a Friday to early on Sunday, and the whole time the place seemed deserted and lifeless to me, like the financial district of an American city on a Sunday. Maybe that's how the downtown is, and there's probably a little more hop to the place out past the circle of monuments in more residential districts. But it seemed strange to me that there was almost no street life along the riverfront. There was no night market to speak of. This morning at breakfast, across from the cultural hall, I counted minutes going by without a single vehicle passing. This is a totally unfair way to judge a community, I know. It just reminds me of how hard it is to really learn anything about the places we visit without having a local guide to help us connect.

I decided to cut the visit short, but I did find enough to keep me busy for a full day. Haw Pha Raew, a former temple now used as a tiny museum of religious relics, was interesting. Across the street Wat Sisaket was especially beatiful. When I nodded hello to a monk there, he wanted to chat for awhile to practice his English and get my email and had his friend take his picture with me. They were visiting from a town in the south, taking in the city sights themselves. (Monks go on vacation, too, I guess. In Luang Prabang, I felt bad about getting up early to mix with the famously obnoxious tourists taking pictures of the famously picturesque morning march by the local monks to beg for alms, until I saw another monk -- presumably visiting from out of town -- taking pictures himself.) I explored the gifts shops and picked out a few things that can survive the backpack. I stopped into a well-known silk shop -- Carol Kennedy Designs -- and talked with the shop clerk for awhile. She tells me Carol is from Connecticut, too. I went out to the suburbs Wat Sok Pa Louang for some more meditation practice. I stumbled across a nice little Japanese restaurant and ate very well there. I loved most of the hot Lao coffee I had, by the way. The iced coffee, not so much. The Vietnamese still lead in that category.

This morning I hired a tuk-tuk to take me to the Friendship Bridge, 20 km out of town, and I wasn't sure we would make it. It seemed slow and a little sick sounding from the start, and we did break down about 10 minutes into it. I sat under the canopy while the driver disassembled some of the guts and got it going again. It's about 45-minutes by ailing tuk-tuk, probably 20 minutes in any other vehicle. I didn't see any other westerners at the border crossing, and I did a lot of wandering around in confusion, once walking through a checkpoint without getting checked.

I'm at a rustic traveler's camp in Nong Khai, Thailand for now, pretty and quiet (in a small-town way, not in an abandoned-capital way, like Vientiane.) Pushing on south tomorrow.

-Robert