Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

Sorry for the dramatics. It’s only worse case for my Blog. Thailand is still intact and holding. Well if you have been following closely to the updates that I had put up on the Military Coup here in Thailand, you know it was pretty exciting around here for a couple days. Things have pretty much calmed down for the moment. If you were really watching closely, before the servers went down, you saw that I even spent a day out at Governement House, where all the tanks and soldiers are, taking pictures of the latest tourist attraction in Bangkok, Tank Row. Unfortunately, as with Murphy’s Law, the last few blogs have been lost forever. The servers at Bootsnall crashed a couple days ago and they lost all the entries that I’ve done all the way back to August 17th. The worst part for me is that since August 17th, I’ve filled in entries that have been missing from about June 15th to August 16th. Hundreds of hours of entries were lost. Fortunately, with the help of Google cache, Yahoo cache and Chris at Bootsnall, I have been able to reassemble most of what was there before their server blowup except for the real time war correspondent entries from the last few days here in Bangkok. That I’m really upset about that because the emotion, sense of urgency, the unknown… was all captured in the entries that came after the coup in near real time. I’m heading out of the country in a few hours and most likely won’t have much time to blog in Lao. Don’t know what the internet connections are like up there. I just know that ATMs are scarce.

I was woken up by a text message from the wife of an AP reporter that tanks were rolling down the street and a state of martial law had been declared in Bangkok. This is a great picture! If u blow it up, you can clearly see a Tuk Tuk speeding past the tank. These guys are fearless in normal traffic, but it seems they don’t even care if there is a tank in their way.

I got up to watch BBC World report with Tanks rolling down the street only a few city blocks away from where I’m staying. Shortly thereafter, the TV screen went blank and a message came on the screen that said due to Sun Spots, coverage may be temporarily disrupted. Pretty funny. It’s been an hour and nothing has come back on yet. Now they’ve blocked all the “Farang” satellite stations, not just the BBC. The Thai stations all have the same guy on talking about something in Thai. I wish I could understand what the hell he is saying. Now they’re broadcasting file footage of the King and playing patriotic songs from the last military coup 15 years ago.

They haven’t blocked internet access yet, so I’m still up to date on what’s going on. But I’m sure as hell not sticking my head outside to see what’s going on. I look too Thai for that sort of thing. There was an eyewitness that said, “We saw a group of blokes bundling a cameraman and another chap into a van. We are taking photos, but not out in the open.” Probably not a good idea to go out and get some shots for my blog. May we live in Interesting times, eh???

This may sound a bit selfish, but I’m almost out of Thai Baht so I hope the ATMs still work. But on the bright side, this kinda news should really crash the value of the Thai Baht even worse than the US Dollar has crashed in the past year. If I can find an ATM that works, I should get a pretty good exchange rate tomorrow. I just looked on Yahoo, the Baht is trading down 1.5 percent already in the States and should really crash when the Asian markets open in the morning. I just may get the prices I remember from Thailand 13 years ago if it crashes the economy tomorrow. More to come as news develops… as long as they don’t cut my internet access

Well… it looks like the coup has been a success as of 2am local time. Martial law has been declared and they’ve occupied the offices of the PM, who now all of a sudden is not sure if he’s coming back or not. At least he has a few properties in the UK that he bought from ill gotten gains while in office.

This is amazing! I just looked up martial law on wikipedia and they’ve already updated their site to include today’s coup that happened less than 3 hours ago. Martial_law#Thailand

Well… I’ve just been outside with the break of day and it seems fine. Shops are opening and busses are running. Since I’ve never been awake at this time before, I have nothing to compare it to, but my friend says that it’s VERY quiet compared to a normal morning in Bangkok. But there is no panic or even a sense of urgency in any of the locals. For the first time since I arrived in Thailand, I took my passport out with me though just incase there were checkpoints.