Bewildered tourists in Bangkok feared for their safety or just wondered what was going on Monday, as soldiers just a few streets away opened fire above the heads of rampaging red-shirted protesters.
On the day the Thai capital should have been filled with revellers noisily celebrating Songkran, the biggest national festival, the sprawling city awoke to the crackle of automatic gunfire amid a state of emergency.
It was not exactly the “Land of Smiles” many visitors had expected.
“I’m disappointed. Where’s all the fun? I’ll have to wait until next year,” said Singaporean businessman Matthew Tan, who travels to Bangkok every year for Songkran.
Columns of smoke rose over the capital as the anti-government protesters hurled molotov cocktails, lobbed firecrackers and even drove hijacked buses towards lines of advancing military personnel.
The demonstrators are loyal to ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and have taken to the streets to press for the resignation of current premier Abhisit Vejjajiva, who issued the emergency decree for Bangkok on Sunday.
The chaos forced some of the city’s most glitzy shopping malls to stay closed when normally they would have been heaving with well-off locals and expectant tourists.
Disappointed shoppers arrived at the glass-and-steel Siam Paragon and Central Chidlom malls to find hastily printed paper signs simply saying: “Sorry, today we closed.”
Other malls opened but warned of bag checks for security reasons.
“I was supposed to pick something up but I guess I just have to go back to the hotel and then fly home,” said 43-year-old Filipina Sharon Pangilinan, at Central Chidlom, who was due to fly back to Manila later Monday.
“I guess you can’t see where the situation’s going… it’s pretty scary and I have two little ones with me,” she added.
The Grand Hyatt hotel nearby said ‘a few’ people had decided to check out because of the deteriorating situation on the streets, but some tourists were just baffled by the Thai political crisis.
“We would like to go to the Grand Palace but I don’t know whether we can. We’re just going to walk around the shopping malls and see which places we can visit,” Parisian tourist Marion Gulerama, 23, told AFP.
“We’re not afraid. We know that the fight doesn’t have anything to do with tourists,” she added.
Meanwhile, the traditional Songkran ritual of dousing people with water for the hot season could hardly be seen.
Stalls selling waterguns were open for business but found few buyers, while about a dozen children could be seen spraying water on Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok’s main thoroughfare, which is usually teeming during the festival.
Instead, television footage being beamed into millions of homes showed scenes of real M16 rifles in the hands of soldiers firing minute-long bursts over central Bangkok.
[Thanks: http://travel.asiaone.com]
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