Coup d'etat

Beautiful view in Mae Salong

More Beauty!!!

Of course, many amazing temples!!!

 

 

Maybe you have heard that the Kingdom of Thailand has undergone a coup d’etat by the military? It’s not much of a surprise as there has been a lot of political unrest over the last months including the Prime Minister being removed from office a couple of weeks ago. The head of the military has named himself the new PM and things are uncertain. We’re watching things unfold day by day.

For the most part we aren’t affected. The majority of the military activity is in Bangkok and we are far in the north. Even in Bangkok things have been very peaceful. There is a nationwide curfew, 10pm- 5am, but it's no problem for us as we aren’t out and about that late. 7-Elevens are having to close for those hours. I read online that this is an issue as some of them don’t even have locks because they are always open 24-7. In fact since they imposed martial law days ago we have yet to see a single soldier anywhere we have been .

We have been watching things online and wonder if/when social media will go down. So far no problems with FB or Twitter. We follow a great Twitter feed but anticipate that it might disappear at any time.  I totally recommend it- not sure when this guy sleeps. Lots of links to great news info.

https://twitter.com/RichardBarrow

Thai TV stations have been taken over by the military and we see this message on the Thai channels.

 

A little fuzzy but you get the idea...

 

We can’t find CNN or the BBC or any other English news  on TV- at least in this place. The last town we were in had Al Jazeera but not here. Occasionally there will be televised messages from the military but we of course can’t understand them. All of our news comes from Richard Barrow and online news sources. Hoping the internet holds out so we can continue to get info. We also have a couple of expat friends who  live here who are updating us. We did have a problem calling home this evening. We tried to call Mike's mom and got a message on our mobile that said we could only make emergency calls. We’ve had this problem before when calling from remote areas so are not sure if it has to do with the coup or not.

The military has promised to assure the safety of foreigners and foreign embassies and all flights in and out of the country are on time as scheduled. The curfew is lifted for people travelling to and from airports. Our plan is to continue to travel here in the north and fly to Bangkok on the 29^th and onto Bali on the 30^th. We don’t plan to go anywhere near the city  (the airport is far from the city.) We couldn’t change our flights and like I said travel is happening without any problems. Also we feel very safe. We haven’t had a moment of feeling uncomfortable.

From Chiang Mai we traveled to Chiang Dao and onto Mae Salong. They are both beautiful quiet villages in the north.  In Chiang Dao we stayed at this amazing place with world class Thai and Western cuisine. Did some biking, trekking, caving and lots of eating and drinking. Mae Salong is known for its tea and coffee plantations and trekking to villages with hill tribes. It also has been settled by people from the Yunnan region of China so the street signs are in Chinese as well as Thai and the food and culture is heavily influenced by the Chinese.

So we’ll stay one more day here in Mae Salong and make our way over to Chiang Rai. We won’t take any silly chances. We’re still having fun!!  We’ll take care of each other and stay safe.

We’ll update soon.

Lots of love!!!  XOXO