Bangkok in the Middle of It

There’s this weird moment when you see a place you know on the news, except it’s not the version you remember. Bangkok in early December 2013 looked like that—the Government House area was tear gas and water cannons and people throwing stones, and somewhere in the same city the sky bars were still open, still full of tourists rotating slowly above the chaos.

I never made it to Thailand that season. The standard travel advice at the time was either it’s fine, go anyway or maybe give it a few weeks. What struck me was how fast the narrative shifted—the same city went from book your holiday now to protest zone in the feed, and both versions were true. The unrest never really stopped the tourist economy, which tells you something about either the scale of the demonstrations or the desperation of the travel industry, probably both.

A drone video of the Government Quarter doesn’t tell you much. It shows you scale and smoke and the architecture of confrontation, but not what it felt like to be there. I think that’s why the footage circulated so much—it looked like something, it looked serious and organized, and it didn’t require you to have an opinion about Thai politics to be unsettled by it. Just footage of a city fighting itself.