Saturday 11 April 2026

Good morning Bangkok. Happy Songkran weekend. It is Saturday and the city is already wet in places: clear skies, 33-38°C (91-100°F), very high UV index all day, light southwesterly winds doing nothing useful. Bangkok AQI is sitting around 87, moderate and steady, a non-event compared to the North where Chiang Mai remains an emergency disaster zone with PM2.5 still deep in unhealthy territory. Markets: SET closed at 1,489.51 on Thursday, up 4.48. Gold at ฿71,850 buy / ฿72,050 sell. USD/THB at ฿30.76-32.29, the baht notably firming. Diesel at approximately ฿36.81 following Thursday's ฿2.14 cut. Maha Songkran opens at Benjakitti Park tonight. S2O starts this afternoon. Here we go.

The Road Accident Prevention and Reduction Centre officially opened yesterday, and the seven-day intensive enforcement period runs from today, April 11, through Friday April 17, under the campaign slogan "Drive safely, slow down, reduce accidents." This is not theater: last year's Songkran enforcement period recorded 253 deaths, 1,538 accidents, and 1,495 injuries across Thailand in seven days. Motorcycles were involved in 84% of those crashes. The deadliest window was 6PM to 9PM, not midnight, not the early hours, the early evening when people are heading out, a few drinks in, confidence up. Bangkok alone recorded 19 deaths last year during the seven-day period, with 10 involving motorcyclists, six of whom were not wearing helmets. This year, authorities have set a target of reducing fatalities, injuries and major accidents by at least 5% from the three-year Songkran average, which sounds modest until you run the numbers and realize it means asking a country of 70 million celebrating simultaneously to be meaningfully safer than it was in each of the previous three years. Daily press briefings will run April 11-16 with a final summary on April 17. The government has also deployed vocational students as volunteers at 150 service points nationwide, now including EV repair capability given the growing number of electric vehicles on Thai roads.

Bottom line: If you are going out tonight for S2O, ICONSIAM, Maha Songkran, or any of the other seventeen simultaneous events happening across Bangkok right now, use the MRT or BTS and leave your bike parked. The 6-9PM window is statistically the most dangerous, which coincides almost exactly with the evening commute to wherever you are going. Police presence is at its highest level of the year, DUI checkpoints are operating around the clock, and Phase 2 traffic enforcement fines are still active on top of all of this. The quickest way to ruin a Songkran weekend is to be on a motorcycle without a helmet after a couple of drinks during peak accident hours. Take a Bolt, take the train, take a tuk-tuk if you have to.

Prime Minister Anutin announced on Thursday at a multi-agency briefing at the Anti-Money Laundering Office a further ฿8.27 billion in seized and frozen assets linked to a transnational scam network, bringing the total confiscated in this case to ฿20.39 billion across 102 assets. The newly frozen tranche included six vehicles, one of which is a Ferrari 296 GTS and five luxury vans, along with bank deposits, loan claim rights, and securities held in trading accounts. The named suspects are a web of Thai, Cambodian, and international figures: Cambodian businessman Yim Leak and his associate Veereenyah Yim, a woman identified as Taengthai, and British-South African businessman and lobbyist Benjamin Mauerberger, also known as Ben Smith, along with his wife Cattaliya Beevor and further associates. They face a serious list of charges including narcotics and human trafficking, public fraud, money laundering, and participation in criminal syndicates. Mauerberger is believed to have played a central role in laundering money for Cambodia-based scam compounds operating across Southeast Asia. An earlier Civil Court order in February authorized the confiscation of over ฿13 billion in assets across four linked cases, and prosecutors have said money trails extend across the region. The government spokesperson confirmed that Anutin has designated cybercrime and money laundering suppression as a formal national agenda, woven into the policy statement delivered to Parliament last week.

Bottom line: The Ben Smith case has been circulating in Thai-language media for months but this week's seizure at this scale, announced by the PM personally at AMLO headquarters with a Ferrari in the background, signals that the new government wants a public win on organized crime and is prepared to move aggressively. For expats, the story matters beyond the spectacle: scam compound networks operating out of Myanmar and Cambodia have direct Bangkok tentacles, and the SEC separately this week escalated enforcement on investment scams driven by social media, which are hitting foreign residents and Thai investors alike. If anyone in your circle is being pitched a "trading opportunity" via LINE, Facebook, or a social media influencer with suspiciously reliable returns, the current environment is a good moment to remind them what ฿20 billion in seized assets looks like.

There is a full-scale Batmobile parked in the middle of this cafe. A black, screen-accurate replica of the Tumbler from the Nolan Batman films, sitting in the centre of a renovated shophouse in the Nang Loeng neighbourhood of Dusit. That is not the gimmick: it is the opening statement of a space that commits completely to its aesthetic and then somehow delivers genuinely excellent matcha on top of it. The interior is a dense, well-curated tribute to 1980s and 1990s pop culture: vintage LG televisions playing old clips, classic arcade machines running retro fighting games, a life-sized Batman bust, tropical wallpaper, framed posters, and enough collected memorabilia to keep you occupied for longer than it takes to drink anything. Every corner photographs without you trying.

The matcha menu is focused and serious in a way the decor deliberately is not. Brown Matcha House uses ceremonial-grade Japanese tea with specific cultivar options: the Samidori (฿155) is nutty and grounding, the Isui is floral and lighter, and the standard house Ceremonial Grade Matcha Latte starts at ฿120. Cold-whisked versions are available for the heat, which today is extremely relevant. Coffee and light snacks round out the menu, and prices start at ฿85 for the most basic options, which is accessible for the quality on offer. It is one of the more genuinely fun rooms in Bangkok right now, the kind of place that reads as ridiculous in description and immediately makes sense in person. With a 4.8 on Google with 64 reviews this place deserves some love.

TIP: Saturday-Monday hours are 10AM-5PM, slightly later opening than weekdays. Parking available in Soi Luk Luang 7. Best on a weekend morning before the afternoon heat peaks. Budget ฿120-180 per drink. Hours: 9:30AM-4PM Tue-Fri, 10AM-5PM Sat-Mon.

11 April 1970: Apollo 13 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bound for the Moon. Two days later, an oxygen tank exploded on the service module, the crew's "Houston, we have a problem" moment, and what followed was one of the most extraordinary improvised rescues in human history. Three astronauts returned safely on April 17 using the lunar module as a lifeboat, navigating by the stars and rationing power in a spacecraft not designed for the trip home. They made it. Fifty-six years later, Thailand has 109 days of oil reserves, nine vessels still waiting on Hormuz passage, and an emergency fund deficit of over ฿50 billion in the oil subsidies account. The parallels are not perfect. But the Apollo 13 lesson, that the most catastrophic situations are often survivable with improvisation, clear communication, and a refusal to accept the obvious outcome, feels reasonably applicable to this country's energy situation right now. Bangkok is still flying. The question is just how creative the navigation needs to get.

See you tomorrow morning, wear a helmet. Drink water. Stay on the train… and if you enjoy the newsletter please click the link down below, your support helps.

— Devon

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