STRANDED Britons were making their way out of Thailand by coach, train and small boats yesterday as political protesters tightened their grip on the main airports with barbed wire and barricades.

Almost all commercial aviation has ceased since anti-government agitators stormed the airports last week, stranding about 100,000 tourists.

Yesterday, masked men wielding slingshots and clubs twice drove back riot police from the approach road to Suvarnabhumi airport, the gateway to Bangkok for British Airways and other international carriers.

Thousands of yellow-clad men, women and children are occupying the terminal. Hundreds more seized the domestic airport at Don Muang, where gunshots injured at least 20 people last Tuesday.

Late last night a grenade thrown into the occupied Bangkok compound of Somchai Wongsawat, the embattled prime minister, injured 46 anti-government protesters.

No foreigners have been harmed in the unrest but the British embassy told travellers yesterday to avoid both airports.

Police say rival Thai factions have used handguns, makeshift explosives and an M-79 grenade launcher in attacks on each other, killing six people and wounding more than 450.

Rumours of a military coup persist in the capital.

A few special flights departed yesterday from a naval air-base at U-Tapao, 90 miles southeast of Bangkok. But there was chaos as 3,000 people waited to use its two x-ray machines and four check-in counters.

About 860,000 Britons visited Thailand last year, most in the peak winter season now crippled by the protests. Officials estimate the cost to the tourism industry at £2.6 billion.

While most tourists stayed in their hotels, many Britons opted to try a variety of adventurous exit routes. Some took trains to the northern border with Laos, crossing the Mekong river to Vientiane, which has a handful of flights out every day. Heading east, others took buses to the Cambodian border and on to Phnom Penh, which has an international airport.

Most went south. “We waited around and for some of us time and money are running short,” said Paul Smithson, from Surrey, who was ready to board a coach to Malaysia. He was joined by a Midlands businessman, who declined to give his name. “I don't like the idea of a long ride but my wife was not very understanding when I called her to say I was stuck for the weekend in Bangkok,” he said.

Britons have been warned not to risk travel through Thailand’s southeast, where a Muslim separatist campaign has claimed 3,000 lives since 2004.

A few travellers took speed-boats and ferries from the west coast 25 miles across the Andaman Sea to the Malaysian holiday island of Langkawi, which has an airport.

As tourists left, there was no solution in sight to the standoff that has brought Thailand’s political feuds to crisis point.

The England rugby league captain Jamie Peacock said he was worried about his wife Faye, who is 31 weeks pregnant and stranded with her mother and the couple’s four-year-old son. “It’s vitally important they try and get her home now,” the Leeds Rhinos star said.

The government declared a state of emergency around the airports but Somchai said he would not use violence. Somchai is the brother-in-law of Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon premier ousted by a coup in 2006 who later bought and sold Manchester City football club.

The protests are organised by the People’s Alliance for Democracy, which claims to be defending the monarchy against an alleged republican plot by Thaksin and his followers.

Video: security nightmare for tourists

Video: Thai PM Wongsawa will not quit

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