Bangkok's bullet-dodging blogger Florian Witulski

Citizen journalist Florian Witulski has become something of a legend among Bangkok's Twitter and media crowd. His reporting of the Bangkok crisis in May has been fearless, some would even say reckless, as he constantly put himself in the thickest areas of action, reporting it all on his blog, Vaitor.com.

But before we get into his present feats, let's flash back to a scene last year.

Florian says he should’ve known that something was wrong when the sounds of the protests got louder and louder. The young German had been trying to avoid the anti-government crowd, as he was only there to cover the underground art movement.

Instead he found his car surrounded, as the cab driver took the wrong route, driving him directly into the protest. Looking out at the scene before him, Florian figured that, seeing as he was there, he might as well snap a few pictures.

But this wasn’t Bangkok, it was Tehran. Almost immediately after he took the photos, Florian says the Iranian secret police smashed in the windows of the cab, put a cloth sack over his head and destroyed his camera. He was put in a Secret Police holding facility where he was questioned every hour for two days, he says, affording him little time for sleep or anything else.

Oddly they let him keep his iPhone, which they thought was an MP3 player, and he managed to snap a picture of the holding cell. Florian says they probably thought he was a spy, and seemed to confuse some sketches in his notebook -- of the community centre where he works in Laos -- with those of a nuclear power plant.

Once the situation was resolved, with him denying everything and laughing at the absurdity of his community centre being mistaken for a nuclear power plant, he was released from jail. Asked if he was scared, he says, “A little on the first day. I thought I would spend forever in the jail.”

After that frightening brush with the Iranian secret police, Florian decided a vacation was in order. In Afghanistan. Through a fixer, Florian says he fell in with local tribal leaders who were fighting the Taliban-led insurgency with NATO forces.

Moving forward to today, Florian was on the scene at flashpoints Khok Wua on April 10, Din Daeng on May 17 and went in with the Thai military’s APCs into Rajaprasong on May 19. His videos and firsthand accounts have appeared on France 24, Der Spiegel and CNN’s iReport, just to name a few. And he did it all with a broken arm, the result of getting shot at Khok Wua intersection with a rubber bullet when the violence first broke out.

With a history akin to that of a seasoned war correspondent, it comes as a surprise to some that Florian -- or @Vaitor as he is known to his massive Twitter following -- is still a student and is only 23.

So what makes the young citizen journalist from of a little town outside Hanover, Germany so fearless?

“I am not really, but I am very aware,” he tells CNNGo. “You can be perfectly safe even in a cross fire if you know what is going on.”

Maybe so, but for anyone thinking of emulating Florian’s fearless reporting skills, we don’t recommend it. Indeed something about his devil-may-care attitude and utter disregard for self preservation has turned him into a bit of a local sensation. For instance, his follower number on twitter jumped from 100 to over 5,000 in less than a month, with his followers anxiously waiting for updates as he tracked the action during its worst moments.

So the big question is, of course, why does Florian feel the need to put himself right in the middle of the danger zone? He says that he's basically just "curious and loves journalism and documenting," but admits that he senses he might be "addicted to the adrenaline rush."

Now that the violence has died down, Florian says he plans on resuming his NGO work in Laos (www.green-gathering.com) while also furthering his studies. Then he says he’ll probably study for his master’s degree, as there is a school in Canada offering to send him out in the world for two years to complete a project. If his track record is anything to go on, we wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up in Darfur or Iraq.