Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (25 page)
Read Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville Online
Authors: Peter Jaggs
I immediately felt my spirits drop again.
“I couldn’t find her, Ron,” I admitted sadly.
“Never mind all that!” he said, waving a bony hand dismissively. “Just tell me what happened—from start to finish!”
I sat down on the dust-sheeted sofa and told Ron everything. I told him how I had searched every bar on Victory Hill and downtown, and about all the people I had met along the way. I told him about my conversations with La Requin and the wandering monk, and Narith the school-teaching motodop driver. I told him about my encounters with Spiky the lesbian, Rath the beggar-boy and Jorani and all the other lovely young girls who sold their wares on the beaches.
I told Ron about my nights with Kanya the virgin, Kung the beautiful Vietnamese hooker and Khwan the scammer. I described my visits to Blue Mountain, Phum Thmei and the Flea Dome, and recounted the episode with May and the fake gold necklace. I related the stories of the incredible football match, the capture of the giant barracuda and the night I had become lost in the dark wood near the casino. Ron’s eyes sparkled as I told him about the day I had fallen foul of ‘The Butcher,’ and the tale of my embarrassing escapade with the stone crocodile I’d stumbled into, made him laugh out loud.
As I spoke, I realised for the first time what a fantastic adventure I had lived through. I had got drunk with French gangsters and befriended a school-girl-bargirl as well as a mangy dog and a lizard. I has visited a casino for the first time in my life and become instantly poor after I had thrown six hundred bucks down the drain-hole of a vermin-infested guesthouse. I had laughed at The Professor’s mad antics, and even shed a tear at the sad tale of poor old Mrs. Krom.
What a month! If only I could have located Psorng-Preng.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t find her, mate,” I finished.
Ron slapped his bony knee, threw back his head and his booming laugh echoed through the almost empty room. He laughed so hard I thought he would never stop. When he had finally finished, he had tears of laughter coursing down his grizzled cheeks and he was gasping for breath. I looked at the old sailor in astonishment and wondered if he had taken leave of his senses.
“Wait here a minute, Joe,” he said, and turned his wheelchair around and left the room.
When Ron returned I was surprised when he handed me a Cambodian-English dictionary. The small book was open and a word and its meaning had been picked out with a red marker pen. The word the old man had drawn the line through was very familiar indeed.
Psorng-Preng.
Adventure
.
Not understanding at first, I looked up at the old man again quizzically, who immediately went into a fresh fit of guffaws. At last the penny dropped—and with it my jaw—because I finally realized how the old man had sent me on a complete wild goose chase.
Of course I hadn’t been able to find the girl he had sent me to look for—she didn’t even bloody exist.
“By Christ, Joe, you’re as slow as a sackful of tortoises!” Ron yelled in delight. “That photograph was taken in the Sailor bar in Pattaya five years ago! I can’t even remember the girl’s name now, and the list on the back was nothing more than a bunch of places in Sihanoukville where I knew you were certain to have a great time!”
The old seafarer’s booming laugh filled the apartment once again, and this time I laughed along with him.
When Ron had stopped chortling for long enough to be able to talk, he told me how when he first met me he had recognized the feelings of boredom and lassitude I was experiencing and decided to put a bit of lead back in my pencil, as he put it. Knowing I would never accept a financial reward for my reluctant honesty, he had concocted his magnificent cock-and-bull story about Psorng-Preng and repaid me with a trip to Sihanoukville instead.
“And you found her, Joe!” he shouted in excitement, jerking about in his wheelchair so much he almost fell out onto the floor. “I knew you had it in you! You found exactly what I sent you to Sihanoukville for, boy! Psorng-Preng!
Adventure!”
As quickly as he had become animated, the old man suddenly slumped back in his wheelchair and went silent. For several long seconds, he gazed at the blank, grey outlines on the white wall where the piece of driftwood with the painting of the splendidly-coloured steamship and the photograph of handsome young Ron with his two shipmates and their pretty Filipina girls had been. Without the pictures, the wall looked stark and empty.
“And that my friend, is what it’s all about,” Ron finished quietly, and wiped a last tear caused by his recent laughter away from the corner of his eye.
I had fallen for the old sailor’s charitable scam like an anchor from a ship. Psorng-Preng.
Adventure
. Just about the only Cambodian name I had come across that I hadn’t checked out the meaning of. The key to the mission Ron had sent me on had been written on the back of the photograph that I had carried around with me for the whole of the bloody trip.
That night, I pushed Ron’s wheelchair around most of the gogo bars in Walking Street. To celebrate the success of my mission we did the remaining two hundred bucks he had given me on beer, gins and tonic and ladies’ drinks. Ron could drink like a fish. The old man appeared to stay astonishingly sober long after I had become drunk enough to throw up twice in the toilet of the Happy-A-Gogo bar. I also managed to accidently spill my drink over the hardest of a gang of wide-boys from the Dog’s Bollocks bar who were out on the town, and disgraced myself further by slapping a passing table-dancer’s buttocks who turned out not be be a gogo girl at all, but some Russian bodybuilder’s scantily-clad wife. Luckily for me, after I apologised, everyone involved saw the funny side of things. It’s amazing what you can get away with when you are pushing an old guy in a wheelchair around. Maybe I should take one with me everywhere.
At some time during the proceedings the old sailor even found the time and energy to disappear upstairs for a short-time in the Far East Gogo bar. It took four of the girls to lift him out of his wheelchair and carry him up the steps, and they were all up there for a bloody long time.
All through this memorable night Ron questioned me over and over again about the visa run to Sihanoukville he had sent me on. He wanted to know every detail and told me to be sure I didn’t forget a thing. Finally, after much drunken deliberation, we came to the conclusion that you don’t have to be Jack Sparrow, Andy McNab or Special Agent 007 to experience action and excitement after all. We both agreed that my hunt in Sihanoukville for Psorng-Preng had been an adventure in the truest sense of the word.
If you bought this book expecting an SAS style, gun-toting, car-chasing, door-breaking, swashbuckling blockbuster, I make no apologies whatsoever. For this is a book about the kind of adventures any Joe Bucket who gets off his arse can have in Asia, and that is why I wanted to tell you about them.
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Peter Jaggs is from Essex in England and has spent the best part of the past twenty five years in Thailand since he was in his early twenties and has visited every province in the country.
Peter has always believed that real work is a necessary evil and should only be undertaken when funds are required for the extended bouts of bar-hopping, fishing and hanging out on beaches he much prefers.
However, he does enjoy writing about his beloved second home and has had articles, stories and poems published in several newspapers and magazines.
Although Peter loves women—especially of the Thai variety—he is not married because he feels that a wife would be as much of a hindrance to his freedom and irresponsible lifestyle as a regular job. Besides this, no female on God’s earth could put up with him for any length of time apart from his mother.
Peter is currently based between Devon, England and Pattaya City and spends an equal amount of time in each of his two homes with frequent excursions to other favourite venues in Asia.
Peter also wrote the first ever book in the English language published on freshwater fishing in Thailand and his best selling book
‘Blundering around Isaan’
has recently been translated into German.
His first work, ‘
From Beggar to Butterfly’
was described by the Bangkok Post as one of the best books on Pattaya written.
*****
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