Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (11 page)

As I pulled my jeans on I remembered my first conversation with Narith and how scornful he had been when I told him how
farang
men in Pattaya married the bar-girls in the city, and how the same thing was bound to start happening in Sihanoukville eventually. Now I knew I was right. There certainly had been a time in my life when I might have tried saving Nakry myself.

So now I was going to find out where Psorng-Preng was at last. I walked back outside and sat down next to Narith.

“Well?” I asked him, scarcely able to contain my excitement. “Where is she then?”

My new friend looked at me somewhat apologetically and didn’t seem to know whether to laugh or to be serious.

“She doesn’t know,” he said. “She just thought it was a good way to make sure you went with one of her girls.”

So that was that, then.

Despite our lack of success in finding out the whereabouts of Psorng-Preng, I surprised myself by admitting to Narith that the night had not been a waste of time at all. Now we were speeding away from the Chicken Farm, I realized I had relished every moment of the adventure. Pattaya girls come and go, but I was sure I would never forget the time I had spent with the fragrant flower that blooms at night on my first ever visit to the strange, dimly-lit, ramshackle world of Phum Thmei.

I remember there was a great documentary series on cable TV around about that time. It featured some American bloke who thought he was a bit of a tough guy. He went around trying all the dangerous and dirty jobs in the world and showing how he could make a reasonable stab at every filthy or hazardous form of employment that the producers could dream up. He roughnecked on oil rigs, cleaned sewers, made a three hour climb up an impossibly tall power mast to change a fuse and put down poison for roaches and rats with a pest control company without batting an eyelid.

I would sure like to have seen that guy last a night as a taxi-girl in Phum Thmei.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

I had been on Victory Hill four days now and so far all my attempts to locate Psorng-Preng had been fruitless and I was beginning to feel I was letting old Ron down. If I hadn’t been enjoying myself so much this wouldn’t have mattered but the truth was, since the moment I had arrived at the guesthouse in Koh Kong, I hadn’t had so much fun for years. The experience of hunting for a mysterious girl in a strange, new country I knew nothing of was not turning out to be the ordeal I had expected at all, but had become an eye-opening adventure. For the first time since my late twenties I was thoroughly enjoying the experience of being in an unknown environment where I had no idea where I was going next or what I would see there. Searching the places on the salty old wanderer’s list had given me a purpose in life and after all those comfortable, familiar years in Thailand, I was aware of my own sense of adventure coming to life again and I liked what I was feeling.

However, in the back of my mind I was conscious I was spending the money Ron had given me and there was still no sign of Psorng-Preng. Because I was having such a ball I felt slightly guilty about this and wondered if I shouldn’t be trying a little harder. So, one sunny afternoon I had Narith drive me up and then down the two steep hills along Ekereach Street that led downtown. I asked him to drop me outside a little store near the market and then I was on my own. My intention was to wander around downtown for a while and visit ‘The Strip,’ where the motodop driver told me there were a number of
farang
-owned bars where the elusive girl might possibly have found a job. Narith said he would come back around five-thirty p.m. to pick me up.

After the miniature, fledgling resort of Victory Hill, I was surprised at the size of the downtown area. It was much more established (most of the buildings on The Hill looked like they might blow over in a strong wind) and was a sprawling hotchpotch of wooden and block buildings on a peninsula that was encompassed on three sides by beaches. The crowded, smelly marketplace was a jumble of close-together stalls selling everything imaginable from dried fish, fruit and vegetables to hats, jewelry, clothes and souvenirs. Unlike back on the hill, I found myself tripping over beggars at very nearly every step and some of them were truly heartrending. It was also hot and dirty and I’d soon had enough of the place, so I walked back to Ekereach Street intending to look for ‘The Strip’ Narith had told me about. Once back on the main road I immediately took a wrong turning and ended up making my way towards the Golden Lions Roundabout and in the direction of the beaches by mistake.

Just before the Golden Lions Roundabout there is a small, narrow road lined with ramshackle karaoke bars. Later, Narith told me this is Boray Kamakor Street. The first few establishments in the gently sloping road are fairly substantial but as you continue up the slight incline to the crest of the hill, strangely, the wooden buildings which line one side of the track become smaller and smaller. The structures at the top of the road—which has become a dusty track by now—are little more than tiny shacks. When I first saw the bar signs and beer advertisements in the distance from the end of the road near the roundabout I thought I might have unwittingly stumbled across ‘The Strip’, but on closer inspection it became plain that these places were not owned by foreigners. The place had the definite feel and look of a Chicken Farm about it.

Still, never having been one to walk past a new bar-strip in the past, I was surely not going to stop now so I decided to investigate further. After all, it was just within the bounds of possibility that someone might even know Psorng-Preng here and I was taking my quest seriously now.

Once past the first cluster of slightly larger buildings that were built along the road, all the small, hut-like wooden bars were on the left hand side of the track. On the other side of the road there was a pleasant view over gently sloping, sun-dried fields where a few skinny cattle grazed on the scrubby grassland amongst stunted trees. I thought it might be agreeable to drink a cold beer or two outside one of the little bars and take in the rural scenery under the warmth of the afternoon sun, something it has not been possible to do in Pattaya for many years. The view from most of my previously secluded old haunts around the city these days consists mainly of concrete, chrome and flashing neon lights.

The first of the bars I ventured into was the largest one along the track. It looked to me as if it it probably doubled up as both some kind of knocking shop and a karaoke bar. The inside was dark and dingy and had several wooden tables and chairs placed around the hard-packed dirt floor. I ordered a beer and was surprised when the waitress brought me out a bloody great pitcher of the stuff. Unfortunately, the bar seemed to be striving for quantity rather than quality, because the beer was truly awful. The cloudy liquid was warm and tasted absolutely foul and brought to mind the day when as a little kid, I had wandered far away from home and into a wood. I had felt very thirsty and I pissed into a jam jar I was catching caterpillars in and attempted to drink it. Well, nodody had ever told me you couldn’t drink piss, had they? Some things you never forget and my first mouthful of beer in that Sihanoukville karaoke bar at least brought back a golden memory of my childhood.

Luckily, it seemed the idea was to feed some of the girls present a generous portion of your pitcher of beer. I gathered this because two of the hostesses in the bar had joined me at the table, armed with glasses. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be to keen to give away my ale, but I suppose it is always the exception that proves the rule and I was pleased to be able to off-load a good deal of the disgusting brew on them. The girls were both a bit too young for my liking and also very shy, which didn’t matter very much because neither of them could speak English anyway so we just sat there grinning at each other like the three stooges.

I had realized by now this was not my kind of bar at all and the situation was not helped by three young English wankers who were sitting over in the corner getting legless. They must have noticed my hesitancy with the two young girls because they began shouting detailed instructions pertaining to what I should be doing with them across the room to me. I saw instantly they were all the type of blokes who think being drunk is an excuse for acting like a prat, so in an attempt to mislead them into believing I didn’t speak any English so they would leave me alone, I shouted back the single sentence my memory retained from the three happy years I had spent studying German way back at school. The reason I had learned so little was indisputable; I only put the language down on my option form because everyone knew the teacher was as soft as shit and I’d spent the whole of the subsequent three terms surreptitiously touching up Wanda Banks under the desk next to mine.

“Haben Sie einen Mietwagen?” I yelled happily at the three revellers and gave them a big smile and a wave.

“Stupid Kraut,” one of them mumbled to his mate, shaking his head in disgust. After that they left me to it, although the biggest arsehole amongst them kept shooting his best Marvin Hagler looks at me. I suppose it was just as well that none of the trio could speak German any better than myself, because it was extremely unlikely that any of them would have had a rental car in his possesion.

The lads were all well pissed-up by now and although they were not really looking for trouble Joe Bucket knows when it is time to move on. It wasn’t so much their graphic sexual tuition I objected to so much as every time they took a drink they would shout “Cheers!” across the bar and raise their glasses to me. This meant I was continually forced to swallow a little more of what was definitely the most repulsive beer I have ever tasted in my life. I paid my bill and slipped the two girls a dollar between them which induced a huge pair of smiles and I left the boys to their party. The one who fancied himself as a bit of a tough guy shouted something after me in a less than jocular tone as I walked out the doorway but of course, I’d expected nothing less.

I strolled further along the track. By now, all the bars had assumed the look and proportions of garden potting sheds and looked like they should have had vegetable allotments growing around them. I walked right up to the crest of the hill, simply to see what was there. A tiny bar right at the top of the slope had a small table outside and I also noticed a big foam cooler full of cans of drink swimming in melting ice just inside the doorway. That was a bit more like it, so rather than risk another glass of warm draft piss I asked the Mamasan to bring me over a cold tinny and I sat outside at the rickety table outside and watched the ribby cattle in the field opposite pulling up tufts of coarse grass.

There were only four people in the bar; it was so small there simply wouldn’t have been room for anyone else. In fact, ‘bar’ was really too grand a description for what was just a shed made out of bamboo strips nailed onto a wooden framework with a couple of uninviting, plastic-covered sofas in the dingy interior that looked so dirty they might have come from a rubbish tip. The inside didn’t look much like a place Joe Bucket would want to explore, so I stayed firmly on my wooden seat even when beckoned inside by one of the occupants, a girl of around sixteen. She was on the plump side and wearing a grubby krama wrapped around her waist and although fairly pretty, she didn’t appear to be too clean and she had a slightly crazy look about her face. Another very young girl who looked to be in her early teens had also appeared to take a look at the
farang
. She looked much too young and skinny although surprisingly, the smile she gave me seemed more genuine than that of her older friend. A small boy of around ten years old sat on a wooden box by the doorway looking at me with dead eyes. The Mamasan of the bar was a hard-faced, painted iron butterfly who had probably been attractive a decade or so ago and she waved a garishly manicured hand at her stable invitingly. It was then I realised with a shock that both girls were for sale. I hoped to God the little boy was not.

From my vantage point in the yard outside I could see that the three English lads had left the first bar and were now walking up the hill towards me. From the way they were drunkenly singing football songs and by the T-shirt extolling the virtues of the ‘Nice and Sleazy’ gogo bar that one of them was wearing, I guessed I was not the only Pattaya resident on a visa run in town that day. Halfway up the track two of the revellers dodged into another bar, but Nice and Sleazy man was obviously making his way up to where I was sitting. Never one to bear a grudge, I gave him a cheery wave as he entered the bar (I couldn’t speak English, remember) but he flashed me his best hard man stare and then ignored me completely. That suited me just fine.

Nice and Sleazy man had obviously been to the bar before. The girl in the soiled krama greeted him like a slightly barmy long lost love and the pair of them sat together on the tiny sofa that was just inside the doorway. The girl was an extremely quick worker and she got down to giving him a blow-job right there in the bar. Nice and Sleazy man leaned back drunkenly on the sofa, his hairy legs stretched out in front of him and his shorts and boxers crumpled around his grubby trainers. He had a faded, lop-sided Chelsea tattoo inked into his fat calf. The girl’s head bobbed rhythmically in response to his loud encouragement. I had witnessed far worse behaviour over the years in Soi Six and I recognised the type immediately. He was one of those guys who just love to have an audience.

I concentrated on watching the cattle grazing in the field over the road. The girl really was as fast as I had first suspected and less than a minute later there was a series of loud grunts as Nice and Sleazy man’s lust and money were quickly and obviously spent. He didn’t hang around for a moment, but pulled up his shorts and flung some notes on the table in front of the girl—who was still wiping something away from the side of her mouth—and stalked off down the hill. He was in such a hurry he hadn’t even stopped for a beer.

It wasn’t two minutes later that Nice and Sleazy man’s two mates turned up. The arsehole who had shouted after me as I left the first bar purposefully jogged my table as he walked by in an attempt to knock my beer over. Neither him or his pal looked like much to worry about and I considered punching his already mis-shapen nose, but it was too nice a day to hurt my fist so I decided not to sink to his level. As it turned out, I had the last laugh, anyway.

The girl in the dirty krama—who hadn’t budged an inch from the sofa since Nice and Sleazy man had left—also seemed to know her last customer’s buddies quite well. When they walked through the gateway into the tiny yard where I sat she jumped to her feet and threw her arms around the guy who had knocked against my table.

Considering what the girl had so recently done with Nice and Sleazy man I winced when she treated his friend to a deep, open-mouthed kiss that lasted for several long seconds. During this touching embrace I suspect that several liquid ounces of body fluids were swapped; not all of which were his and hers.

I had seen enough. I paid Iron Butterfly for my beer and left. As I did so, I attempted to slip the young boy sitting by the doorway a dollar. I needn’t have bothered. Iron Butterfly’s sharp eyes saw everything and she had the note off the little lad before I had even walked out of the gateway.

The girl in the krama’s latest sweetheart shouted something at me in a pseudo-Nazi voice about me being a German cocksucker as I walked away down the hill, but as I had previously deliberately misled him on the first part of his accusation and his second misconception was plainly a case of the pot calling the kettle black, I let the matter rest and walked off down the hill, smiling to myself.