Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (18 page)

Singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ at the top of my voice, I splashed around under the tepid shower, enjoying the feeling of not being destitute in a strange, poverty-stricken land. I towelled off briskly, then reached for the tube of toothpaste and the toothbrush I had bought at the little store before checking into the guesthouse the previous night. I squeezed a generous amount from the tube onto my toothbrush and began to vigorously brush my teeth. Instantly, I began choking and gagging furiously.

My tongue and the inside of both cheeks and the back of my throat felt like they were on fire. The taste was so foul I grabbed a bar of soap and took a huge bite out of it in an attempt to get rid of the noxious mixture in my mouth, all the while hawking and spitting and taking huge gulps of unsanitary water from the rusty tap.

“Jesus Christ!” I thought in amazement, marvelling that the Cambodian people really cleaned their teeth with this shit.

I reached for the toothpaste again and took a closer look at the writing and the logo on the tube. A drawing of a grinning monkey smiled back at me.

‘Lotus Blossom Ointment for the Extermination of Head Parasites and Pubic Lice,’ the legend proudly proclaimed, and the monkey leered at me happily.

Still spitting into the basin that had been the cause of my adventure, I thought ruefully how I must now at least possess the cleanest mouth in Sihanoukville.

After I had carefully pushed the pipe back into the disintegrating wall and pulled on my clothes (including my spotless, sweet-smelling socks), I made my way downstairs and paid for my night’s accommodation. I walked out into the sunlit street. There was an old man begging in a doorway by the entrance of the small guesthouse.

“No money for yum yum! No money for yum yum!” he assured me, rubbing his stomach meaningfully and looking at me with old, imploring eyes. I was going to walk straight past the beggar and ignore him as I would normally have done, but then I realised in a flash that should I have not been so lucky, I may well have been joining the poor old fellow.

I fished around in my plastic wallet and handed the amazed old pan-handler a twenty dollar bill. His sunken, toothless mouth dropped open in surprise, then lit up in a delighted smile. You can call me superstitious if you want to, but one thing a quarter of a century in Asia has taught me is that sometimes it pays to accumulate a bit of good Karma.

The sun was shining over Sihanoukville as I hailed a motodop driver to take me to the beaches I had never seen before. We flew down the almost empty, tree-lined street towards the Golden Lions roundabout, and a flock of black and yellow mynah birds squawked across the road in front of us like rags in the wind. A pretty Cambodian girl’s behind moved enticingly beneath a tight krama as she made her way back from the market, a pile of multi-coloured fruits and vegetables filling the round, bamboo baskets that she carried.

The reassuring weight of my plastic wallet bounced heavily in the front pocket of my jeans where I had transferred it for greater safety. Although I have always professed a disregard for the almighty dollar to my friends, it sure felt good to have some of them in my pocket again. I watched the pretty Khmer girl walking along by the side of the road until we passed her, and I reflected happily that despite the strange events of the morning, it was going to be another great day in paradise, after all.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

By now, I knew in my heart I was never going to find Psorng-Preng but I was still determined to try the dwindling number of places written on the back of Ron’s photograph. Besides a genuine desire to locate the mysterious girl who nobody knew, my enthusiasm for the hunt was also fuelled by the fact that I seemed to have a fine adventure wherever the old sailor sent me. Occheuteal and Serendipity Beaches were next on the list, so I had the Motodop lad drive me around the Golden Lions roundabout and along the beach road.

The road on the beach side was bordered by casurina trees and scrubland. Goats, cattle and whistling mynah birds foraged amongst the ruined remains of the weekend villas the affluent Cambodians had built in the sixties before Pol Pot and his brutal regime had torn the country apart. We stopped at the far end of Occheuteal Beach and I made my way back along the yellow sands on foot. Both Occheuteal and Serendipity Beaches were a tourist ghetto of bamboo and wooden walls, tin and nipa roofs and wooden poles. Deckchairs, sun-beds and tables littered the beach and sun-brellas made of plastic and thatch fluttered in the salty breeze as I walked past. There were plenty of holidaymakers about because it was still high season.

Behind the lines of sun-worshippers on the sand was a long string of small, open-air bars and restaurants all the way along the beach. Painted boards outside the little establishments advertised banana pancakes, fish and chips, spaghetti, all-day breakfasts and cheap beer. Compared to the much quieter Victory Beach the sand was as busy as Blackpool on a summer’s day. It was plain I wouldn’t stumble across Psorng-Preng in this muddle even if she was here. Not for the first time, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the old seaman was losing his marbles and wondered why Ron had sent me on such a difficult quest with such confidence in my success. This mission was becoming so impossible I was beginning to feel like Tom Cruise.

I didn’t know where to start so I sat on a sunbed and ordered a hair-of-the-dog beer, instead. There were scores of beggars and beach vendors around and before my buttocks hit the wooden slats of my recliner I was offered a bunch of bananas, a necklace made of shells, a sarong, a pair of sunglasses and a manky looking lobster on a tray.

A teenaged beggar with two stumps where his legs should have been sat at the foot of the sun-bed in front of me where an attractive Russian blonde in a microscopic bikini was sunbathing. He wasn’t intentionally annoying the girl—who seemed oblivious to his presence anyway—but simply watching her every move like a hawk. An old woman bent almost double leant on a stick and hobbled by me with her begging bowl clutched in a claw-like hand. She was followed by a strong Cambodian guy who virtually carried a scrawny old man who was plainly so weak he couldn’t stand up. Very young child-beggars carrying brothers and sisters almost as big as themselves also plied their trade amongst the tourists and watching them I thought of Rath and Papa Eng.

Although there were plenty of them about, none of the beggars on the beach were getting in the tourists’ faces too much. From the way they moved on wordlessly when ignored I guessed they had been told not to annoy anyone, but they were certainly there in some numbers and it seemed that unlike back on Victory Hill, their presence here was tolerated.

Some of the teenagers selling kramas and offering manicures on the beach were undoubtedly amongst the most exquisite girls I have ever seen in Asia. One, a dark beauty with waist-length, wavy hair, was so stunning I had to buy one of the checkered cloths from her just to take a closer look. As she took my dollar and handed me a krama she told me about her wares.

“You can use it as a headscarf, a skirt, a towel or a hammock,” she said, breaking my heart with a smile. “You can tie it around your ankles to help you climb a coconut tree, or shape it into a toy for your children to play with.”

How could I turn down the chance to buy such a useful piece of equipment from a girl who was so pretty she made my breath catch in my throat? I chose a krama decorated with red checks and the girl giggled as she handed it to me.

“Do you want a rifle to go with it?” she smiled at me, showing a set of perfect white teeth. “I don’t suppose you know that under the Khmer Rouge regime, all Cambodians were encouraged to wear a red-checkered krama just like the one you have bought to show their allegiance to Pol Pot!”

A couple of sun-beds further up the beach another of the gorgeous young vendors was removing the hair from a hirsute German woman’s legs with the aid of a piece of twine. The girl manipulated the metre-long length of thread with great skill, using both hands and an end held between her teeth. It seemed the idea was to wrap the dangling loop around a batch of hairs on the woman’s calves, then pull them out with a firm tug.

This bizarre operation didn’t seem to hurt the German lady at all and when the young girl had finished the woman’s husband wanted a go—probably simply to get the little darling a bit closer to him. However, he soon changed his mind. The heavily-muscled German guy jumped upright with a loud yell of pain as soon as the pretty teenager got going and yanked a large tuft of chest hair from his broad pectoral. His delighted wife seemed to think this was hilarious and laughed long and loud; and I noticed she gave the lovely young girl a very large tip when she left.

I was lying on my sunbed minding my own business when a couple of girls sat down on the two recliners on the beach beside me. At first I wondered why they chose the beds adjacent to mine—there were plenty more of the sunbeds free on the beach. One of the girls was Cambodian, and the other a
farang
. The white girl had a short, spiky haircut, which I guessed went with her temper by the look of her. She was a stringy, hard-faced woman who looked as if she lived on steroid sandwiches. Her muscular body was pierced in a variety of places and she had more tattoos than I did. I had seen her type before. She had the bearing of someone who is constantly on the look-out for trouble and is never happier than when it comes along. She was obviously a control freak as well, because no sooner had they arrived than she was telling the Cambodian girl where they were going to sit, what they were going to drink, where to put their bags, when they were going to swim and would you
please not
put the towels down there because they would get sand all over them. Christ, it was supposed to be a beach, wasn’t it? I wondered if her poor Cambodian friend was allowed to take a piss without supervision. All these orders were imparted in a very loud voice which disturbed the mood of what had up until then been a very mellow day. I considered moving to another spot. Then I thought why the hell should I? After all, I had arrived first.

I began to get an inkling of what the situation was when—obviously for my benefit—Spiky instructed her long-suffering companion to rub sun lotion into her bony back. Now I understood why they had sat so close to me and why she was so loud. Spiky wanted the
man
on the beach to see that girls could come out to Asia and play the game too. She could have saved herself the trouble. Spiky wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t seen around the bars in Pattaya before for decades.

Eventually, Spiky stalked off for a swim. Looking at the fearsome lesbian by the water’s edge, I was reminded of the time when Big Nobby and I had travelled to Hua Hin in Thailand for a change of scenery and a bit of fishing off the pier there. The doors of the rooms of the guesthouse we were staying at opened out onto a communal balcony that ran the length of the corridor, one side of which was completely open and afforded a pleasant view over the tiled and corrugated tin roofs of the wooden buildings that are still part of the seaside town.

A pair of gay women travellers were staying in the room next to Big Nobby. One of the lesbians was butch as hell and the other was very young, very beautiful and very blonde. Unlike the individual on the beach though, they were both friendly and pleasant and would greet us with a smile and a nod when we passed them on the stairs.

The tide was going to be at its highest point around seven in the morning and Big Nobby had risen with the dawn to catch the best fishing time. Planning to make himself a cup of coffee from the little water boiler at the end of the corridor that the guesthouse kindly provided, and sure that there would be nobody about at such an inhuman hour, he opened his door and walked out onto the balcony into the early morning light.

Scratching his testicles and yawning widely, Big Nobby stepped out naked onto the empty balcony, holding his coffee cup. Except the balcony wasn’t empty. The lesbian couple sat on the bamboo chair outside their room, enjoying the early morning sunrise.

In spite of the shock he must have given them, in hindsight, I think Big Nobby unwittingly did the gay pair a big favour. If the lovely young blonde girl had previously harboured any doubts about her sexuality at all, no doubt they were dispelled at once by the sight of eighteen stone of bald, beer-bellied, naked truck driver scratching his nuts and farting in the gentle glow of the early morning sunshine.

The Cambodian girl on Occheuteal Beach caught me grinning at my memories of Hua Hin and smiled back. She was sweet and pretty and had nice eyes and lovely, smooth brown skin. The small bikini top she wore barely covered a pair of young, very firm breasts and I tried hard not to stare.

Spiky may have been an awkward bitch but I couldn’t fault her taste. I wouldn’t have minded the young Khmer girl rubbing oil into some of the parts I couldn’t reach myself. I didn’t look at her girlfriend too hard though, for fear of upsetting the tough looking lesbian who was now flexing her muscles by the water’s edge. The Cambodian girl however, seemed to want to talk. I wondered if it would be best to ignore her because I knew Spiky wasn’t going to like that at all.

I suddenly found myself in a most unusual position; should Joe Bucket risk incurring the jealous wrath of what he by now had deduced was a man-hating dyke, or should he simply let a nice, friendly Khmer girl think he was a right ignorant bastard? What would you have done? I had no choice, really.

“I come from England,” I told her, in answer to her question, and gave her the old Joe Bucket grin.

The girl told me her name was Srey-Doung, which means ‘young coconut girl’. Considering what her bikini top was struggling to hide, this seemed like a pretty good name for her to me. She said she worked as a hostess in a guesthouse-cum-bar in Phnom Penh and that Spiky had come to a financial arrangement with the boss and brought her to Sihanoukville for a paid holiday. Srey-Doung made a face at her benefactor, who was now determinedly powering out into the incoming surf, her powerful arms cutting a swathe in the water that Mark Spitz would have been proud of in his best days.

“She gives me a lot of money but I don’t really like her,” the Khmer girl confided, shaking her pretty head. “She makes me do dirty things.”

I could well imagine.

“It means I can help my family,” Srey-Doung continued, “but what I would really like is to find a nice
farang
boyfriend to take care of me. Are
you
married?” The girl asked me, hopefully. She gave me another smile and moved closer to where I lay on my sun-bed.

Things were getting positively dangerous now.

Spiky had noticed our conversation by now and was emerging from the surf. She had the light of battle in her eyes and looked very much like something coming ashore at Iwo Jima might have done. I hastily settled back onto my recliner and immersed myself in a battered old Harry Potter book that someone had left at the guesthouse.

Spiky stood in front of us with her sinewy legs apart and put her bony hands on a pair of even bonier hips aggressively. There was no denying the angry girl was in great shape. She was all hard, toned muscle and I guessed she must have spent half her life in the gym. Despite the immediate peril I was facing and in contrast to the young coconut girl, I also couldn’t help noticing how her endless sessions on the bench-press machine had left Spiky with a flatter chest than Stan Laurel’s.

“Was that man
bothering you?”
she asked Srey-Doung hopefully, in a voice designed for the whole beach to hear.

“No, we were just talking,” Srey-Doung answered her, just a touch too demurely for my liking.

Of course, Spiky took no notice of her girlfriend’s reply at all.

“Did he try to
pick you up?”
Spiky continued her interrogation, and threw an accusing glance at me that contained such hatred, if looks could kill I would certainly have been dead on the sand, right there.

From experience, I knew my best bet at avoiding trouble would probably be to ignore her, so I suddenly found the pupils of Hogwart’s extremely engrossing. I was just coming to the bit in the book where Harry fights the dragon, which seemed very appropriate at the time.

“Did I see him trying to
touch you?”
Spiky almost spat with hopeful venom, just dying for a reaction and a reason to rip into me.

Luckily for me, Srey-Doung had recognized Spiky’s game by now and the young Khmer girl took pity on me and came to my rescue. She began to gather her things together.

“I go back hotel if you want fight,” she said flatly. “No good fight on beach. Everybody look you very stupid.”