Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (19 page)

Although the pretty Cambodian girl’s English was less than perfect, I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Spiky also began to angrily stuff her things into a bag, angrily muttering something about filthy lechers trying to take advantage of naive Cambodian girls. I thought that was just a tad hypocrytical. With a last baleful glance in my direction over her impressive deltoid, Spiky followed Srey-Doung along the track that led away from the beach. As the couple walked away I looked at the card Srey-Doung had slipped into the pages of my book when Spiky wasn’t looking.

Traveller’s Bar, Ph 63, Phnom Penh.

That made me feel a bit better and I vowed I would visit Cambodia’s capital one day and look Srey-Doung up. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get to do to the young coconut girl what Spiky couldn’t, just to get one over on the bitch.

Although I feigned indifference, Spiky had done what she intended to do all along and had spoilt my day and pissed me off. This was nothing to do with the fact she was a lesbian. I honestly hold nothing against gay people of either or indeterminate sex and have several gay friends in Pattaya. In fact, I often fantasize what a great world it would be if every other bloke alive was bent. Jesus, the possibilities for Joe Bucket would then be
endless
. And if I had been born a girl, of course I would have become a lesbian. I’m damn sure I wouldn’t want some big hairy gorilla ramming his plonker into any one of my orfices. But gay or straight, male or female besides, Spiky was simply one of the world’s obnoxious people and it needed a good few Angkor beers to wash the taste of the encounter with her out of my mouth.

To cheer myself up, I went for a wander along the beach. Many of the bars and restaurants were run by Cambodian people and some were owned by foreigners. Some of them were even offering free accomodation if you spent all your time—and money, of course—in their establishments. There certainly were some interesting characters about. In one restaurant, a fit-looking, handsome young Aussie guy with sun-bleached dreadlocks was walking the length of the bar on his hands to the loud encouragement of his buddies. In another place, a shaven-headed muscleman covered in tattoos and with more body piercings than a nail bomb victim was playing with a yo-yo and looking very serious about it indeed. I stepped aside to avoid being bashed by a tall, skinny Cambodian guy wearing a battered trilby hat who was doing something extremely complicated with coloured balls on strings which he swung in the air.

Jet-skis and boats bounced on the waves and people splashed and laughed in the sun-sparkled water. I looked out at the islands rising out of the sea and at the endless coastline, and I realized that if it wasn’t for the many mines still hidden beneath the earth around the country, Cambodia would be a beach and island-hoppers’ paradise. Apart from Spiky and the beggars, the mood on the beaches was good and everybody seemed to having a great time. It may have helped that everywhere I walked, the smell of marijuana smoke hung heavily in the air.

Round about where Occheuteal Beach becomes Serendipity Beach, I saw a large gallery of paintings that were hanging all around the walls of one of the beach restaurants, so I went in for a closer look. The pictures were all painted on wooden panels and most of them were clumsily done, although many had a certain crude charm. I guessed they were done by children and it turned out I was right. As I studied them a young Cambodian man came up to me and began telling me about the Cambodian Children’s Painting Project he helped to run.

The young man told me that the gallery on the beach sold the paintings for four dollars. The child who had painted the picture received two dollars, and the other two bucks went towards the gallery’s expenses. If anyone wanted to pay more the kid got the rest. He said that over one hundred and fifty children between the ages of five and fifteen had taken part in the project over the past three years, and that some of the kids were homeless, some orphans and some simply very poor. The children painted the pictures in the restaurant with materials provided by the Project and every kid who turned up received a cold drink and a meal. If any of the children were sick the gallery tried to help them as best it could.

There must have been over a hundred paintings hanging on the wooden walls of the restaurant. Many of them depicted rural scenes such as farmers working in the rice fields, buffaloes pulling carts and people fishing from wooden canoes. The one that caught my eye was a big, grey helicopter painted against the background of a blue sky flecked with white clouds. Two tiny parachutists fell through the sky away from the chopper. The painting was roughly done but to me it seemed to possess a vitality that most of the others lacked. I asked the young man if he remembered who had painted it.

“This picture was painted by one of our older artists, a fourteen-year-old-boy called Taa,” he told me, standing on a chair and getting the painting down for me. “Taa has no mother or father and used to be a beggar until we fixed him up with a job helping a market trader with one arm who was having trouble loading and unloading his goods. Every so often the boy turns up at the gallery and paints very much the same picture time after time. It seems to be something that became stuck in his mind since his childhood, but I don’t suppose we will ever know the truth because the poor boy has never spoken more than a few words to a soul in the two years we have known him.”

After hearing such a story I could hardly refuse to buy the picture and it hangs on my bedroom wall to this day.

I’d had enough of the crowded beach by now so I walked back towards the Golden Lions roundabout. I was hungry, so I stopped on the way to stuff yet another impeccable fish and chip dinner down my neck in an upstairs restaurant run by a friendly Vietnamese woman called Rosie. The food was great and Rosie’s restaurant was made of corrugated iron and wooden planks and had a nipa roof and narrow, open windows. It felt more like I was eating my meal in a machine gun nest than a cafe.

Whilst I ate, I watched a gang of around twenty young Cambodian guys on a dusty square outside playing a strange game of keepie-uppie with a giant shuttlecock set with coloured feathers. They booted the over-sized shuttlecock to each other and kept it in the air with an astonishing degree of skill and agility. When I paid Rosie for my meal, I showed her my photograph. She told me she recognized Ron at once, and that he had been in her restaurant for his lunch five or six times. She said the old seaman was one of the nicest and most interesting men she had ever met.

As for the girl in the snap, it didn’t surprise me when Rosie said she didn’t know her from Queen Nefertiti.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

Although I didn’t want to believe it, I was now almost sure Ron was slightly senile. After all, I had only met the old guy twice, so I may well have been mistaken when I had thought that despite his advanced age, he was still as sharp as a tack.

I was sitting outside the first hut at the bottom of Blue Mountain when I came to this conclusion. Blue Mountain was number six on the retired sailor’s list—so here I was—but if the old man thought I stood a chance of finding a missing girl here, he was plainly sadly mistaken. Even if I’d had Sherlock Holmes with me I wouldn’t have had a prayer in this bedlam.

Blue Mountain was a track meandering up a steep hill around two hundred yards long. It was lined with wooden shacks similar to those in Phum Thmei. The difference was in the way that the buildings were precariously perched one above the other on the steep incline. This made the place an astonishing spectacle. Blue Mountain is undoubtedly one of the wonders of the red-light world.

There must have been fifty or more of the rustic little knocking shops, and wailing karaoke music drifted out into the dark night from many of them. Girls sat outside the huts and in the doorways, smiling and beckoning at the passing punters. The flashing coloured bulbs and neon-lit signs outside the chicken-coops that clung perilously to the steep gradient gave Blue Mountain an appearance that was almost surreal. To me, it looked as though one good storm might well wash it all away. The place looked like something out of Gulliver Guinea Pig’s Mystery Tour.

The surface of the road was appalling and was littered with potholes and broken bricks and rubble. Groups of Cambodian men wandered up and down the hill, and a few motorcycles jolted and struggled dangerously over the bumps and ridges in the track. Despite its bizarre appearance, there seemed to be a lot more guys sampling the delights of Blue Mountain than there had been at the Chicken Farm, and I surmised that the Cambodian punters had to be pretty fit. I walked up to the top of Blue Mountain myself, but the steep hill knackered me far too much to contemplate expending any more energy on a jump when I reached the summit. In fact, I felt it would have been more appropriate to have stuck a flag up there instead.

Narith told me that most of the Blue Mountain hookers were Vietnamese and the majority of their customers were Cambodians. He said quite a lot of the girls wouldn’t go with
farangs
because some of their Cambodian regulars wouldn’t touch them again if they did. He seemed to think the Chicken Farm was a better bet for a horny
farang
than Blue Mountain, but looking around me there was no doubt that the girls here were better looking than at Phum Thmei and I wondered if the locals were directing
farangs
away from what they considered to be their territory. Just like the Chicken Farm near the port, once again I didn’t see any obviously under-age girls around.

There was a string of motorcycles parked at the bottom of Blue Mountain where the punters had left them—perhaps a dozen in all—and they were all lined up in a row facing the same way. The front wheels of the bikes were jutting out into the track that passed as a road, and the back wheels were just touching the worn dirt path outside the huts that served as the sidewalk.

When I had been sitting outside the bar at the bottom of the hill for five minutes, the relative silence of the night was shattered by the arrival of what was possibly the most decrepit, clapped-out motorcycle in Sihanoukville. There was more rust than chrome on the machine and the tank and mudguards looked as if someone had attacked them with a hammer. There was plenty of yellow foam showing through the leather on the pillion seat, and the bent and corroded rack bolted onto the back of the bike looked like it might have come from a scrapyard. The clunking engine of the ancient motorcycle sounded as though it were in a worse state than even that of The Professor’s rusty steed.

A scruffy old man with long, wispy hair and a superb pair of whiskers was driving the crappy machine. He was dressed in what amounted to little more than rags, and he wore a battered straw farmer’s hat with a broad, tattered brim over his flowing, grey locks. When he dismounted and parked his wreck with the other motorbikes I guessed he was drunk because he weaved from side to side as he made his way into the little store at the foot of Blue Mountain. My suspicions were confirmed as he passed me. The reek of alcohol left in his wake was almost enough for me to get pissed on myself. As he staggered by he gave me a toothless grin, then disappeared into the rickety store next to where I was sitting.

Just after the old guy’s dramatic arrival, a very well dressed young Cambodian man came walking up the track towards Blue Mountain. He was around twenty-five years old. In a country of T-shirts, shorts and rubber sandals, the young man’s silk shirt, stylish black pants and the trilby hat he wore appeared strangely out of place, as did the heavy gold chain around his neck. I could only assume he must be a man of some substance in Sihanoukville, otherwise I am sure somebody would have nobbled that big lump of glittering bling pretty damn quick. I’d seen his type in Asia plenty of times before, and he looked like some sort of a pimp to me. Judging by the direction he was heading in, this was quite possible.

The flash young Cambodian guy was leading a small white poodle by a silver chain. Don’t ask me why, but these dogs seem to have become the emblem of the nouveau riche in many countries in the Far East recently. I hope I am not upsetting too many old ladies with poodle companions in the Western world when I say that Asian hookers and pimps seem particularly fond of the breed.

The spotless white poodle pranced along happily beside its dapper owner. I couldn’t help thinking that not so many years ago in Cambodia some starving person would probably have eaten the dog, but now the animal looked as elegantly coiffed and barbered as its smarmy master. Both dog and man walked with the arrogant gait of the wealthy amongst the poor.

I thought it would be a good idea to show the young guy Ron’s photograph as he walked by, thinking that if he was a local and did run girls on Blue Mountain he might have seen Psorng-Preng. I could have saved my breath. When I greeted him with a cheery “Good Evening” and a smile, he looked at me as though I was something his dog might have done. He whisked past me and tied his pet’s lead onto the back of one of the parked motorcycles at the bottom of Blue Mountain and walked into the tiny store next to the shack I was sitting outside. What happened next was either hilarious if you have a wicked sense of humour, or tragic if you are of a softer disposition. Either way, it was certainly one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen.

The scruffy old fellow who owned the battered bike hadn’t been in the store for more than a minute. It was pretty obvious he had been buying cigarettes, because when he emerged he was emitting copious amounts of tobacco smoke. He walked to his beat-up bike, climbed astride the ruined seat and kicked her over. Surprisingly, the old clunker started first time.

The old guy let out the clutch and pulled away slowly up Blue Mountain. The vintage bike seemed to be having trouble climbing the steep gradient, and a cloud of noxious exhaust fumes followed the old man up the hill. As did the Pimp’s unfortunate poodle, because the small dog was still firmly tied to the rusty rack on the back of the old man’s bike.

At first, as the bike managed to pick up some speed, so did the dog. Unfortunately, when the old biker changed into third gear the animal could keep up no longer and its legs straightened reflexively. The girls outside the tiny brothels lining the track looked and pointed at the poodle in surprise as it was pulled slithering up Blue Mountain like a canine water skier. I shouted to the old man that he had an unexpected passenger, but he didn’t understand a word I was saying and took no notice.

The door of the store flew open and the pimp appeared, yelling at the top of his voice for the old man to stop. His cries went unheeded—the missing baffles of the bike’s smoking exhaust made such a din that the geriatric rider couldn’t possibly hear a thing. He continued up Blue Mountain, completely unaware of the drama that was unfolding behind him.

Bellowing loudly, the pimp began sprinting up the incline after his hapless pet and the unbelievable cavalcade continued past the ramshackle, colourful little brothels that clung to the sides of Blue Mountain. As the bizzare procession passed by, many of the watching girls in the shadowy doorways were cheering and clapping loudly. The unlikely trio finally disappeared over the crest of the steep hill and into the blackness of the night, and I gazed after them in open-mouthed amazement. I am sure that everyone who knows me will agree I am an animal lover, and I like most dogs I have met with very few exceptions. Despite my fondness for all things furred and feathered, I must admit there was just the glimmer of a smile playing around my lips as I finished up my beer and hailed a motodop driver to take back into town and on to the next venue on Ron’s list—the strangely named Flea Dome Hotel.

The Flea Dome was, in reality, the bar under The Freedom Hotel. The place had earnt its unenviable sobriquet simply because none of the motodop boys could pronounce the correct name properly and Flea Dome was where you asked for if you wanted to get there sometime that night.

There was a huge, square counter right in the middle of the floor with a pool table on one side. All the spirits were two bucks a shot so I did some damage to the gin and tonic bottles. There were freelancers dotted around the bar and a couple more good-time girls playing pool. Some of the Vietnamese girls—I was learning to tell the difference now—were very classy. I was delighted to find the bar was run by two Thai women and they seemed just as pleased as I was when I spoke to them in their language. Now I might get somewhere, I thought, taking Ron’s picture out of my pocket. Surely someone from my adopted country might be able to help. The Thai lady behind the bar looked carefully at the picture I handed her and called her sister over. They jabbered together excitedly in the Isaan dialect.

“It’s Lon! It’s Lon!” They squealed in delight. “He lovely old man! And so good-hearted. I never forget him!”

Laughing and shrieking, the two sisters fought for possesion of the picture. Knowing Thai girls as I do, I quickly interrupted before they really got going.

“Yes I know,” I said impatiently, jabbing a finger at Psorng-Preng, “but the girl—have you seen the girl?”

The two Thai women both looked at the photograph, then at each other.

“Khor thot, mai roochak,”
they squealed almost in unision, “sorry, we don’t know her.” So that was another avenue to completing Ron’s mission closed.

It wasn’t very long before a beautiful Vietnamese girl moved in alongside me. She was gorgeous, but after the episode with Khwan I reminded myself that I wasn’t about to get sucked in again just yet. I wandered upstairs out of the way of temptation where there was a small bar where three-fully-but-scantily-clad Cambodian girls were dancing half-heartedly around a chrome pole in the gloomy interior. As a resident of a city with some of the finest go-go bars in the world, this place was never going to hold my attention for very long and I decided to call it a night.

I made my way down the narrow staircase. Walking through the crowded bar downstairs, I decided to stop for one for the road. Of course, this was my undoing. The beautiful Vietnamese girl came up to me again and this time Joe Bucket’s resistance had been severely lowered by a dozen generous measures of gin, which I am sure the girl had been banking on all along. He who hesitates is lost—and the next thing I knew I was leaving the Flea Dome hand in hand with a Vietnamese freelancer named Kung, bound for the Crazy Monkey.

We boarded two motodops outside the Flea Dome and our drivers raced along the road. By now, I was pissed up enough to enjoy the ride. Kung’s waist-length hair streamed out behind her like black flames in the night, and we smiled at each other every time we changed pole position. On the way back to The Hill we drove through a group of about ten Cambodian teenagers who were travelling along on their motorbikes two and three abreast and almost blocking the road.

“Mafia,” my motodop driver told me darkly after we had passed. “No good.”

As we sped along side by side down the hill on Ekereach Street, the feel of the wind in my hair and all the unfamiliar smells, sounds and sights of Sihanoukville around me—and the fact that I would soon be in bed with a seriously sexy Vietnamese girl—all combined to make every one of my senses feel totally alive. I felt a wave of happiness surge through my whole being. Thanks to old Ron, this visa run to Cambodia was turning into the first proper adventure I’d had for years.

Back in my room at the Crazy Monkey, Kung told me she was twenty-four years old. As well as her native language she could speak English, French, Khmer and Thai, so I guess that makes her a lot smarter than most of the blokes she’s been with. I asked her why she chose to live in Cambodia rather than Vietnam but she wouldn’t really tell me. She just said she occasionally went with men from the Flea Dome in order to look after her mother and father, who both lived with her. I asked her if she would ever go back to live in Vietnam.

“No,” she said in Thai, looking rather sad.
“Lambaak mak”.
Too many difficulties.

Kung was warm, eager and very good at what she did. She really was a beautiful girl and had classically high cheekbones, large eyes and that magnificent mane of long, silky hair. In colour she was a little lighter than myself. She was slim and long-limbed and had small, firm breasts and a beautiful, tight behind.