Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (21 page)

I have been here for three months now and have done nothing more than allow the customers who buy me drinks to hold my hand, hug me and squeeze my bottom, but like so many of the girls who come to work here I know it is possible that one day my family’s circumstances might make it necessary for me to do more, and this makes me very sad.

Every weekday morning I go to school for five hours and I work very hard to study and improve my English. The school is a very good one although it is expensive and charges fifty dollars a month. I hope and pray that one day the ability to speak and write the language might give me the opportunity to find work that I am not ashamed of doing. If I could choose to do any job in the world, I would like to be a hairdresser”.

Funnily enough, after hearing Pheakdei’s story, I stopped trying to fuck her anymore.

While I had been listening to Pheakdei, there had been a fight in the street outside. Earlier on, a drunken French tourist had wandered into the Shark Bar, but the barman had refused to serve him and he had left, cursing. The boozer must have continued being a pain in the arse because a wiry Cambodian motodop driver was now battering him up and down the street. The loud smacks of the motorcycle lad’s fists on the drunk’s face echoed through the night and it wasn’t long before he ended up flat on his back. Despite his bloodied face it looked like he was going to get up and have another go, but then Le Requin walked over to him and whispered something into his ear and the drunk climbed to his feet and slunk off into the night.

After I had enjoyed the impromptu boxing match and heard Pheakdei’s story I thought it was a good time to call it a night. Walking back to the Crazy Monkey, I was pleased when I passed a guy on a bicycle with a pile of crusty rolls in a basket on the front carrier. The vendors who sell these rolls fill them with meat, pickles and salad. They are a bargain at three thousand Riels and just the thing for a delicious midnight snack before bed. With this in mind, I stopped the bloke on the bike and ordered one. He made the sandwich up for me and I paid him and he pedalled off.

As I made my way down the street, I took a gigantic bite of the roll and very nearly gagged. Instead of my expected favourite filling, the guy on the bike had stuffed the roll with something that looked and tasted like a cross between frozen pork and ice cream. Just to make sure the sandwich was totally indedible he had then covered the whole thing with evaporated milk. I suppose somebody somewhere in the world must like these Cambodian delicacies, but Joe Bucket didn’t. The scruffy little dog that lived just around the corner got the rest of the horrible mixture while nobody was looking.

After that, every night when I returned to the Crazy Monkey the mongrel would be waiting for me around the corner with its tail wagging hopefully. The small dog would then keep me accompany all the way home on my walk back from the bar-strip, and it continued to do so until I left Sihanoukville.

What with Stumpy the lizard, Pheakdei the bar-girl and Scruffy the dog, I felt I was certainly making lots of new friends in Sihanoukville. However, I knew I was still no closer to finding Psorng-Preng than I had been to tricking that Vietnamese hooker out of twenty bucks, and time was running out.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

Almost every evening that I was in Sihanoukville, I used to take a stroll down the hill to the beach. I would walk slowly past the shacks where the two pretty girls and the old lady lived, then sneak carefully past the violent monkey that had given me such a fright on my first day and walk to the end of the pier for an hour’s fishing with a hand line.

The pier at Victory Beach was one of the most solid constructions in town and was made of thick wooden poles supporting a cement surface that had been tastefully covered with red tiles. All along the one-hundred–and-fifty metre ‘L’ shaped length of the pier, there were strange Victorian-style lamposts that looked like something Jack The Ripper might have stood under whilst contemplating his next murder. Someone had obviously spent a great deal of thought and money on the pier and Narith told me it had been built in 2007 by a
farang
as the embarkation point for the nearby resort on Koh Pos Island. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in Asia, things had gone a bit wonky for the guy who had built the pier, and sadly it had never been used for anything other than tying fishing boats up to, evening strolls and angling.

Most evenings there were usually a few Cambodian fishermen trying their luck along the pier. These guys seemed to spend nearly all their lives on the colourful wooden fishing boats that were tied up alongside the jetty. They used nothing more sophisticated than handlines, and every now and then one of the shirtless, muscular fishermen would jerk his line and pull in a frantically wriggling Rabbitfish or an ugly brown Flathead and deposit it on the red tiles. Now and again the old sea-dog of a Captain who owned one of the boats would emerge from his hammock to catch his supper and he was so skilled he could virtually hook the fish one after another, at will.

The fish seemed to hole up under the bottom of the bobbing fishing boats and the dark-skinned Khmers used either small prawns, pieces of squid or sticky rice on treble hooks for bait. For my part, I couldn’t entice a thing to take my offerings but I didn’t care whether I caught anything or not, because the pier was a fine place to finish the daylight hours.

I spent most of my time on the pier watching the swallows and butterflies skimming and fluttering inches over the sparkling water and wondering why the suicidal butterflies—which often crash-landed into the sea—didn’t choose to stay much closer to the safety of dry land. Sometimes, a couple of large birds of prey would circle overhead uttering forlorn, mewing cries that were audible even at the great height they were flying at. One night, there was a large, expensive motor launch anchored just off the pier and a brave Cambodian diver wearing what resembled a war-time gas mask attached to a very dodgy looking compressor with a hose was diving down underneath the hull and making repairs. Rather him than me.

Every time I visited the pier there was a big fat
farang
bloke fishing there with an armoury of shiny rods and reels that looked as though they would have cost the average Cambodian a years wage’s. At first I tried talking to him and asked him what he had caught but he growled at me to go away as I was scaring his fish so I left him to it. Despite his impressive array of tackle all he ever seemed to catch were tiny silver fish which he ripped the hooks from and then left to gasp and die on the pier in the evening sun. I gathered the Cambodian fishermen didn’t think much of this practice at all, because I heard them muttering to each other and pointing to the dead fish Fatty left behind him every day and shaking their heads angrily.

One fine evening Fatty cheered all the Cambodian fishermen up though. They were all in hysterics for about two hours. Fatty’s terminal tackle had become snagged on the sea-bed and as he yanked hard to retrieve his gear there was a snap, a thud and a yell and Fatty held his podgy hand to his mouth. A stream of red blood trickled through his plump fingers.

As Fatty had attempted to pull his tackle free it had pinged back and whacked him in the mouth, and the intrepid angler was now hooked in exactly the same way as the little fish he had been killing all week. The barb of the hook had gone all the way through his top lip and he was having terrible trouble getting it out, which elicited fresh bursts of laughter from the Khmer fishermen. The last anyone ever saw of Fatty he was making his way to one of the local clinics, the hook still firmly embedded in his gob. Nobody ever saw him again. I suppose some might say that’s Karma for you.

A few days before Fatty caught himself I had also been fortunate enough to be able to wind him up a bit. I was down on the pier an hour earlier than usual and there were two Cambodian men anchored up in a small boat who were obviously preparing to go out fishing. Their brightly-painted craft was around ten feet long and powered by a small motor on the back.

The two men looked like a father and son team. The older guy was just finishing tying a large hook onto the second of his two hefty rods and I looked at the pair enviously, for it was a superb evening for a fishing trip. The younger of the two men, who was around sixteen years old, saw my covetous glances and looked up at me and grinned.

“Would you like to come with us?” the lad asked me with a wide smile.

I was delighted, but the older man scowled and looked angrily at his son.

“Don’t worry about my father,” said the youngster. “He has been asleep all day and he is always grumpy after he wakes up. He will soon cheer up once we get a fish.”

The young man started up the motor and we puttered out to sea. The old fellow motioned at me stay up the other end of the boat and to keep away from him and his tackle, and to be quiet. He obviously wanted to make sure I knew who was Captain of this vessel, despite his son’s invitation.

We bounced over the sun-sparkled waves and anchored up at a spot just past Koh Pos Island. The two men immediately lowered handlines baited with a string of small, coloured feathers and quickly caught around twenty small, silver fish very similar to the ones that Fatty liked to murder so much. They put them all into a plastic bucket which had a little pump going inside it to keep the water aerated. The old man was very skilful and every one of the five hooks on his line had a wriggling fish on it each time he pulled it in. His son usually managed two or three.

When the pair had caught enough of the bait fish the old fellow hooked one up on each of the rods. He had set both rods up with a simple running ledger rig and was using a big hook of around size two, which he gently threaded through the back of the livebait just under the dorsal fin. As he cast the baits out, the old man was still looking at me and grumbling under his breath and I wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t have come at all.

The bobbing action of the boat on the gentle waves was soporific and the evening was still very warm and soon my eyes began to close of their own accord. Fifteen minutes later, I jerked awake when I heard the line peeling from the spool of one of the reels. The older fisherman looked intently at the revolving spool for several long seconds. When he judged the time was right he tightened up the drag and struck hard into the running fish. The heavy rod bent over in a beautiful curve and the fish continued to take line. It ran hard for fifty yards until the old man managed to tighten up on it and began to pump it towards the surface. Every so often, the fish would make another determined run, but it soon began to tire and the youngster eventually stuck a gaff into the side of a shining barracuda of around ten pounds in weight. The fish was a slab of solid muscle and thrashed and slapped stiffly on the wooden decking.

Almost immediately the line on the other spool started spinning, and after a similar battle the old man’s son had a slightly smaller specimen on board. By now, the older man was grinning happily at both of us and jabbering away in Khmer at me as though I was his best mate.

“Father says you must have brought us good luck!” laughed the teenager. “He is pleased you came now!”

Nothing more happened for half an hour. Then, just as the sun began to set and the ocean became tinged with orange, one of the spools started whirring and clicking again, then whizzed round and round so fast it became a blur. I was astonished when the Captain motioned for me to take the fish—and suddenly Joe Bucket was stuck into the first barracuda fight of his life.

As a freshwater fisherman, the sheer power of the big sea fish shocked me. The rod was a powerful one, but the barracuda had no trouble pulling it down into a graceful arc and managed to run hard for what must have been close to a hundred yards before I came even close to stopping it. I was immediately worried the reel might run out of line, so I tried slowing the fish’s blistering run by braking with a finger on the whirring spool. I soon gave that tactic up when I instantly recieved a painful friction burn. My two companions roared with laughter when I snatched my finger from the reel with an exclamation of pain. I grinned sheepishly at them and shook the soreness from my burnt finger, although I made damn sure I kept contact with the running fish all the time.

When the barracuda was near the boat it made several determined leaps for freedom and the youngster yelled at me to dip my rod tip and give it some slack or the line would break. After twenty minutes, the Captain carefully gaffed the fish and I was proud and pleased to see it was the biggest one of the evening.

The Captain said we had caught enough fish for one day, so we pulled up the anchor and went back to the pier. On the way home the old man was all smiles and kept giggling and re-enacting the friction burn scene which he seemed to find hilarious. When we arrived back at the pier I tried to give his son ten bucks and I was surprised when he wouldn’t take it.

“You brought us luck,” he said, shaking his head, and I could see he really believed it.

Fatty was on the pier surrounded by his gleaming display of tackle and I insisted on carrying that magnificent fish past him nonchalantly, as if catching a ten-pound barracuda was an every day occurrence in the life of Joe Bucket. Fatty’s eyes opened wide in disbelief and he looked after me in open-mouthed amazement. At the end of the pier I gave my new friends back the beautiful barracuda and walked back happily to the Crazy Monkey with a spring in my step that only a good day’s fishing can give rise to.

I had my first drink in the Shark Bar that night. By now, my burnt finger was red raw and very painful, but remembering my battle under the setting sun with the glorious barracuda and recalling the look on Fatty’s face when I had walked past him on the pier, I relished every throb; which I soon anaesthetized anyway with the help of several more beers and a couple of spliffs.

It seemed my luck was in that evening, so I decided to visit the final place on Ron’s list in a last-ditch attempt to find Psorng-Preng. The fishing adventure had made me uncharacteristically optimistic. Surely the kind of man who could catch a ten-pound barracuda could find a missing bar-girl in Sihanoukville.

The Snake Pit was a three minute drive on Narith’s motorbike around the corner from Victory Hill in Soviet Street. We drove down a dark, narrow track that was bordered and overhung with verdant, tropical trees. The open-fronted bar was in the grounds of the Snake House resort and the comfortable wooden bungalows for rent in the lush grounds looked like a very pleasant place to stay indeed. Considering the name of the street where it was situated, I wasn’t surprised when Narith told me that the resort and the bar were run by Russians.

I arrived at the Snake Pit at just the same time as four Russian guys who had come out of one of the nearby bungalows, and I walked into the bar behind them. As we entered there were screams and splashes from the far end of the bar and five girls in bikinis jumped into the small pool there, obviously for our benefit. There were chrome seats at the far end of the swimming pool, and the girls tried their best to entice us into the water and have a drink with them.

There was a cold wind blowing in from the sea that night and it was a bit nippy for Cambodia, so the poor girls stood no chance. They soon got out of the water shivering when the Russians made straight for the pool table and I propped myself up at the bar. As well as the water babies, there were three more young girls dancing right above me on the counter where I put my drink.

The scarred, wooden counter of the Snake Pit looked like it had seen plenty of use. There were a couple of chrome poles at either end and the trio of scantily-clad girls stood on the polished wood and danced around them, laughing and joking with each other. There was a half-sized snooker table over one side of the bar that was lit by a couple of those proper green lights just like the ones at the Crucible. The serious-faced Russians were over there, playing a game of eight-ball pool with absolutely no banter at all.

The rest of the bar was very low-lit and there were some plush Soi Six-type groping sofas in the darkest corner. Dozens of broad-leaved ferns and plants in pots were dotted around the room, and small, red lazer dots zipped and crawled along the tiled floor and up and around the walls and ceilings like glowing red insects. There were also a pair of those old-fashioned seventies-style disco balls suspended from the rafters. Compared to some of the rustic nightspots I had visited in Sihanoukville in my search for Psorng-Preng so far, the Snake Pit was a pretty classy place.

If the decor of the Snake Pit was stylish, then the cocktail menu was even more refined. There was a mind-boggling array of Russian Vodkas and combinations on offer. After several large gin and tonics, I was curious and drunk enough to order a sickly mix of malibu, lemon, pineapple juice and chocolate that sounded like something out of an ice cream van, but luckily for my morning health I was not pissed enough to do anything other than taste the ‘Choco Special’.