Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (5 page)

The boy grinned at me again as I lay back in my comfortable bamboo chair. I gazed out over the darkening river and blew out a lungful of wacky backy smoke. Despite my preconceived dislike of Cambodia, I was surprised to find I felt at peace with myself and the world as I relaxed and regarded the unfamiliar scenery.

“Welcome to Cambodia,” the young waiter said as he took the proferred joint from my fingers and had a puff himself. Tiny bats wheeled and flitted outside the open-fronted guesthouse looking for mosquitoes, and the insects in the nearby trees buzzed an accompaniment to the croaking frogs by the riverside. The lights along the length of the bridge we had driven in on painted wavering orange lines in the water and the flat-calm river was dotted with the red, yellow and blue lights of small vessels passing by. The shouts and laughter of children riding bicycles and playing drifted up from the dusty road outside, and the guttural sounds of a boat’s spluttering engine growled into the night. The dark blue sky was flecked and streaked with patches of lighter blue which were clouds that were still visible in the growing darkness and the uneven hill on the other side of the river turned the skyline into a dinosaur’s back. I thanked the young waiter for his gift, and as I climbed to my feet and floated back to my comfortable little wooden room, I was already beginning to wonder if there wasn’t just a little more to this Godforsaken country than the Pattaya boys had led me to believe after all.

There were no toilets in the rooms of the little guesthouse and the cold Angkor beer had brought on the need for a piss so I walked down the back stairs and down a small, dark corridor. I found a small room full of rubbish with another tiny cubicle next to it containing a squat toilet and a big plastic barrel full of water. It was so dark in there I could barely see, but the room had no door, which let in a small amount of light. I was in the process of relieving myself when there was a loud, feminine scream behind me and I turned quickly to face a naked Cambodian girl holding a towel around her body which she dropped on the floor at once in shock. Her husband—the owner of the guesthouse—appeared beside her at once and found Joe Bucket—knob in hand—in front of his nude wife in the darkened room. Luckily for me, the girl regained her composure quickly and was kind enough to explain to her husband why I was standing in front of his wife with my cock out whilst she was completely starkers. The husband seemed as relieved as his wife that I wasn’t a potential rapist or adulterer but merely Joe Bucket the stupid
farang
who had wandered into the wrong toilet by mistake. I was very relieved to find the Cambodian people apparently had a sense of humour. The couple seemed to find the incident a lot funnier than I did and I was pleased when the girl gave me a shy smile to show there were no hard feelings as I left for the boat in the morning.

The trip to Sihanoukville was in a long, speedboat. The doom and gloomers back in Pattaya had warned me it was really a river boat and wasn’t fit for the four hour sea journey I was about to embark on. As I stood in the queue amongst chattering Cambodians and scruffy backpackers weighed down with rucksacks that looked big enough to house small Khmer families, the sun was just beginning to rise over the horizon. I watched a small boy fishing in the rubbish strewn waters just by the gangplank that led onto the boat. His method of fishing was unique, if a little brutal. He had mounted a big lump of smelly fish intestines on a large treble hook and when a shoal of small fish came to investigate, the boy jerked his handline deftly and impaled one through the guts. Perhaps not the most sporting or graceful of angling practices, but judging by the dozen or more spiky-finned little fish he had threaded on the stringer hanging from his belt, very effective. I noticed a couple of used condoms and a dead rodent float by in the current near to where the boy was fishing and decided that the stomachs of the young angler’s family must be pretty strong. The boy looked up as I boarded the boat and I was surprised when he returned my smile and gave me a thumbs-up salute, before returning to gut-hooking his wriggling breakfast.

I took a seat at the back of the boat amongst the rows of cramped, peeling plastic chairs, wishing fervently that the boat was seaworthy. The small port holes were all screwed down firmly, there were no life jackets, and the only entrance was the small door twenty yards to starboard where the passengers had boarded. If the boat did sink, we would all be drowned like the rats an old farmer I knew in my boyhood days used to delight in drowning in a large water barrel he used as his execution pool. As it happened, I need not have worried. The journey was surprisingly comfortable and despite the warnings of the naysayers back in Pattaya, the unusually long boat was smooth and safe and slid across the water effortlessly like something out of the credits of a Cambodian episode of ‘Baywatch’.

I looked out of the tiny port holes at the passing scenery. On one side was the vast expanse of the Gulf of Thailand, and on the other, the undulating, tree-clad coastline of Cambodia. A few flying fish skimmed across the shining water like bouncing, silver torpedoes and as we left Koh Kong the rubbish-strewn waters became clear.

Sitting behind me was a young mother and her two small children. The woman had to virtually drag her poor little daughter past me as she looked up at the hideously ugly
farang
with wide, scared eyes. Mum was dressed in a blue-checked
krama
and wore a battered straw hat. Her young son—who was around five or six years old—was nowhere near as timid as his sister and stared at me with unblinking interest for the whole of the trip until the family got off the boat at Koh Sdach, an island stop about two hours into our journey. Every time I glanced a the bright-eyed young boy he squeaked a “Hello” at me and grinned. His mother didn’t seem to approve of this, because every time he did so, she pinched him hard and mumbled something unintelligible to him in the Khmer dialect. The bruises her son received seemed to be no deterrent to his friendly—if monotonous—salutations, and the poor lad must have been black and blue by the time they got off the boat. Tough kid. He was prepared to collect a painful nip simply to gain a smile from the funny looking foreigner with the big nose. It was already becoming plain to me that the Cambodian children were not yet as familiar or bored with visiting
farangs
as their rather more sophisticated counterparts in Thailand.

Koh Sdach consisted of a cluster of wooden shacks and huts built both over and beside the water and a long pier made of rickety wooden planks nailed together provided access. Colourful fishing boats bobbed on the water and there were bundles of nets and traps lying around. Lots of the passengers left the boat at the island, and a strong Cambodian guy hefted a sack full of rice up onto his shoulder. As he did so, a split appeared in the canvas and a cascade of hard white grains spilt onto the wet, footstep-spattered wooden deck of the boat. When the man had re-adjusted his burden and walked off down the gangplank a very old Cambodian woman came from the back of the boat and began collecting the fallen rice. Her broad-fingered peasant’s hands scooped up the dirty grains and put them into an empty packet; it seemed to me as much dirty water as rice went into the plastic bag. The grey-haired lady’s tattered blouse fell open and her withered breasts dangled as she worked, but she didn’t seem to care. I guessed she had seen times when an amount of rice such as she had recovered could probably have saved a life. We only stopped at Koh Sdach for five minutes, then we were away again. Throughout the journey, every so often there was a loud cheer from the Captain’s cabin as someone won the pot in the game of cards he and his cronies were sitting cross-legged over.

There was a group of British backpackers sitting in front of me who were having a loud, superlative-filled conversation about all the ‘amazing’ and ‘incredible’ things they had seen on their trip across Asia so far. Mary-Jane was telling Ryan about the ‘stupendous’ lady-boy show she had seen in Patpong Road in Bangkok, and Felicity was showing Desmond the ‘delightful’ hand-woven hill tribe blanket she had bought in the market in Chiang Mai. The others were swapping paragraphs from their bible; the Lonely Planet Guide to Southeast Asia. Undeniably an extremely helpful and informative book, but after listening to very nearly the same conversation for the past quarter of a century I couldn’t help wondering if the route wasn’t so well-trodden by now that it hadn’t worn away all together.

Much more interesting was the gorgeous Cambodian girl sitting three rows in front of me. She was around twenty years old and wore a red-checked
krama
wrapped around her waist and a faded T-shirt. Dressed in the right attire she would have stopped the traffic along Pattaya’s Beach Road. Even the sun-bleached, loose shirt could not hide the generous ripeness of a pair of breasts that Desmond would have found ‘magnificent’ if he had stopped gobbing off for long enough to take a look, and her long silky hair shone like wet coal. Her heart-breakingly expressive eyes were shaded by thick lashes, and the shape of her full lips had me fantasising about several good uses they could be put to. The girl caught my surreptitious, admiring glances and treated me to the gift of what was definitely a smile—if a little fleeting—and I found myself thinking that the prospect of a few weeks in Sihanoukville might not be quite the ordeal I had expected.

Just over three hours later we glided into the dock. The jetty was a ramshackle, wooden affair that had definitely seen better days, and was thronged with motodop drivers, touts from guesthouses and various other hawkers. I walked to the end, intending to find some transport to Victory Hill, but just as I was about to leave the pier I was stopped by a Cambodian policeman. Christ, I thought, I’ve only been here two minutes and I’ve been nicked already. However, he smiled at me and pointed to a wooden shack I had walked past.

“Passport and visa, please,” he told me, and I realised I hadn’t been arrested after all but that everyone had to check in at the end of the pier before making their way on to Sihanoukville. The immigration office at the end of the jetty was a wooden, tin-roofed shack and I showed my passport to a friendly policeman who was bristling with shiny buttons and badges and sported more ribbons than a maypole. He wrote my name down in a big book and handed my passport back to me with a smile. I was surprised when he told me to enjoy my stay in Cambodia, because to be honest, I expected to be scammed out of another couple of bucks.

I gazed around looking for a motodop driver who didn’t look like one of the bad guys in ‘The Killing Fields.’ Like the immigration cop no doubt had, the toughest of the dozen motorcycle taxi-drivers gathered at the end of the jetty immediately identified me as a newcomer and a non-backpacker and therefore a potentially good earner. He elbowed his villanous-looking competitors out of his way effortlessly and strode up to where I stood uncertainly. I was never too happy about getting on the back of motorcycle taxis at the best of times and tried to avoid them whenever possible. Back in Pattaya some of the younger drivers are little short of suicidal and when in the wrong mood, delight in scaring the shit out of
farangs
. A good tip for newbies to Pattaya is to insist on the oldest, greyest motorcycle driver in the rank as he has probably been around town a bit and might just keep you out of the emergency unit at the Pattaya Memorial Hospital a bit longer than his younger mates. I was extremely dubious about using the services of this rough-looking character but it appeared there was no other way to get where I was going. A bike accident in Pattaya could be bad enough, but there were no decent hospitals here to accept the medical insurance I didn’t have anyway so a bad tumble in this back of beyond place would be disastrous.

The guy approaching me was short and had very broad shoulders and was built like a middleweight boxer. His skin was very dark and he looked as hard as nails and just as sharp. He also had a real beauty of a scar over his right eye. He didn’t much look like he would take any notice of me if I told him to slow down, and he didn’t look the kind of bloke to fall out with, either.

“How much to Victory Hill?” I asked him tentatively, although I had already gathered from the Lonely Planet fan club on the boat that the price should be a buck.

“One dollar,” he grinned at me, rather to my surprise. I had been warned of the aggressive attitude of these Cambodian motodop drivers and I was expecting the strapping motorcyclist to notice I was a newbie and therefore attempt to stitch me up.

“Go real slow and I’ll give you two,” I told him. His fierce face lit up in delight at his good fortune and I climbed onto the torn pillion of his battered bike. The Lonely Planet fan club blasted past me dangerously on the back of a half dozen other motorcycles leaving a trail of dust and exhaust fumes in their wake. My bloke poodled along at around fifteen miles per hour and kept turning around every ten seconds and asking me if I was OK in order to make sure of earning his extra dollar. This suited me just fine and I relaxed and enjoyed the passing scenery and thought how you should never judge a man by his appearance.

We drove past an assortment of thatched roofs on poles under which vendors were selling everything from bunches of bananas to plastic bags full of candy. The narrow dirt road was flanked by small trees and scrubby fields and there were cattle grazing on the verges by the side of the road. My driver swerved to run over and kill a small green snake that was rippling across the road and turned around to smile broadly at me.

“Want to buy some ganga?” he asked me, with a grin.

Eventually we turned into a steep hill by a funny looking war memorial and the bike struggled to maintain speed as we passed by the few guesthouses and wooden shacks that lined the dusty tree-lined track. It all looked extremely rustic to me. Someone had once told me that Victory Hill was like Pattaya had been twenty-five years ago, but looking around me, I realised he had been mistaken. In all the time I had been coming to Thailand there was no way it had ever been as undeveloped as this, and I reckoned forty or even fifty years would have been closer to the truth.