Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (7 page)

“I am twenty-seven years old and I was born in Kompot, which is a drive of around an hour and a half from Sihanoukville. My relatives have a restaurant here on Victory Hill and they allow me to park up and look for customers outside. Sometimes I also work downtown or at the crossroads in Victory Hill with the rest of the motorcycle taxi-drivers.

I only work as a motodop driver during the evenings and at night. This is because I am a teacher at a secondary school in Sihanoukville during the daytime. I studied to be a teacher at the School Teacher’s College in Sihanoukville and now I teach Geography and History to eleven- to fifteen-year-old boys and girls. My salary is around fifty US dollars a month and I also get a room for free at the school. I have two jobs because I need to save as much money as possible. I do not have a girlfriend and I am not sure if I will get married for a while yet. If I should marry it would cost me around three thousand US dollars for the girl’s parents. I have been here two years now and saved around a thousand. I could probably do it on less than three thousand, but then I would not be marrying the kind of girl I really want.

Sometimes I think I might use the money I have saved to further my education and gain more qualifications instead. My dream is to study English at a University. Cambodia is hoping to turn itself into an important tourist destination and English speaking teachers will soon be very much in demand. All the kids in Cambodian schools are taught English these days, but my own English language skills are not suffficient for me to tutor them yet.

I have two young brothers in Kompot. My Mother and Father are dead but I don’t want to tell you about that. Sometimes I send a little money back to my brothers because they both work as builder’s labourers and their salary is very low. My brothers come to see me here in Sihanoukville once a fortnight and we all go to a Chicken Farm or up Blue Mountain to have a drink and a girl. Most of us Cambodians prefer Blue Mountain and I usually go with one of the Vietnamese girls. Somehow it doesn’t seem quite right for me to use a girl from my own country as a taxi-girl. I find it hard to believe you when you tell me you like your freedom and don’t ever expect to get married. Nobody wants to end up as a lonely old man. And I know you are joking with me when you tell me that many foreigners in Thailand marry the bar-girls and prostitutes there
—
of course, no rich man in his right mind would be foolish enough to marry a taxi-girl!

Last year there was a blonde French girl named Michelle staying at my Uncle’s guesthouse with her parents for a few weeks. She was only eighteen years old and she liked me and bought me a silver necklace when they left. She was very pretty and always happy and I kissed her a few times after I had taken her into town at night. I was surprised how confident and forward she was and I guess I could have taken things further if I had wanted to but she was a guest of my family so it wouldn’t have been right. Although I still think of Michelle sometimes I know in my heart when I get married it will be to a Cambodian girl.”

After Narith had gone home, I settled my bill. I guessed that one day in the near future, when tourism really took off, the motodop driver would be in for a shock and remember our conversation. Just like in Pattaya—if nothing went wrong with the tourist industry in the meantime—I was sure it wouldn’t be too long before
farangs
fell in love with some of the taxi-girls from the Chicken Farms and bars of Sihanoukville and began ‘saving’ and marrying them. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with the motodop driver who looked more like a boxer than a school teacher, and I admired his traditional way of thinking—although I couldn’t help wondering if his ideas might change throughout the course of time. Before Narith left I asked him what he would really like to do with his life if he could choose any form of employment at all. His reply surprised me.

“I sure would like to have a job like that pirate Jack Sparrow I saw in a movie,” he said seriously, and I was about to laugh out loud at his joke until I saw there was not a trace of humour in his reply.

It was dark now and I left the small restaurant and walked into the dirt road where I had noticed the bars when I first arrived. In the daytime the street had appeared to be a quiet, dusty track around a hundred yards long but when I turned the corner, I was astonished to see at night it was almost in total darkness. There was no electricity and all the bars were lit by candles. A pool table in one bar had a row of candles all along both of its sides so customers could play pool by candlelight. I wondered where the hell Ron had sent me. The effect was almost surreal and the wooden shacks, the rasping call of the night insects, the shadowy bar-girls seated at the low tables and the hushed murmur of voices I couldn’t understand could have been a scene from a James Clavell novel. I walked the length of the street and apologised to several people I bumped into in the blackness along the way. I had my first beer in a bar where a trio of Khmer girls were playing a crazy game of seeing who could hold their hands nearest to the flame of a burning candle the longest. A girl with features that were indistinct in the gloom started massaging my shoulders with some skill then suddenly, there was a flash and a cheer and the lights came on all along the street. An old Rolling Stones number blasted away the silence and we were back in the twenty-first century again. It seemed that my trip back in time had been nothing more than a power cut.

There were a handful of open-fronted nightspots and bars dotted along the length of the street and I saw that even in the blackness of the power cut I had managed to choose the liveliest bar with the most girls in evidence. Now that the neon-lit sign outside was working again, I saw I was in the Shark Bar. Despite the infamous reputation of Cambodia’s Chicken Farms, I immediately noticed that all the girls in the bar appeared to be in their late teens and twenties. The owner of the bar was an extremely hard-looking Frenchman. He was serving drinks behind the counter with an equally tough Cambodian guy and a couple of pretty waitresses. A couple more brawny French blokes were sharing a joint on the other side of the bar and playing cards for money—two activities that would certainly get you nicked back in Thailand if performed in public. It was rapidly becoming plain there were very little in the way of laws in Sihanoukville.

Oldies from the 70s and 80s were being played instead of the ubiquitous gangster rap now so common in the bars of Pattaya, and I enjoyed Bono’s U2 telling everyone how he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. This reminded me how I had better start my own search for the girl with the daft name properly tomorrow, myself. A dozen bar-girls were dancing up on a rickety wooden stage that stood against the wall and the villainous looking French owner bellowed at them good-naturedly to move it about a bit more. The beer was cheap and cold, the music good and the girls pretty and although I thought that Victory Hill looked more like a film set than a real place and felt like a bizarre fusion between the Wild West and the swinging sixties, I was already beginning to feel glad I had embarked upon old Ron’s mission.

It would have been easy to stay in the Shark Bar all night, but I decided to start at the top of the track and visit every other nightspot on the way down instead. In practice, this was not going to be as daunting as it sounds, because there were fewer than a dozen bars. Anyone attempting this at most of the busier bar-strips in Pattaya these days would certainly be dead from alcoholic poisoning before they progressed less than halfway down. I climbed a set of rickety steps that led to an upstairs bar with an open front that commanded a fine view of the whole street. I ordered a beer and peered out into the Sihanoukville night.

Over the road, in a dark doorway at the top of the track, I saw one of the card-playing Frenchmen I had noticed in the Shark Bar bar earlier clobber a Cambodian beggar who was attempting to sneak into the bar area. A flash of movement, the smack of knuckles on flesh, and the tattered pan-handler lay motionless in the dirt. The tough guy uttered something in French and walked away, rubbing his fist. If he did this in Pattaya he would have every member of the beggar, flower-selling and crap-vending mafia lurking around every dark corner on the way back to his room waiting to perform an impromptu tracheotomy with a variety of sharp instruments. It was rapidly becoming plain to me who ran this place and I strengthened my resolve not to pull any of the stunts I had been getting away with in Pattaya for years until I knew Sihanoukville a bit better. Victory Hill was way too small to make enemies.

Although The Professor had warned me most of the Frenchmen who owned the bars on the hill were gangsters this didn’t bother me unduly, because I have found this to be the case in many of the world’s red light areas. Some of the nicest blokes I ever met were a selection of Australian crooks and villains who used to run the bar areas in Manila and Angeles City way back in the early eighties. Whether my timid room mate was exaggerating or not I don’t know, but there certainly seemed to be a definite hierarchy amongst the foreign bar-owners. I also noticed they were rather cautious around Joe Bucket during his first week on The Hill until they realised I was not from Interpol or a potential competitor, but simply in town to try and find Psorng-Preng and lay around on the beach and spend lots of money on beer, girls and food in their bars. By the end of my stay in Sihanoukville most of the Frenchmen on The Hill were greeting my arrival in their bars and restaurants with a smile instead of a suspicious glare and Didier—the one who had bashed the beggar—used to almost crush my chest with a bear-hug and give me a big sloppy kiss on both cheeks every time I visited his place.

On that first night on Victory Hill I sampled several Angkor draft beers in every bar on the strip then made my way back rather unsteadily to my room. My wobbliness was accentuated by having also partaken of some of the gigantic joints that were openly being passed around and smoked in many of the nightspots, and I was ready to get my head down. When I arrived back at the Crazy Monkey, I was surprised to see there was a huge iron-grilled gate pulled shut across the entrance to the yard of the guest house. The gate was around ten feet long and at least eight feet high and I hoped it wasn’t locked because there was no way I was going to be able to climb over it in my state. By now it was very late, very dark and very quiet and all the inhabitants of the deserted street appeared to be asleep. So, instead of waking everyone up by knocking, I gave the gate a testing shove. Although it didn’t appear to be locked it seemed to be sagging on its hinges, so I tried lifting it up as I pushed. The gate budged a few inches but it still wouldn’t open, and it seemed to weigh a ton. Not to worry. I had been at the dumbells every day back in Pattaya for a couple of months now in an attempt to minimise the growing gut the sedentary lifestyle and nightly sessions on the piss threatened, and I’d been looking for a chance to try out my new biceps for a while. I took a good grip on the wire grill, summoned up all my strength and lifted the gate as high as I could, then shouldered it forwards with all my drunken might. Disaster ensued.

If I had taken the time to look at the gate a little harder I would have seen it was, in fact, of the sliding variety and ran on small rubber wheels in a little concrete trench. As I manhandled it forward, I pulled the wheels loose from the channel in the cement that they ran in and the gate came right off its hinges. The two-hundred pound iron gate slowly toppled away from me as I made a last attempt in vain to keep it upright, then it fell into the yard—with me still on top of it—making a resounding clanging noise that woke every living creature in the street. Instantly, the quiet night came to life. All the dogs on Victory Hill began barking and howling and lights went on in all the wooden buildings up the track. The door of the Crazy Monkey flew open and the owner of the guesthouse and Srey-Leak appeared, clad in pyjamas and blinking in surprise. The husband was waving a large pistol about which he pointed at my head for a moment until he realised it was only the stupid
farang
making a prat of himself and then, thankfully, he lowered it. The fallen gate had knocked over a big earthenware pot full of fish and several large Koi Carp struggled and gasped for air in the wet puddle I sat in. I jumped to my feet, apologizing profusely, and scrambled around in an attempt to recapture the flapping fish.

Eventually, between the three of us we managed to rescue all of the stranded pets and put them in another water-filled receptacle. When we had done this, the owner of the Crazy Monkey asked me if I would help him to put the gate back into position. I was pleased to be able to do something to rectify the situation and I bent down and took a firm grip on the fallen gate. As I did so, a small, scruffy-looking black dog of indeterminate breed ran out of the shadows and took a lump out of my protruding left buttock. I straightened up with a yell and the owners of the guesthouse could finally contain their mirth no longer. Both of them began to fall about laughing.

Finally, with a great deal of panting and groaning—liberally punctuated by sounds of mirth from the amused couple—we managed to re-hang the heavy gate and slide it shut. Apologies were then exhanged by both parties pertaining to the unacceptable behaviour of both Joe Bucket and the small dog. Luckily for me, it appeared that the Cambodian people really do possess a sense of humour because the owners of the guesthouse told me not to worry, and that they hadn’t had such a good laugh for a long time. Just before I gratefully retired to bed, the still chuckling Srey-Leak pointed at a shiny and expensive looking four-wheel drive vehicle parked across the street from the Crazy Monkey.