Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville

by Peter Jaggs

  I had arrived back at my room at the Happy Home around midnight to encounter a completely naked Russian couple in the corridor on the fourth floor. The guy was semi-conscious in the corner, legs splayed apart, his genitalia displayed very ungracefully for all to see. His attractive, large-breasted partner was seemingly doing her best to kill him with one of the round metal lids she had grabbed from one of the large trash-bins that stood at the end of every corridor. She was certainly pulling no punches, and wielded the heavy cover ferociously. There was quite a lot of blood splattered up and around the walls, as well as a generous amount of claret running down her boyfriend’s face. It appeared that she had already broken his nose with the unusual weapon, and was now attempting to do the same to his head. I debated going to the poor bloke’s assistance, but both of the Thai security guards who worked at the Happy Home were standing there smoking cigarettes and regarding the incident with interest so I guessed they had the situation in hand and left them to it. Shortly afterwards the police turned up and took the now-hysterical girl away, wrapped in nothing more than a bedsheet. The security guards told me later that the girl’s boyfriend had apparently sneaked off for a short-time in Soi Six under the guise of going for a game of golf. This indescretion would probably have gone unnoticed—aside from the dose of gonnorhea he had brought back and given to his girl as a holiday present. I couldn’t help thinking the lovebirds maybe should have gone to Southend-on-Sea where the ladies of the night are much less alluring.

  Back on the minibus to Koh Kong I concentrated on ignoring Groucho and the moronic backpacker and contemplated the scrubby trees lining the sun-blasted fields on either side of the bumpy road. I was still only ten minutes away from Thailand, the Cambodian driver and his mate were still jabbering away to each other in a language that sounded very much like the chorus from Neddy Seagoon’s Ying Tong Song and I felt lost already. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before we reached Koh Kong; the port town where I was to board the boat for Sihanoukville the next day. The minibus pulled up outside a wooden guest house and everyone got off. I wondered if the driver had brought us here simply to earn a commision, but in fact the ramshackle guest house was situated right opposite the jetty on the river where the boat left for Sihanoukville in the morning, and at three dollars a night I wasn’t about to argue. In fact, to my surprise, although very basic, the rooms were spotlessly clean. The polished wooden floors literally gleamed and the little restaurant upstairs that looked over the dirty brown river served a variety of cheap and tasty meals and snacks, including sandwiches and toasties. My first meal in Cambodia was a not very exotic but certainly welcome bacon and ham sarnie, and as I tucked in I began to feel that perhaps I needn’t have worried so much about the horror stories I had been told in Pattaya about uncooked Khmer food and the subsequent food poisoning it was bound to induce after all.

  After I dumped my bag I had a walk around Koh Kong to kill some time, but due to an horrendous smash up on the Rayong to Trat road involving a truck driver high on amphetamines who had wiped out several motorcycles, the traffic had been heavy and we had arrived late, so there was little time to explore the small town properly. Many people had told me that Koh Kong was a shit-hole, but I was surprised to find I disagreed. Sure, it is a shack-lined dustbowl of a town, but after the concrete metropolis of Pattaya, it was not without a certain charm. There were plenty of old-fashioned wooden houses and shops lining the quiet streets and motorcycles and bicycles in various states of disrepair spluttered along the dirt roads. Pigs in wooden trailers were being pulled behind some of the motorcycles whilst others dragged impossibly heavy looking tree trunks behind them that bounced dangerously on the bumpy surface. It didn’t take me long to notice there were also some extremely attractive Cambodian girls knocking about and this raised my spirits considerably. I also couldn’t help observing how young everyone looked. It was a hot day so I bought a cold can of beer and sat at a stone table outside a tiny store to drink it and watch the world go by.

  I sipped the ice-cold beer straight from the can outside the open-fronted store—which was little more than a hut—and three small street kids sidled up to where I was sitting. The small boys were all barefoot and as grubby and ragged as hell. The oldest and biggest lad was around ten years old and his companions perhaps a year or two younger. I expected them to attempt to beg a note or two (there are no coins in use in Cambodia), but their grimy leader pointed a dirty finger at my drink and then pointed to a plastic bag he was carrying which contained several empty cans. I realized that the trio were simply collecting the empty cans for scrap, so I motioned to the boy that I would let him have mine just as soon as I had finished my beer.

  Whilst the boys waited they indulged in a spot of play-fighting, and I was taken aback by the ferocity of their game as they attempted to impress the watching farang. They punched and kicked each other with real venom, and I winced as some of the older boy’s blows smacked hard against the head and body of his smaller friends. I flinched again when the youngest of the lads took a kick to the stomach delivered by the dirty, bare foot of his much bigger pal and he flew over backwards, cracking his close-cropped head on the sidewalk with a hollow thud. I expected the small boy to cry, but the doughty little fighter picked himself up and, rubbing his head, threw himself back into the fray, laughing. He received another heavy thump round the ear from a small bony fist almost immediately, but shook that off as well. I watched the street-kids bashing lumps out of each other in playful delight for ten minutes, and I couldn’t help thinking that I wouldn’t want to come up against one of them in a dark alley in five or six years time.

  When I had all but finished my drink the ringleader pointed at the can and raised his dark eyebrows at me. I nodded to him and he grabbed it, then threw back his head and drained the last few drops of beer with exaggerated relish. Then, the three ragamuffins chased each other down the street, yelling and cuffing at one another. I would like to have given the boys a dollar or two, but realized if I did every other farang that came to Koh Kong would be pestered by the tough little urchins.

  When I had finished watching the youngsters punch each other silly I walked all around the small town and through the crowded, smelly market place. I was struck by how friendly all the local children were. Nearly all of the kids I passed greeted me with a wave and a ‘Hello’ and I was surprised when none of them asked for money. When two lovely teenaged girls pedalled by on their bicycles and smiled at me shyly from under lowered eyelids, I almost felt I had started to enjoy myself already. I finished up with a walk along the road that runs parallel to the Kah Bpow River, and stopped at a bridge just before the headquarters of a mining company to look at the ramshackle hamlet of wooden houses built over the scummy water. As I leant on the concrete rails a shining blue kingfisher plunged into the filthy water in front of me and emerged with a wriggling fry in its beak. The beautifully irridescent feathers of the little bird contrasted strangely with the rubbish strewn waters from where it had taken its squirming prey.

  Back at my guest house, I sat in the elevated restaurant and had a nightcap of another couple of beers and looked out at the wide expanse of dirty river and the gigantic new Koh Kong bridge. The huge structure had been built to take the place of the boats that until fairly recently had been the only way of crossing the muddy waters of the Kah Bpow River. The young waiter told me that the bridge had opened on April fourth in 2002 and before that, the crossing could be extremely hazardous in bad weather. When I paid for my second beer I tipped the teenaged Cambodian a twenty baht note I still had in my wallet and he smiled at me gratefully. He immediately went behind a wooden counter and returned with a handful of sweet-smelling brown and green stalks and leaves which he placed on the table in front of me together with a pack of King-size cigarette papers. It had been a long journey and a tense day for me, so I took him up on his offer.

  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 mor
e 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.