Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville

by Peter Jaggs

  After I had apologised to The Professor for my puerile sense of humour and established that all he had lost was a wallet containing twenty-five bucks, I saw that the robbery had really upset him and I felt a little guilty at my mirth. To make him feel better, I devised a cunning plan to enable The Professor to exact his revenge. In fact, I never intended that the scheme should be anything other than a fantasy to cheer The Professor up, but to my surprise he seized upon the idea with apparent joy and told me he was going to put the plot into action the very next day. It was plain The Professor wanted his vengeance.

  The Professor knew exactly where he had been dipped. He had foolishly put his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans and leaned over a stall to choose some shells with which to decorate his aquarium. He felt the merest of touches, and when he straightened up—of course—his wallet was gone. I wasn’t really surprised and thought that if you go bending over in a crowded market place in front of some of the poorest people in Asia with your money wedge poking out of your backside there is an extremely good chance someone is going to nick it, but I didn’t say anything.

  The plan that had started out as a joke and that The Professor liked so much was as follows. The Professor was to revisit the market at the same time and the same place the very next day with an enticing looking brown envelope protruding temptingly from the very same pocket he had lost his wallet from. The idea was simple. Seeing the inviting envelope, the pickpocket would once again rob his victim. Only this time, instead of twenty-five bucks, he would blag only a couple of used, spermy condoms I would kindly provide from my trash bin.

  The Professor was delighted and seemed to think this was a great idea. He would teach the robbers a lesson and get his payback. I never thought he would really go through with it, but the thieves must have really pissed him off, because there was just no stopping him.

  The next day at around ten in the morning The Professor set off for the market on the rusty steed, chuckling to himself. True to my promise, I had rummaged through the trash, and a brown envelope containing two used contraceptives was jutting alluringly out of his pocket. The Professor asked me if I would like to accompany him to witness the fun as it had all been my idea but I declined, thinking I would do better by staying well out of this one.

  Three hours later The Professor returned. He was acting even more manic than the day before, and for a second I thought he might be going to punch me. He didn’t said a word, but simply stood there in front of me, hyper-ventilating. Then he emitted a strange, strangled cry and stalked to his room and slammed the door behind him.

  “I would be grateful if in the future,” I heard him yell from behind the closed door, sounding just like Apoo—the Indian who runs the corner shop in the Simpsons—“you would keep your bloody great ideas in your cake-hole!”

  When The Professor had finally forgiven me enough to tell me what had happened it was truly a miracle of the Gods that I managed to keep a straight face. The trap that I had devised had in fact, worked perfectly. Bending over to scrutinize the same shells on the same stall in the same market, it wasn’t long before The Professor felt the same sneaky hand steal the envelope containing the nasty surprise from his back pocket.

  Smiling happily to himself, The Professor then walked around the market for a while, imagining every unhappy looking Cambodian to be the victim of his malevolent revenge. Eventually, he returned to where he had left his treasured motorcycle.

  Unfortunately, some wandering thief had taken advantage of The Professor’s absence to steal the rusty steed.

  After The Professor had told me his story I thought it best to get out of his way for a while because every time I looked at him, I could feel the corners of my mouth turning up into a smile. I thought the best idea would be to take a stroll down to the pier for an hour or so and see if there was anybody fishing. On the way, I bumped into Narith, who was walking down the hill that ran down to the beach. He said he was going to see a friend of his who lived in one of the small wooden houses on the left hand side of the track. Every day I passed by I had noticed a very old woman who always sat on the wooden steps of one of the small shacks, and it turned out that the friend Narith was going to see was a relative of the old lady.

  As there were so few old people around Sihanoukville I thought it might be interesting to talk to the old girl, with Narith acting as translator, of course. The motodop driver and I sat on the steps with the old lady and Narith put the questions I wanted to ask her into Khmer and then told me what her answers were.

  The old lady was stooped and slight and she wore a tattered purple krama and a faded green shirt. Her hair was shot through with streaks of grey which accentuated the dark brown of a face that had wrinkles upon wrinkles. Her arms were thin and bony and the skin on them was so scaly it looked like that of a reptile. She looked at me as I sat down and I immediately perceived a depth of suffering in her dark eyes that I knew I had never seen before in Thailand. Every time she smiled—which wasn’t often—she showed a set of teeth and gums that were stained bright crimson by years of chewing betel nut.

  Despite her archaic appearance, the old lady turned out to be a mine of information about the Sihanoukville of the past.

  “My name is Mrs. Krom and I am eighty-two years old. I was born in Kep but I first came to live in Sihanoukville in 1956 when I was thirty because my husband was a clever and important government draughtsman who was working with the French engineers who designed and built the port in the late nineteen fifties. In those days, we Cambodian people called Sihanoukville Kompong Son—and did so until the name of the town was changed to honour King Sihanouk in 1960. The port was built because the country could no longer use the Mekong Delta which came under the control of the Vietnamese after the termination of French Indochina in 1954.

  My husband was very well paid for his highly-skilled work and we always had more than enough money. He was also a very generous man and he bought his youngest sister and her husband a very small house along this road when he was working on the port. And that little house is where you are sitting today.

  A few years after the development of the port was finished my husband was offered a very well paid job helping to design a series of large reservoirs that were being planned in up-country Cambodia. I had just given birth to a beautiful baby daughter who we named Arunny, because she was my morning sun. Although my husband’s new work would take us away from Kep to Phnom Penh we wanted to give Arunny the very best things in life, so we decided that my husband should take the job and we made the move away from our home to the capital city. For a while my life was perfect. I had a clever, important husband who loved me, a beautiful child and the great deal of money my husband earned meant that we lived extremely well.

  Then came that terrible day; the seventeenth of April, in 1975. Everyone in Phnom Penh was driven out of the city by the Khmer Rouge. Boys not yet in their teens were carrying machine guns around and telling us we were all going to be farmers now. We loaded our possessions into our car but soon realized this was a mistake because there was no gasoline available and after a day we abandoned the vehicle by the side of the road with all the other cars and motorcycles that had been left there. We had no idea where we were going, and were driven along by mere children who were looking for trouble every step of the way. It soon became plain that the Khmer Rouge were also taking many people away from their families, and when they did, none of them returned. They were especially looking for doctors, teachers, lawyers and other professional people. So we threw away all our good things and when anyone asked us we pretended my husband had been a block-layer on construction sites around the city.

  We arrived at our destination and we were made to grow rice and dig irrigation canals there. We all had to work very hard for twelve hours in the heat of the sun every day. There was very little food but we were told once the rice was harvested there would be more than enough for everyone. By this time, food was so short and the work was so hard people were already begi
nning to die around us, but the Khmer Rouge didn’t seem to care. We watched hungrily as the rice shoots we had planted finally began to come up, but when the crop was nearly ready the Khmer Rouge moved us all on and marched us away to start all over again in a new place.

  One day when he was working in the fields, my husband found a nest of rice-rats in a hole in a bank. They are very good to eat so he hid them in his pocket intending to bring them back for Arunny and myself because we were almost starving. This was strictly against the rules and he was spotted slipping them into his jacket by a fourteen year old soldier. As he cooked the rats over a fire that night more soldiers turned up and they beat him with rifle butts and forced his head into a bucket of water until he nearly drowned. They told him he should have been working, not hunting for rats. Then, they tied him to a tree and left him there for two days with no food and water and during the torture he broke down and told them he used to be a draughtsman. After that they took him away and I never saw him again. One of the young Khmer Rouge soldiers told me later how they had cut out his liver and eaten it. I don’t believe the young boy was lying.

  Arunny missed her father dreadfully and a month later she became very ill with a fever and stopped eating. With no medicines and nobody to help her she died within a few days. The night before the day she passed away an owl shrieked all night long so I knew she was going to die. I buried my beautiful little daughter in a shallow hole next to a frangipani tree and cried myself to sleep for a week afterwards. I knew my morning sun would never rise again.

  Before we left Phnom Penh my husband had slipped me a plastic tube containing several small items of gold jewelry and two small diamonds which I secreted in my vagina. My husband had saved my life. With these hidden treasures inside my body I managed to buy enough food to keep myself alive. I dirtied my face and clothes and didn’t wash so I would smell very badly. I also acted like I was crazy and chewed betel nut whenever I could get it so none of the soldiers would want to rape me like they did so many of the other women.

  In 1978, on the twenty-fifth of December, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. They overthrew the Khmer Rouge government on the seventh of January, 1979. Pol Pot and his supporters fled into the jungle where they continued to plan attacks on the Cambodian government for nearly ten years. Despite this continuing resistance, it was no secret to most of us involved that the Khmer Rouge regime was already in disarray well before the Vietnamese arrived.

  As soon as I could, I made my way back to Sihanoukville where I was lucky enough to find my sister-in-law, who was all I had left. She still had this tiny house you are sitting in and we stayed here together. She was also very lonely because her husband and son had both been killed when the Americans bombed the warehouses at the port where they both worked in 1975. The Americans also bombed the train yard, the refinery, the airfield and the Navy Base at Ream. The bombings were in retaliation for the Khmer Rouge capture of the American container ship S.S. Mayaguez.

  I never married again and I have lived with my sister-in-law for thirty-eight years now. Times have been hard but there have always been plenty of fish in the sea and we lived off little else for many years, together with the vegetables we grow. Now the tourists have started to come we make a little extra money from a small laundry business we run. Our needs are very simple.

  I still miss my husband and daughter Arunny terribly, and I cry and pray for them every night. Of course, nothing can ever bring them back, and sometimes I wonder why I fought so hard to stay alive, at all.”

  By the time the old lady had finished her tragic story she had tears streaming down her lined cheeks and I wished I had kept my big mouth shut. The questions I had asked Mrs. Krom had brought back such painful recollections of things that would probably have been best left unsaid. With an estimated one and a half million violent deaths in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime and another million or more during the resulting famine that followed, Mrs. Krom’s tale was hardly unique, but it was the closest I had ever been to the tragic history of the country and it upset me a great deal. I was surprised to feel a couple of tears slide down my own face, and for some reason this seemed to please the old lady and she clasped my hand in her own bird-like claw. When I left, I gave Mrs. Krom a ten-dollar bill and I was touched when she pulled me against her frail, bent body for a few seconds and hugged me before disappearing up the wooden steps into the darkened interior of her tiny home with only her memories for company.

  After talking to Mrs. Krom I felt I definitely needed a beer or two to cheer me up so I walked back up the hill to the bar-strip. I climbed up the rickety stairs of a very small bar which was on the second floor of a wooden building with a tin roof. The front of the bar looked right out onto the road; there was a ramshackle balcony with a scarred, polished counter and a couple of bar stools. From this vantage point it was possible to obtain a view of the whole of the bar-strip, what little of it there was.

  Darkness was falling and the evening was a dull one and threatened rain. Heavy, grey clouds were scudding in from the direction of the sea together with the encroaching darkness. The red light on top of the mast in the Weather Station that gave The Hill its other name winked like a red star. The leafy silhouettes of the trees the mast stood amongst moved and rustled in the growing wind ominously, and in the distance, foreboding rumbles of thunder could be heard which heralded the approach of a storm. I wasn’t worried though, because despite some cool nights, the days had been incessantly hot since I had arrived in Sihanoukville and I was actually looking forward to the coming, cooling downpour.

  I saw a beggar come crawling slowly and painfully along the path at the top of the bar-strip on the other side of the road. He appeared to have lost the use of both his legs, and he made progress by dragging himself along with his arms. His paralysed legs trailed in the dust behind him as he continued on his painstaking way. At every open-fronted bar or restaurant the beggar paused and held out a blue plastic cup to the customers who were drinking or eating at the tables that faced the street. Many of the farangs who sat at the tables put a note or two into the beggar’s cup, because he really did look a very pitiable sight. It is hard for anyone with any kind of heart at all to do justice to a glass of the amber nectar or a plate of fish and chips when faced with such an unfortunate human being staring at them imploringly.

  I watched the beggar disappear around the corner into Mealy Chenda Street, his wasted legs leaving two pathetic lines in the dirt road in his wake. I was surprised he had managed to sneak into the bar-strip at all, and hoped for his sake Didier the gangster wouldn’t see him.

  A flash of forked lightning lit up the new night sky in a steely streak and the thunder growled again, sounding like a huge, distant dog. The storm was much closer now and I guessed it was time to move around the corner myself. I thought I would sink my last couple of beers in The J-Bar, which belonged to the Mealy Chenda guesthouse. From there, I would be able to make a dash for the Crazy Monkey if it really started to rain in earnest.

  The sky was darkening forebodingly now and I wished to avoid a soaking. I walked up to the crossroads quickly and turned into Mealy Chenda Street, following the furrows in the dust made by the beggar who was still pulling himself along slowly in front of me. As I passed by the wretched little guy, I felt a pang of compassion for his plight and I dropped a dollar bill into the plastic cup clutched tightly in his hand. There was nobody else around in the quiet dirt road at all.

  Suddenly—in the wink of an eye—the shadows of the night were illuminated by a tremendous bolt of lightning. For a split second, the whole of The Hill was lit up as brightly as a floodlit football match at Wembley Stadium. A tumultous peal of thunder rent the air. I could feel the rumbling roar move through the soles of my feet and up into my guts. Instantly, the heavens opened and the rain came down as hard as nails. I was soaked to the skin immediately, it was as though someone had thrown a bucket of tepid water over me. A chill wind gusted in the air and the rain pounded and hammered on
the tin roofs of the surrounding buildings loudly.

  I decided to make a run for it and began legging it towards the nearest bar which was about fifty yards down the rain-washed track. I splashed through the driving rain. The downpour had already turned the dirt-roads of Victory Hill into a slippery quagmire and I had to watch my step.

  As I ran through the stinging deluge, I was surprised when I became aware of another runner behind me who was also fleeing the cloudburst. He was obviously fitter and much more sure-footed than myself, because he flew past me, his bare feet raising splashes of muddy water at every athletic step. I looked at the back of the powerful sprinter as he easily pulled away from me, his arms and legs pumping like pistons. I was immensely impressed with his prowess. I was running hard, but this guy had passed me by as though I was standing still.

  It was then that my amazement caused me to halt in mid-stride for a double-take and I stood in the dark, deserted rain-soaked track and stared after the bolting sprinter in astonishment. Yes, it was the paralysed beggar.

  It appeared that the pelting rain had effected a miracle cure and the not-so-handicapped pan-handler was now fleeing for the shelter of an overhanging roof at the end of the street. I was drenched by now and I couldn’t have got myself any wetter if I had tried, so I saved my breath and gave up on the running. It had become dangerous by now anyway, due to the slippery surface of the track. I trudged through the pelting rain and the cloying river of muddy water that was now the road, shaking my head in disbelief.

  I reflected that when in Cambodia, sometimes it pays to remember some things are not always quite as they seem.

  Lying on my bed back in my room at the Crazy Monkey, I surmised that it had not been one of my better days in the country so far. Besides being semi-responsible for the theft of The Professor’s rusty steed, I had also been moved to tears when listening to the tragic story of poor old Mrs. Krom.