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Authors: Peter Jaggs
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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
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
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