Read Online Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville by Peter Jaggs - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Jaggs
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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.
We drove down another narrow, pot-holed pathway and pulled up on a flattened area of earth where four dirt-tracks met. Later on I learned this spot was the main drag and meeting point in Victory Hill, but on my arrival, it looked about as lively as a bunch of farm tracks back in rural Devon. I gave the driver his two bucks and he parked up and went to sleep in a hammock slung between two nearby trees; his work for the day obviously done. I shouldered my bag and set off to look for a suitable HQ in the form of a guesthouse or a cheap hotel.
Joe Bucket had arrived in Sihanoukville.
C HAPTER F OUR
My first impression of Victory Hill was that the town was so tiny you could have smoked a spliff without finishing it whilst walking all the way around, and judging by the smiling, vacant expressions of some of the people there and the haze of marijuana smoke that drifted out from several open doorways and windows, plenty of the residents of the diminutive resort were doing just that. After Pattaya, ‘The Hill’ seemed little more than a quiet hamlet and I could see at once why Ron thought I might be able to locate Psorng-Preng in such a tiny area; there were so few people living here that I felt everyone must surely know each other. Despite its Lilliputian proportions,
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.
We drove down another narrow, pot-holed pathway and pulled up on a flattened area of earth where four dirt-tracks met. Later on I learned this spot was the main drag and meeting point in Victory Hill, but on my arrival, it looked about as lively as a bunch of farm tracks back in rural Devon. I gave the driver his two bucks and he parked up and went to sleep in a hammock slung between two nearby trees; his work for the day obviously done. I shouldered my bag and set off to look for a suitable HQ in the form of a guesthouse or a cheap hotel.
Joe Bucket had arrived in Sihanoukville.
C HAPTER F OUR
My first impression of Victory Hill was that the town was so tiny you could have smoked a spliff without finishing it whilst walking all the way around, and judging by the smiling, vacant expressions of some of the people there and the haze of marijuana smoke that drifted out from several open doorways and windows, plenty of the residents of the diminutive resort were doing just that. After Pattaya, ‘The Hill’ seemed little more than a quiet hamlet and I could see at once why Ron thought I might be able to locate Psorng-Preng in such a tiny area; there were so few people living here that I felt everyone must surely know each other. Despite its Lilliputian proportions,
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