Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville by Peter Jaggs Page A

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