Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville by Peter Jaggs Page B

joint on the other side of the bar and playing cards for money—two activities that would certainly get you nicked back in Thailand if performed in public. It was rapidly becoming plain there were very little in the way of laws in Sihanoukville.
    Oldies from the 70s and 80s were being played instead of the ubiquitous gangster rap now so common in the bars of Pattaya, and I enjoyed Bono’s U2 telling everyone how he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. This reminded me how I had better start my own search for the girl with the daft name properly tomorrow, myself. A dozen bar-girls were dancing up on a rickety wooden stage that stood against the wall and the villainous looking French owner bellowed at them good-naturedly to move it about a bit more. The beer was cheap and cold, the music good and the girls pretty and although I thought that Victory Hill looked more like a film set than a real place and felt like a bizarre fusion between the Wild West and the swinging sixties, I was already beginning to feel glad I had embarked upon old Ron’s mission.
    It would have been easy to stay in the Shark Bar all night, but I decided to start at the top of the track and visit every other nightspot on the way down instead. In practice, this was not going to be as daunting as it sounds, because there were fewer than a dozen bars. Anyone attempting this at most of the busier bar-strips in Pattaya these days would certainly be dead from alcoholic poisoning before they progressed less than halfway down. I climbed a set of rickety steps that led to an upstairs bar with an open front that commanded a fine view of the whole street. I ordered a beer and peered out into the Sihanoukville night.
    Over the road, in a dark doorway at the top of the track, I saw one of the card-playing Frenchmen I had noticed in the Shark Bar bar earlier clobber a Cambodian beggar who was attempting to sneak into the bar area. A flash of movement, the smack of knuckles on flesh, and the tattered pan-handler lay motionless in the dirt. The tough guy uttered something in French and walked away, rubbing his fist. If he did this in Pattaya he would have every member of the beggar, flower-selling and crap-vending mafia lurking around every dark corner on the way back to his room waiting to perform an impromptu tracheotomy with a variety of sharp instruments. It was rapidly becoming plain to me who ran this place and I strengthened my resolve not to pull any of the stunts I had been getting away with in Pattaya for years until I knew Sihanoukville a bit better. Victory Hill was way too small to make enemies.
    Although The Professor had warned me most of the Frenchmen who owned the bars on the hill were gangsters this didn’t bother me unduly, because I have found this to be the case in many of the world’s red light areas. Some of the nicest blokes I ever met were a selection of Australian crooks and villains who used to run the bar areas in Manila and Angeles City way back in the early eighties. Whether my timid room mate was exaggerating or not I don’t know, but there certainly seemed to be a definite hierarchy amongst the foreign bar-owners. I also noticed they were rather cautious around Joe Bucket during his first week on The Hill until they realised I was not from Interpol or a potential competitor, but simply in town to try and find Psorng-Preng and lay around on the beach and spend lots of money on beer, girls and food in their bars. By the end of my stay in Sihanoukville most of the Frenchmen on The Hill were greeting my arrival in their bars and restaurants with a smile instead of a suspicious glare and Didier—the one who had bashed the beggar—used to almost crush my chest with a bear-hug and give me a big sloppy kiss on both cheeks every time I visited his place.
    On that first night on Victory Hill I sampled several Angkor draft beers in every bar on the strip then made my way back rather unsteadily to my room. My wobbliness was accentuated