Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville Read Online Free PDF

dark-eyed Filipina girls had her arm around his slim waist and was gazing up adoringly at the dashing young seaman.
    A gigantic pair of shark’s jaws grinned savagely at us from above the television; the teeth were so large they looked like a set of white knives and the gaping mouth looked wide enough to take a small bicycle.
    “I caught that fish off the coast of Malindi in fifty-five,” the old man reminisced. “It was so ferocious it took the three of us five hours to bring it in to the boat.” As he began to tell me about the past battle with the sea monster, Ron noticed my continued interest in the snap of the Philippine sunset and smiled wickedly, suddenly looking a bit like that old shark himself.
    “And that little beauty came from near the dockyard at Manila bay in sixty-two,” smiled Ron, his bright blue eyes lighting up at the memory. “And believe me, she was almost as wild as the shark!” The old man laughed so loudly at his recollections he startled me, and Nan gave a squeal when he slapped her ample rear as she bent to pour us both another rum and coke.
    Ron was dressed in nothing more than a sarong he had wrapped around his thin body, and he apologised to me for being shirtless. He told me that the cooler he could keep himself these days, the more comfortable he felt. As well as the colostomy bag I hadn’t noticed before that was attached to the old man’s gut by a plastic tube, I also saw his incredible collection of tattoos for the first time. The retired sailor’s body was almost covered in the faded designs, and I studied them with interest. Bare-breasted mermaids and geisha girls fought for space with tigers and dragons on his chest, and a three-masted galleon sailed on blue waves beneath the red setting sun on his back. I also counted the names of at least half a dozen different girls in hearts and floral motifs on his now skinny arms. Some of the tattoos were crudely done, but many were beautiful works of art. I asked Ron where he had obtained them, and he gave that booming laugh again.
    “Singapore, Mombasa, Portsmouth, Bombay, Brussels; name any port in the world, and I’ve probably had a tattoo done there,” he reminisced. A large, fouled anchor decorated Ron’s stomach near to where the tube from the colostomy bag entered his body, and he patted it sadly.
    “Looks like this anchor’s down for good now, though,” he finished reflectively. “This old wreck will not be making another voyage.”
    During the next two hours, I became aware I was listening to a man who had been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt in almost every imaginable port and red-light district in the world. Ron never bragged, in fact, it was almost as if the old man was talking quietly to himself rather than to me. His gruff, throaty voice took me on a journey on the grimy steamships and rusting cargo vessels of days gone by and he remembered trying to move containers so cold they were frozen to the deck, and leaving the ship for a twenty-four hour liberty in a country so hot all the sailors’ shoes stuck to the melting tarmac. He told me about shy, dark-eyed girls for sale in the cages of Bombay and about brassy professionals in red-lit windows in tiny cobbled alleys near medieval churches in Amsterdam. He spoke of wahines from the Pacific Islands with flowers in their black silky hair, and Kenyan girls as black as coal whose clitorises had been brutally circumcised at puberty. The old sailor treated me to his resounding laugh again when he told me about the night he and his shipmates were tricked by a trio of lady-boys from Singapore’s Bugis Street who would have fooled even a sober expert. Even when Ron had finally left the Navy at sixty years old he had continued his travels around the globe, unable to settle down after a lifetime at sea. Curious, I asked him where his favourite place had been.
    “Wherever I was going next,” he told me with a wink.
    As Ron spoke, an excitement and love for all those