Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville Read Online Free PDF Page B

far-off places that had not been dimmed by the years shone through the frail old man’s conversation, and I realised I was in the company of a true traveller and adventurer. Listening to the old seaman, it was with some embarrasment that I realised just how set in my own ways I had become. The sad thing was, I hadn’t always been such a boring stick-in-the bar, and when I had first come to Asia at the age of twenty, I too had thrown myself into the great adventure with relish. Back then it had always been me who had jumped on a rattling bus and travelled to Isaan at the mere mention of a bar-strip where the girls were not yet as mercenary as those in Pattaya. I explored the crazy US military base towns of Olongapo and Angeles City in the Philippines alone back in the early eighties when none of my mates had the bottle to come with me. And when I first took a bumpy bus journey down South all the way from Bangkok to Hat Yai, the town had been a dusty, quiet frontier town where sex-starved Malaysian husbands nipped over the border away from their wives to sample the cheaper and much more accomodating Thai girls. Back when I first saw Lamai and Chaweng beaches on Koh Samui, they had been nothing but strips of golden sand boasting a dozen ramshackle twenty baht a night huts, where the few backpackers who visited the island could grab a few hours sleep before continuing to get stoned under the now long-gone palm trees. The Samui beaches were so quiet in those days it was possible to make love to your Thai girl on the deserted sands at night without anyone either knowing or caring. Sadly, if you were to try this nowadays, the boys in brown would soon have something to say about it.
    Pattaya was such a great place in those early days it was inevitable that it would soon begin to grow out of all proportion and when the city did start to develop, it did so with a vengeance. It wasn’t long before comfortable, budget accomodation with hot water showers and cable TV began to replace the mildewed rooms of guesthouses with their squat toilets and ‘bucket and chuck it’ washing facilities. Cheap cafes and restaurants started to serve up tasty, affordable all-day breakfasts and pie and chips, and the stalls selling khao pad khai and noodle soup were quickly forgotten. McDonalds and Pizza Huts opened, and big supermarkets sprang up almost overnight and all us sex-pats started buying packaged meats, sandwich fillers, cheeses and convenience foods with which to fill up our new fridges. So many bars were built, if things were planned properly it was possible to stagger around a circuit of cheap drinking establishments populated with attractive, almost naked Thai girls all night long. In Pattaya, Happy Hour can last forever if you know where to go.
    Back on that evening I spent with him, Ron assured me that Pattaya’s unerring ability to gratify almost any human want, need or perversion instantly is the very reason why Joe Bucket and so many others like him become so bored and lethargic. The old sea-dog reckoned the city has become so comfortable and convenient over the years there is now very little point for most guys to go anywhere else, and as everyone knows, familiarity with a place often leads to discontent. I think the old man was right. This would also explain how the previously rural side of the Sukhumvit Road where white egrets and mynah birds used to follow buffaloes through the green trees in the flooded fields to catch the fish and frogs their plodding hoofs disturbed has now turned into something that looks like a 1970s British housing estate.
    “And it’s all happened because Pattaya is the only place in the world where it ain’t ridiculous for a bloke to spend loads of money on a holiday and stay in bed all day and night,” the old man said with a wry smile. Knowing the Pattaya of old, I had to agree with him.
    Listening to the old sailor, I realized everything he said was true. Although it is undeniable that much of the