Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville Read Free Page B

return on a new tourist visa. So, everybody piles down to the Cambodian border at Poi Pet in a minibus and leaves the country for five minutes. The more adventurous travellers sometimes pause for a quick short-time with a girl of questionable age and cleanliness in a wooden hut in one of the aptly named ‘Chicken Farms’ just over the border. It is then possible to re-enter the Land of Smiles under a new stamp on the double or triple entry tourist visa you obtained at the Thai consulate back home. On every visa run I have ever made the journey to the border has been made doubly unbearable by having to listen to some knobhead complaining incessantly about the ridiculous system. I wish they would shut up and live with it. We all know it’s crazy but that’s the way things work if you want to stay in the country longer than the three months allotted to tourists. You’re in Thailand now. Surely you didn’t expect things to be sensible? If you don’t like it, you can always go back to your cold, expensive country and its equally cold and expensive women anytime you please. Any takers?
    It has always been my policy to try to remember that when life does not go quite as well as it should, it is a good idea to bear in mind that there is always someone worse off than yourself. Looking at the old man in a wheelchair in the queue in front of me, reminded me that I was, as usual, the author of my own misfortunes and that my problems were easily rectified by a handful of Thailand tokens. The poor old fellow looked in a bad way, and although he peered around him with interest, pain had etched lines around his eyes and cut deep grooves into his almost skeletal face and his yellowing skin was stretched tightly over his cheekbones.
    I couldn’t help noticing that the Thai girl pushing the old boy’s wheelchair certainly didn’t seem to have any of the complaints that had recently begun to irk Jai so much. The girl was one of those smiling, chubby, capable-looking types that you often come across in Thailand, and enough bling to start a small store was hung and fastened around every one of her available extremities. Gold bracelets fought for space with bangles on her wrists, and enough gold chains to have the most vulgar of gangster rappers green with envy festooned her neck and glinted in the sunlight. Obviously having run out of space, she had even begun to encircle her ankles with her favourite metal. I wondered with some interest where she would start next. If this female Mr.T had fallen into the bay from Pattaya’s Bali Hai pier, all that extra weight would certainly have sunk her like a stone, even if she was blessed with the skills of an Olympic swimmer.
    Despite her predeliction for the shiny stuff, the undeniably plump but certainly still attractive woman, who on closer inspection appeared to be around thirty-five years old, did seem to be taking exceptional care of the old guy. I would like to think it was her good heart rather than the acquisition of all those expensive trinkets that prompted Nan—for I learned later this was her name—to fuss around her patient’s wheelchair plumping cushions, patting a sunken cheek and generally letting the old chap know someone cared. Looking at the couple, I couldn’t help remembering a visit to an old peoples’ home back in England to visit the ailing father of a friend. I recalled how saddened I had been at the lumpy sofas full of drooling and glassy-eyed fossils who had been prompted into singing ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’ by an over-enthusiastic care-worker. Just then, the smiling Thai girl’s dress fell open as she bent down to straighten the old man’s blanket and I copped a look down the front of her generous cleavage. I knew which way I was going when my dotage came.
    The old man had one of those safari-type waistcoats that have enough zips and pockets to take the contents of a small house and the girl had hung it over the back of his wheelchair. After changing a