Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville by Peter Jaggs

stretch of Victory Beach was almost deserted and I settled down on one of the half-dozen wooden sunbeds that belonged to a tiny beach bar called Cafe de Mar. I thought this rather a grand name for a establishment which was little more than a large shelf stacked with bottles surrounded by a rickety bar that looked like it had been knocked up out of driftwood. The Cafe de Mar stood in the shade of a huge, wispy tree that looked like some kind of conifer. There were also some coconut palms along the beach but it looked as though they had almost blown down in a storm and someone had propped them up on wooden stands so they were now growing almost horizontally. Although the gnarled trunks of the trees were leaning at weird angles, the crowns had already turned upwards and were growing towards the sun once again. Sun-beds and umbrellas had not taken over Victory Beach yet and there were no Jet-Skis so it was still pleasant, but I wasn’t too sure about the real airplane that someone was apparently turning into an internet cafe. I had just settled back with a banana milk shake and a novel when two small boys carrying trays containing carved seashells came racing across the sand towards me.
    “You buy one!” You buy one!” They both clamoured. The larger lad—and obviously the leader—elbowed his smaller competitor roughly out of the way and he went sprawling into the sand, his half-dozen shells scattered around him. “You buy one from me,” the bigger boy insisted, and placed his tray directly in my lap where I couldn’t ignore it. Like most of the kids I had seen around Cambodia so far, both little boys were ragged and barefoot and they looked as brown and hard as baked chestnuts.
    “Steady on!” I said to the bigger lad, waving an admonishing finger at him. “You’re twice the size of him!”
    “No problem, he my brother,” the rough young enterpreneur assured me as if this made his violent behaviour totally acceptable, and he gave his sibling another hard clip round the ear for good measure just to show everything really was OK. The little boy in the sand looked up at him and laughed. There was now no doubt about it. Just as I had suspected when watching the street kids play-fight in Koh Kong, and when watching the boy on the boat enduring his mother’s spiteful pinches, these Cambodian kids were incredibly tough.
    The elder boy helped his brother up with a yank on the little lad’s shaggy hair and pointed his finger behind me.
    “And this is my sister,” he said, and I turned around to face one of the most beautiful Asian girls I have ever seen.
    The girl was around seventeen and wore a white, broad-rimmed sunhat that set off the cascade of jet-black hair that fell around her slim, shapely shoulders. To attempt to describe her any further would be to do her an injustice; she was simply perfect. She immediately took over the sales pitch from her young brothers who shut up at once, recognizing that their sister stood far more chance of persuading a horny foreigner to part with his money than two snotty-nosed little boys. The lovely girl could speak English very well and simply to keep her around for a while I purchased two crappy bead bracelets I didn’t want, a ring which fell apart the next day and a key chain made from a seashell that I had absolutely no use for whatsoever. I unashamedly paid an extortionate price for the rubbish items just to see the girl smile. After fleecing me in the nicest possible way the Cambodian beauty gathered up her wares and floated off down the beach like a dream.
    When she had gone her young brother immediately plonked his tray back in my lap—obviously very jealous of his sister’s success—and tried to sell me a shell.
    “You buy one,” he told me firmly, and looked at me accusingly as I watched his sister’s erection-inducing buttocks undulate enticingly under her tight sarong as she walked away.
    “Tomorrow,” I told him, dragging my eyes away reluctantly from the