Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (11 page)

The
next day we bought another pair of jeans for me because the one I bought in Vladivostok just two months before was already falling apart. Chinese quality. The rest of the day we shopped a bit and spent a lot of time between the sheets. In the evening we ate something at a restaurant and I was so hungry that I kept ordering. I ate a four-egg omelet, two boiled eggs, a quarter chicken, rice and salad and drank a big coffee and half a liter of beer. I loaded up on proteins as much as possible. It all tasted great but when I stood up, my stomach was instantly fucked. I almost had to run back to the hotel. Julia wanted to go up to the room with me but I told her not to because I wanted some privacy. She was upset about it but I didn’t care. She even wanted to be near to me when I was taking a crap, but I sent her away to do something else. I went up to the room and almost exploded in the bathroom.

Since
then Julia and I have had the agreement that she’ll leave the room when I need to use the “office”. I’ve used this expression with other girls too. I’m always fucking embarrassed to take a dump when someone is near. One of the reasons I don’t couchsurf.

The
next morning she had to leave at 7:00 in the morning and we hugged goodbye. It was not the last time I saw her.

I
went back to Harbin as a stopover to Dalian where I would see El Mariachi again. I’d been hoping to go to North Korea as well, but by now that was definitely off.  I’d bought a double-entry visa for China, but all the tours to North Korea from Beijing were insanely expensive.  I’d asked Julia if she could book me into a Russian tour I could join after they crossed the border.  I didn’t care how legal it was, I just really wanted to be able to say I’d been there.  But that would have been crazily expensive too.  It costs about 300 dollars a day to visit North Korea, no matter what country you book a tour from, and going with a tour is the only way to even get in.  Even if you go alone you’re stuck with a guide and a driver 24 hours a day and you can only stay in a government-owned 5-star hotel with the price to match.  In hindsight I just should have done it. It would have been an once-in-a-lifetime experience.

China – Dalian

After arriving by night train I took a taxi to the apartment of the friend I’d met in Seoul. El Mariachi (a young war veteran)was living in Dalian with a girl/fuck buddy named Sheila, and I had a great time with them. They were both English teachers. I had to sleep on the couch but I didn’t mind because it was free and I was looking forward to hanging out with El Mariachi.

It
was a typical student house and the toilet was so dirty that I couldn’t believe there was also a woman living there. Dalian is a very young city, it’s only a hundred years old or so. It’s a harbor city and there’s a fresh breeze wherever you go. It’s a great contrast to most Chinese cities which are all smogged up. During the day El Mariachi and his girl showed me around the city a bit.

That
night he and I went out to a bar but it wasn’t too crowded. There were a few gold diggers/pros around and drinks were very expensive. I remember El Mariachi telling me to “just get your lips wet” when taking a sip of the beer, which I found very funny and still use from time to time. We bailed after a while.

The
morning after, El Mariachi and his girl had to work and I stayed in the flat when Dan arrived and took the last bedroom. Dan was a tall American guy and another English teacher. The three of us went out to a big club where you had to pay about fourteen dollars to get in but after that got free drinks all night as long as you held on to your glass. There were loads of (Far East) Russian students in the club because China is a booming country. Everywhere you look people are building new roads, railways, bridges and buildings. I spoke to people from cities I visited when in Far East Russia. I couldn’t pull a girl but I didn’t try so hard either.

After
waking up with a hangover the next day I went to a local street food place with El Mariachi and ate some weird stuff, though not as gross as the stuff in Beijing. The chicken hearts on a stick were delicious. After this we went to a park where he showed me some marijuana plants growing along the roads. He wanted me to confirm it was real as I was a Dutch expert on weed, aka The Bongmeister. It was real marijuana and we took a few handfuls back to the apartment. I sorted it out and microwave dried it and rolled it up. This sounds bad and it was. The only buzz I got was being dizzy from the horrible crap we were smoking that evening.

That
night I wanted to go out again but El Mariachi went to bed early and wouldn’t join me, so I went out alone and spoke to lots of Russians again in the same club. At the end of the night a Chinese girl named Carol walked up and started talking to me. We flirted a bit and when the club closed I took her back to the apartment, where we slept on the couch. It was almost daylight and getting cold when I heard Dan get up, but before he left the house he took a blanket and put it over us. Yeah, Dan was a nice guy.

As
soon as he left I got up and took the girl to his room and banged her in his bed. Carol was quite young, only twenty-one years old. She had a rock hard body and was quite inexperienced in bed. It was my first Asian girl ever and I took that opportunity to bang her well.

After the deed I noticed there was a giant blood stain on the sheet. We took the sheet off the bed, talked a bit and fell asleep. We woke up in the afternoon and Carol left. I was quite hungover from lots of drinks and lack of sleep and didn’t know what to do with the bloody sheet and just hung it outside without cleaning it.

That evening I hurried to the train station to get a train ticket. I gave El Mariachi some money for a new sheet and got the fuck out of town. I didn’t know how Dan would react but for sure he wouldn’t be happy. Dan, if you ever read this, I’m sorry for being such a dick. I still have regular contacts with Carol and El Mariachi on Facebook. Carol lives in Singapore
. El Mariachi  really got into The Lord and married a pretty girl on the west coast of California.

China – Xian

A
short stay in Beijing and a few long train rides later I arrived in Xian. Xian is a major tourist destination because of the discovery of the terracotta warriors some thirty-five years ago. I slept in a dorm and heard there was a Dutch girl staying there but I didn’t see her that day. The next morning as I was eating breakfast I all of a sudden saw Nicole, a Dutch girl I met in Mongolia, walk by. I tapped her on the shoulder and she was even more surprised than I was. What was even weirder was that just two days before in Beijing I’d met up with Odette, an American girl who looked like Brooke Shields and had been in the same Mongolian hostel as Nicole. Nicole and I talked for quite some time that morning. I explored the city a bit but it was not that interesting, just another giant Chinese city.

I
woke up early the next morning and I got on the bus to the area where the famous terracotta warriors were. It was an enormous park with three giant halls filled with archeological finds. I started with the smallest one and worked my way to the biggest one, which was most impressive. There were thousands of statues and it was hard to imagine that everything was over 2200 years old. The statues were made of clay and were originally fully painted, but the paint came off when the statues came into contact with oxygen when they were excavated. The nine thousand statues were discovered in 1974 by a Chinese farmer who was digging a water well. There was no history of the statues – no-one knew they’d ever existed – and it was one of the biggest discoveries of that time. All the statues are about 1.70m high and very detailed; they were modeled after real servants and soldiers and they all have different facial expressions. Legend has it that they were buried with the emperor to protect him in the afterlife, instead of burying the actual servants alive the way they would have done in earlier times.

In the evening
I met an American woman in the hostel. I’d moved dorms and she was staying in my new one. I gathered some free beer tickets from the hostel and Christa gave me hers too. Christa had also travelled for a few months in Russia and we shared some stories. She told me a crazy story about how she took a train with hundreds of drunken Russian soldiers on it and was the only (foreign) woman. Christa was about thirty-three years old and chubby. Not a looker but she was nice and had tits the size of watermelons. They were hard to miss and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, especially since she was wearing a low-cut shirt.

That
night I had quite a few beers and later talked and flirted with Christa again in the dorm. When we went to sleep I asked her if I could sleep in her bed but she said no because of the couple who was also staying in the same dorm.

The
next morning after breakfast we were internetting in the dorm room and I threw on some charm. At one point we were sitting and flirting on a bed and I was looking her in the eyes and I said to her, “All I want is to kiss you.” “What are you waiting for?” she said.  Of course I went straight in for the kiss and things heated up fast. I took a chair and put it under the door handle. We got in her bed and she gave me a blowjob. At that moment a cleaning lady walked in and the chair just fell to the side. I have to improve my chair under the door handle technique a bit. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, the cleaning lady or Christa, but I found it quite funny. Christa wanted to stop but I convinced to go through and she did. I got my American flag but it wasn’t one to be much proud of, it was just a one-noon stand.

After
this, we walked over the huge defense wall in the city. I was leaving in just a few hours and my hands were almost glued to her giant breasts. Back in the hostel I tried to bone her a second time but she was afraid of people walking in again. One hour later I took the train to Shanghai and never had contact with her again.

In
Shanghai I had a night out at a club with lots of Russian girls. Although I succeeded three times in Russia, I pretty much bombed out due to the fact I was a poor backpacker with close to zero pick-up skills. One of the Russian girls working at the club seemed to be into me, constantly giving me free drinking tickets but I didn’t like her physically. Not all Russian girls are hot – just a lot more than other nationalities.

I
went on to the city-states Hong Kong and Macau, where I had lots of fun but nothing outside the usual drinking and weed smoking backpacker fun with lots of cool people and failed attempts to pick up a few girls from several nationalities. A hundred pictures later it was time to go off the beaten track a bit by visiting Taiwan, which isn’t a major tourist destination. By now I had decided to visit every country in Asia, so I couldn’t skip Taiwan and had to bite the bullet on the prices of the flights.

Taiwan – Taipei

In a hostel in Taipei I met D-Lux. He was a fully tattooed Canadian bodybuilder with a strong appetite for women. We went to a big club together to pick up some Taiwanese girls. At least, that was the plan, but the club kind of sucked and I found it hard to talk with the local girls. They all seemed very childish. We tried to hook up with a few chicks but didn’t get anywhere except for getting some phone numbers which were later flaked on. I had my doubts about D-Lux at first, mainly because of his foul language regarding women and crazy character. Little did I know that he would become one of my best friends on this trip.

I
was getting tired of hanging around only in big cities; I needed a break from pollution and noise. So I decided to visit the Taroko Gorge nature park. I ended up getting to the Taipei train station way too early – I got there at 9:00 in the morning and the train to Shincheng didn’t leave till 13.00, so I had to wait for a long time.

I
arrived at 16.00 and there were no more buses to Tianchang, the small mountain village I wanted to get to. A few taxi drivers were happy to take me there but asked for prices that were pure extortion. I told them to go fuck themselves and started walking. I was determined to reach the village no matter what, but my twenty-two kilogram backpack started weighing me down, the village was twenty kilometers away and the only road up there went through some steep mountains. An unrealistic plan.

Hitchhiking
there would be a smarter option, so I stood by the road for about an hour but none of the passing cars wanted to take me up the road. Out of desperation I signaled down a bus.

After
lots of pointing at maps and trying to pronounce the Chinese words, the guy let me in and sometime later he dropped me off at the headquarters of the park. It was already after 18:00 and near dark so the park was closed. I banged on the door but nobody came.

A
few minutes later a park ranger that was doing some overtime walked up to me and asked me what I was doing there. Luckily he spoke a bit of English. He told me that the small village was still miles away. I asked him if I could wait until 6:00 in the morning so I could get the first bus to the village where there was a hostel. He said it was OK to wait in front of the door and I asked him for a chair to sit on. He brought me a chair and a few moments later a couple of office ladies brought me cookies and drinks. How nice of them. I was sitting on the chair for about an hour and the guy came back. He said I could stay in the dorm with the park rangers who were young students. A bed for the night – and free!

It
was a four-bed room and the guys were friendly and spoke a bit of English. They showed me some pictures of the park on their laptops and I helped them repair a motor bike. They told me that most of the walking routes were closed because of dangerous weather. That disappointed me a lot, I was afraid I had come for nothing.