Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (12 page)

I
barely slept because I had no pillow and one of the guys was snoring like a chainsaw. The next morning I woke early and took a well-needed shower. One of the park rangers asked me to come with him and took me on his newly repaired motorbike. He drove like a madman on the wet mountain roads. It was a bit scary but I figured he did it daily. He dropped me off in the middle of nowhere and he said it was twelve kilometers back to the park headquarters. I thanked him and he drove off on his motorcycle.

I
started walking the road back and took lots of pictures. The mountains were almost vertical and a spectacle to see in the early misty morning. There were quite a few small waterfalls but no big ones. The hanging bridge was impressive too but off-limits for non-park workers because it was too slippery after the storm a couple of days before.

After
a few hours of walking I was pretty much through the food I brought from Taipei. I had one snack of rice wrapped in seaweed left, which is not enough for the whole day. I guessed I had to take the next best thing: cigarettes.

After
a while I reached a big open spot where a small monastery had been built on a mountain with a waterfall under it. This was a place where some tour buses stopped so people could take pictures. I was sitting on the fence when a few women walked up to me and asked me where I was from. I said I was from Holland and travelled around the world. I told them I hitchhiked up to the park and although they were Canadian/Taiwanese women who spoke good English they misunderstood me and thought I’d said I hitchhiked around the world. They offered me some food and soon other people from the bus were bringing me food too. I was kind of starving so I didn’t say no to that. I got three bananas, some rice snacks, a chocolate bar, a warm cheese sandwich and a couple of bottles of water. I thanked them all and went on my way. People are friendly on this side of the world.

After
another couple of hours walking I came back to the headquarters and got some food and tea again. I waited for a few hours for a bus to the train station and went on my way. The whole trip didn’t cost me much. I didn’t have to pay much for the bus up to the park headquarters and I got a free night of sleep instead of paying for the hostel in the small village, which charged dearly for a dorm bed. I got free food and drinks and I saw some amazing nature and lots of waterfalls.  There are worse ways to take a trip.

Taiwan – Kenting and Kaohsiung

After returning from my small adventure in the nature park, I returned to Taipei. I stayed one day in the hostel and relaxed a bit before moving on to the south of Taiwan. I was glad to escape the polluted city where it rained most days. The bus ride to Kaohsiung, only took five hours, which after some of the Russian trips I’d taken was nothing. The massive bus I took had only eighteen chairs as big as couches, along with a TV and video games. The chair had a massage function and I slept like a baby after playing some old school Nintendo games. I arrived in Kaohsiung and met up with D-Lux, who had gone there the day before me.

We
took a bus to Ken Ting, a famous Taiwanese beach town. We shared a room in a place called the RICH Hotel even though we were far from rich. The room was quite luxurious and it was on the street were all the party places and bars were. Or so we thought. We went out later that night and it turned out there wasn’t a damn thing to do in Ken Ting. Most bars closed down early and only a place with some lady boys was open. No thanks! On the streets were a lot of T-shirts shops and most of them were selling T-shirts with marijuana leaves and stoner pictures. We were happy for a moment and tried to score some weed but our happiness was only short-term. No one actually sold weed, or if they did they gave us ridiculous prices. All grumpy we bought some bags of chips and lots of beer and watched the movie channel in our room for a few hours.

A
girl knocked on the door in the morning and told us that we had to check out. When we did that we were told that the room price doubled because it was the weekend. Great.  We decided to go back to Kaohsiung to see what was happening there, since we both had some time to kill before flying to Vietnam. We shared a taxi with a Taiwanese couple back to Kaohsiung, which was even cheaper than the bus. Most bus and taxi drivers in Taiwan eat beetle nuts, which like chewing coca leaves gives you energy throughout the day. The problem with beetle nuts is that they makes your teeth rot away and the liquid inside the nuts and leaves is red so it looks like the buses and taxis are driven by bloodthirsty vampires. The upside of those beetle nuts is that they’re sold by girls in bikini in little glass houses. When I first saw them I thought I was back in Holland in one of the several red light districts throughout Holland – not only in Amsterdam, as most tourists seem to think.

D
-Lux and I stayed in a big apartment a block away from the hostel that rented it out. On Saturday we went out with an American guy.

When we walked into the club and ordered a drink, two girls approached me and said I looked like a movie star. Something I was getting used to by now. They pulled out their phones and I had to give my number to them, which I gladly did. A second later three other girls pulled me onto the dance floor, which was still empty, and the first two girls joined us. So, there I was dancing with five girls on an empty dance floor. Other people started to dance as well and within moments the floor was packed. Everyone was checking me and the five girls out and I nearly felt like a real movie star. D-Lux was not too happy about it because nobody asked him. At the end of the night I had five phone numbers in my phone. I tried to escalate a bit with one of the girls at the club but didn’t get far. Asian girls are very shy and conservative even though they dress up sexy and come on to you sometimes. Even when they are in their early twenties they mostly act like fourteen-year-olds.
Hate to say it, but it’s true from a guys perspective.

Over
the next five days I got a lot of phone calls from them but it wasn’t more than a lot of giggling and badly spoken English. I couldn’t pin anyone down. D-Lux and I got into a small argument about the girl who worked in the hostel, he wanted to bang her but she started flirting with me. Later that week we went out with a few girls I don't even remember meeting. That was a bust as well. I was going to leave the country without capturing the local flag.

D
-Lux took his flight to Saigon and I followed a day later. I was about to explore the poor parts of Asia. Up till now I hadn’t seen much poverty. There were some bums in Japan and South Korea but those guys didn’t look like they were starving. I had seen extreme poverty in India a year before I left on my round-the-world trip. It looked like people were dying right in front of you on the streets. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to see that again. Julia and I still had close contact and agreed to meet again somewhere. Thailand was a good option and it was not that far away from Vietnam. For now it was time to visit ’Nam, as the country was named in the many war movies I saw. I didn’t know what to expect but I sure was excited.

Vietnam –
Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)

After
a short flight from Taipei I arrived in Saigon, the southern capital of Vietnam. I was finally in South East Asia and ready to see what everyone was raving about. The country got off to a good start – I got a very luxurious hotel room for only fifteen dollars in one of the many alleys in the tourist area.

There
were a huge number of white tourists around, something I didn’t see since Xian in China. I had mixed feelings about this, since I hadn’t come to Vietnam to see foreigners, but I enjoyed the western food sold in the restaurants after spending the last months eating rice and noodles. That’s not to say I didn’t try the local food, though.  I ate Phô for the first time and loved it. It’s a kind of thick spicy noodle soup with vegetables and pork meat that really fills you up for a while. When you buy it from street vendors it’s always a gamble and I don’t recommend trying it if there’s no toilet around.

There
are literally millions of motorbikes in Vietnam and it’s normal to see a mother with three small children on one bike while she’s holding the groceries or a sun umbrella with one hand and using the other to steer. When people drive their bike, they don’t look to the left, right or over their shoulders. They just watch right in front of them and it works surprisingly well.

D
-Lux and I did go out in the hopes of finding some girls, but it was all No Money, No Honey. D-Lux even got his thousand-dollar iPhone pick pocketed while he was drunk that night.

Three
days later we both went to Nha Trang by overnight sleeper bus, which had three small rows of beds. It was like being in a can of sardines, but still comfortable enough to have a few hours of sleep. Later I realized that Vietnam is the only country that has overnight buses like that, that actually take into consideration the fact people are going to want to sleep. I would spend many sleepless nights on countless buses in other countries fondly remembering the buses of Vietnam.

Vietnam – Nha Trang

Nha Trang is a city on the coast of Vietnam and quite a touristy one. We were there during the off-season and hotels were ridiculously cheap. I paid seven dollars for a room with marble floors, a decent bathroom, a king-sized bed, a fridge, cable television and an air–conditioning unit.

Across
the street was a small bar/restaurant named Zippo. D-Lux and I went there a couple of times and had fun with the girls working there. I kind of liked one of them. Her name was Nga and she was a short twenty-two year old cutie. She barely spoke English but with the help of a small translation book we could communicate a bit. You can buy loads of knock-off Lonely Planet books for only three or four dollars there. I learned some Vietnamese but pronouncing it right was very difficult. Vietnamese is a tonal language and the same word can mean different things depending on the pitch of your voice.

I
went out with D-Lux that evening, but a lot of clubs had girls who were working P4P (pay for pussy). It was quite obvious that they were hookers and D-Lux and I didn’t stay long inside. Back at the Zippo restaurant I kind of picked up Nga, but not much happened with her. There was never really a chance with Nga, who was still a virgin and had never had a boyfriend before. I later heard this story many times but with Nga I still have the feeling she wasn’t lying to me.

One
day she took me to her parents’ house in a rural area. It was fun to hang around the house with her family and lots of kids. She cooked me some food and it was delicious. We rode on her motorbike and we visited a few sites on the way there and the way back. Nga was super shy and she told she had never even kissed anyone before. After some charm talk she went to my room nonetheless and we kissed a bit but she wouldn’t take her clothes off no matter what I tried. She weighed only thirty-eight kilos and I could easily throw her around the room and on the bed. We had fun but I also wanted to actually get laid. I decided to go out alone.

D
-Lux had met a girl while in Saigon and she came over to see him. She wasn’t my type but she was nice. At least he was banging. One night I went out with a Vietnamese girl I met in another restaurant. We went to a club together but I really didn’t like the atmosphere there, it was very expensive and the hot girl I was with got kind of bitchy after a while. I cut my losses and went back to my hotel.

I
later met an English couple in their forties and we went to a bar with them. Inside the bar were two hot blonde Swedish girls. There were no other foreigners around and they were eyeballing me a lot. I went over to their table and started talking my ass off. It looked like everything I said hit the spot. We were drinking quite a few beers and I couldn’t figure out which one to go for. One girl was very tall and had model-like features, the other one looked like a porn star. She told that they were leaving for Cambodia the next day and I didn’t know what to do exactly. They shared a room together and bringing one of them to my room would split them up, which was unlikely to happen. Going for a threesome came to mind but seemed impossible. The problem when getting clear signals from two girls at once is that if you choose one, the other one will probably cock block you. I couldn’t think of a way to bypass this problem.

So
I made the stupid decision to ask them to dance at another place. We walked over to a place on the beach and danced a bit. This was the beginning of the worst cock blocking ever. There was a group of Australians lurking around but they were too scared to approach the girls. They just watched from a distance. There were about eight of them. One of them asked me if I was with the girls and I told him that they were with me there. They kept lurking around. Suddenly one of their moms (!?) asked the girls if either of them was my girlfriend and she said no. The mom called all the guys over and started introducing all of them to the Swedish girls.

I
was floored by this and couldn’t do a damn thing now that a few other moms were also introducing their sons to the girls. I mean: Seriously, their MOMS were picking up girls for them. What a bunch of pussies.

Of course the girls liked all the attention and the whole group sat down. The guys were just on a family holiday and had shitloads of money to spend and they
were buying expensive cocktails for the blondes. I was completely cock blocked because those asses kept talking to me while others talked to the girls. What to do when there are eight horny guys in your way and there’s no way to isolate the girls now that they’re getting all the attention from those buffed-up guys in their own age group? The situation was getting hopeless.

One guy wanted to go to another club and the whole group went there. I tagged along but could already tell it was a lost cause. The tall blonde was into a really tall muscular guy and they danced closely together. The other girl was also occupied. At one point I decided to call it quits and went home. I got their names for Facebook but never found them on there. I had this problem a lot with Scandinavian girls; many of them have the same or similar last names.
Or yeah, they might have changed them a bit but they didn’t seem the type to do that.

I
felt like shit when I went home drunk and alone. The girls had to leave the next day, which was just a few hours later, but I was pretty sure they at least kissed those guys or maybe even banged them somewhere. The thought was killing me. I did all the fucking work in the first bar, they were hanging onto my lips and then I lost them to a bunch of money-throwing Aussies who needed their mothers to get talking to girls. Months later when I was getting to know more Swedish girls I started to suspect that probably nothing actually happened: they’re not easy to pick up and always have cock blockers around.

Well,
I still was hanging out with Nga a lot. One day there had been a giant storm that flooded the city: in some streets the water was standing to my knees. I couldn’t go to the beach for about five days. I spent the time in my room or at the bar/restaurant where Nga worked. She worked every night till midnight but couldn’t spend the night with me because she shared a room and her motorbike with a coworker. In the morning she went to school. She worked twenty-eight days out of the month and earned only fifty dollars for it. I felt bad when I ordered breakfast and it cost more than her whole day’s pay.

When the sun returned
I went to the beach a lot and even jogged on the beach three times after a night of heavy drinking and smoking, after which I swore off booze and cigarettes because I was feeling so terrible the next day. My getting-back-in-shape mood only lasted three days before I started hammering beers again.

One
night I went to the beach bar again but had to get money out of the ATM first. I took out 1.5 million Dong, the local currency. On the way to the beach bar I was stopped by some street girls looking for a customer. They pulled my arm but I refused to go with them. I was kind of drunk and one of them was feeling my nuts, which actually felt pretty good. Hands were all over my body but I pushed them all off, saying that I don't pay for sex. One of the girls hit me gently in the balls then, and like all guys know, even a small graze to the nuts will hurt. I felt them pulling on me again but managed to shake myself loose and go on to the bar. I ordered a beer, but when I wanted to pay I felt my back pocket and half a million dong was gone. I’d been pick pocketed. Luckily I had put the other million Dong in the front pocket and it was still there. I was fuming and ran back to the corner where I’d met the girls, wanting to slap them in the face to get my money back. Half a million dong isn’t a fortune (about twenty-six dollars) but you can eat and drink a lot for it. I was still a very cheap bastard because I had a lot of travelling to go. Of course I never saw those girls again.

Anyway,
after a while it was time to move on. D-Lux had other plans; he was going to stay there and was thinking of taking over a bar/restaurant. I gave Nga about thirty dollars to help her with her school and kissed her goodbye. I thought about what it would be like to have some short of a relationship with her. It was probably doomed to fail, with all the cultural differences between us. It would be great for a few months but wouldn’t last.

I
was approached by a happy Vietnamese guy who offered guided motor rides through the rural areas of the country. It’s called the easy rider experience. At sixty dollars a day it wasn’t that cheap but it was the only way to really see the country.

Vietnam – 8
-day motor ride

This
part of my story focuses more on sightseeing and less on pick–up, because it was a journey through the countryside, where there aren’t really any opportunities. It was still one of the best parts of my trip.

I
had booked an eight-day motor ride through the countryside with a local guide. There were several motor guides in Nha Trang and my guide’s name was Eddy Murphy. Eddy was a crazy guy who spoke good English. I’ve had my motor driver’s license for many years (you’ll remember how I used it to get into museums for cheap back in Russia) but I’m not an experienced off road rider, especially on Vietnam’s dangerous dirt roads. I choose the cheapest option which was to sit on the back of his bike. We strapped my giant backpack on the back of the motor so I had something to sit against. It was quite comfortable.

The
first day we took a short coastal road and then we went into Vietnam’s countryside. The water at the rivers was quite low and it was strange to see people standing knee-deep in the middle of the river. They were fishing for lobster and shrimp, which were sold everywhere for next to nothing.

We
stopped along the roadside and I met an indigenous family living in a straw hut. They lived very basic lives. There are fifty–four ethnic minorities in Vietnam (population 92 million), and most of them live in poverty in the rural areas. Eddy gave the man of the house some money and a few cigarettes and we rode into the mountains where the air was a lot colder. We saw many tea and coffee plantations along the way, a beautiful sight.

We
then arrived the medium-sized city of Da Lat, which has many temples. Most of them are beautifully decorated with thousands of colorful small tiles. After this we visited a train station housing the first steam train Vietnam ever had. It wasn’t very interesting, but Eddy was making sure to stop every half-hour to show me something new, whether it was interesting or not.

The
second day we visited a silkworm farm and silk factory to see how silk is made, and afterwards a temple with strange statues of Buddha. One had countless arms and a lot of heads. Outside was a giant smiling Buddha. I’m an atheist but I like the Buddhist religion. They’re generally peaceful and don’t try to force their religion on you.

There
was an enormous waterfall close by, and if you climbed a lot of dangerous wet rocks you could get to a cave behind it. You didn’t want to slip and break a leg in the middle of nowhere. I got completely soaked but it was worth it. How often do you get to look at a waterfall from inside?

We
rode through a part of the country where there were a lot of coffee plantations. You could buy a cup of coffee at roadside stalls and the taste was amazing. I never had better coffee anywhere else in the world. The plantations are small and all family-owned; the families build small palaces to live in next to their piece of land. We ate at roadside restaurants along the way and my stomach survived everything. We stopped at a school where I took a picture with a group of school kids. They were scared of me at first because I’m so tall compared to rest of the people. People in the countryside are not used to tall white people and my arm got tired from waving to everyone. On one occasion a whole army platoon stopped marching and waved at me, their machine-guns dangling around their stomachs.