Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (14 page)

On
the third day in Bangkok I got a strange request from Julia. Imagine this:
 

Julia
(with thick Russian accent): “Neil, I want to go to Ping Pong show”.

Me
(laughing): “Baby, do you even know what a Ping Pong show is?”

Julia:
“Yes I know, I read about it on the Internet”.

Me:
“Sure? What is a ping pong show, according to you?”

Julia:
“Women shoot ping pong ball from vagina”.

Me:
“LET’S GO!!!”
 

And
off we went, we got into a taxi and drove to a shady part of town (Pat Pong), got out of the taxi and into a tuk tuk. The driver, of course, knew the best sex show in town. “Yes Mister, I know the best”.

We
stopped at a place and the doorman asked for five hundred baht per person to get in. Now, five hundred baht was something like twelve dollar so it wasn’t cheap but we got a free beer and could stay as long as we wanted. The stage was in the middle of the room and had tables and chairs around it. We sat down close to the stage and a waitress brought us two large beers.

The
first girl walked onto the stage and inserted a small bottle of coke in her pussy and filled a couple of glasses. I looked at Julia and surprisingly, she was smiling. Next up was another girl doing a dance show and inserting a couple of ping pong balls in her pussy. She sat down, opened her legs and shot the balls at least 1.5 meter into a small bucket. Not an easy thing to do. After this we saw another ten different acts including girls pulling ten meters of barbwire out of her snatch, a string of razorblades, a string of plastic roses, a girl deepthroating a long balloon, a girl smoking a cigarette with her pussy and finally a live sex show, a guy and a girl performing at least thirty different acrobatic fuck positions. Some Chinese guys caught and pocketed the ping pong balls that missed the bucket and flew off stage. I laughed, but looking back one of them would have made an excellent souvenir for my guy friends back home. I later found out that the stage girls put a large plastic box inside their pussy, which is how they’re able to pull out those long strings of razor blades, barb wire and flags.

The show repeated itself afterwards, there were some older guys rubbing their crotch while seeing the acts. Those damn perverts, to me, at that moment, it was just a funny thing to see: it wasn’t sexual at all.

When walking out, Julia and I both felt ashamed of contributing to such shameless sexual exploitation. The girls on stage looked bored and sad at the same time; I’d never seen an expression on a girl’s face like that before. I would see it many times again in other countries.

Julia
had done some Internet research and found out that Pattaya was the place all Russians go on holiday. We went there the next day and it was the first leg of our booked holiday. In the morning the arranged taxi pickup from our hotel was late and I was sweating buckets about the guy not showing up and us losing all our money in a travel agency scam. A few minutes later we heard a honking horn and all was safe.

For
those who never heard of Pattaya, it’s not just the place where Russians have their holiday, it’s also the prostitution capital of the world (although Angeles City in the Philippines is a close second). In Pattaya you will find the highest ratio of DOMs (dirty old man or dumb old man) compared to the general population. It’s the sleaze capital, with thousands of old North American or European men looking for love or sex. I could write for ages about all the tricks girls use to trick them out of their money, but there’s actually a better book on the market for that:
Money Number One
, by Neil Hutchinson. A travel buddy gave it to me when I was in Indonesia, though by then I already knew most of the tricks South East Asian girls pull on the unsuspecting tourists.  Still, I recommend it.

We
spent four action-packed days in Pattaya. We stayed by the Jom Tien beach, ate some (crappy) Dutch food in a Dutch-owned restaurant, went one day to the beach to meet up with a Russian girlfriend of Julia, and saw a lady boy cabaret show. The lady boy show, which was called Alcazar, was actually quite entertaining and funny. It’s sort of a musical show in five different languages and the “girls” were hot. Such a difference with the lady boys on Walking Street, the famous street with a hundred Go-Go bars and a thousand bar girls. Walking street is well-worth seeing and we went there almost every night to either try out of one of the many clubs or just enjoy watching the people. I had fun walking around with a hot Russian girl on my side; she has raven-black hair and a killer body. Lots of old geezers were checking her out, because from a distance she could look Thai, and they got pretty clearly jealous at me when they found out she was actually my girlfriend, one who really loved me and not my wallet, so they couldn’t peel her off me by offering more.

We
got into a bus back to Bangkok and transferred at the train station. Like I said before, transport was all-included on this trip, and we had a big envelope with bus, train and plane tickets. All the tickets were dated and we had different papers for the hotel rooms. It might seem strange and really organized coming from a broke-ass backpacker like me, but this was a good deal. We took a night train down south and transferred to Ko Samui, a holiday island close to famous Ko Phag Nan.

There’s
not much to tell about our stay there. We had a nice room with air-conditioning, cable television and free breakfast in the morning; we did a few standard island tours and lay on the beach a lot. Needless to say we did a lot of pounding at night. We didn’t go out much there, though I did have my teeth bleached with a top-notch laser treatment for only 160 dollar.  By then they needed it – I hadn’t brought a three-year supply of toothpaste and some of the stuff you found in the smaller places was… well, not what you’d find on the shelves back in the West.

A
fter this my teeth stayed really sensitive for at least a week. I could only eat “white foods” the first days, such as rice and white bread. I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee, tea, Coca Cola or eat ketchup or mustard. To keep your teeth white as long as possible it’s better to always avoid all those things anyhow, but I like my coffee in the morning. Of course smoking was off-limits too, but I’d quit smoking already on my holiday with Julia. I can’t really enjoy a cigarette when I have someone around who hates them, and I needed my oxygen for nightly sessions.

We
moved on to Phuket, where we stayed in a resort-like hotel with a swimming pool and gym. By now I had heard and read about pick-up artists like Mystery, and a famous book called
The Game
by Neil Strauss. (What is it with the name Neil?)

Travelling
for eight months straight in unknown countries had improved my personality and social skills but I was still kind of introverted, and I was thinking about whether there was a way I could improve more and faster. I knew where I wanted to go, and as soon as I heard about books that would improve your chances with girls and make a pick-up artist out of you, I knew I needed to study that stuff.

On
a moment alone I bought a lot of books in the giant Jung Ceylon mall and made a start reading them. I was fascinated by the story of Style and Mystery, but I didn’t read many pages a day.

While we were there, though,
Julia and I got into a big argument. At first we were just having fun in the shower together and I sprayed some water from my mouth on her. She laughed and did the same to me, then I spit on her and she did the same to me. Of course, being the moron as I am, I took it a step further and took a piss on her leg. When she saw what I was doing she was enraged and the fun was over. She got out of the shower and stormed off.

After
a few hours she still hadn’t come back and I got really worried and went looking for her. I couldn’t find her. It was the only time I went out walking in the evening alone, and several Go-Go bar girls tried to pull me into the clubs. I was too worried and didn’t let them distract me.  In the end I just went back to our hotel, and luckily Julia was there, swimming in the pool. I asked her if she was still mad at me and to never to leave like that again. As I said before, it was the last of my days as a beta male. Julia felt bad about it too.

We
had to change hotels to another part of town and were closer to the beach now. Walking on the streets here was quite annoying. There were massage parlors everywhere and all the massage girls would sit outside and yell at you: “Hey handsom guy, want massaa, massaa?” Or they would just shout massaa massaa at you, which was funny at first but got old after fifty times or so. The massage girls were all young and hot. There was one girl/woman I really liked in the massage parlor next to our hotel. I should have sneaked out of the room and gotten a massage from her. On the streets, people hassled you every ten meters, especially the Indian guys with clothing stores who wouldn’t leave you alone even after you said no to them twenty times before. That was something I had to endure in Hong Kong as well, along with the offerings of fake drugs by Africans.

Around
Christmastime Julia gave me a present for my birthday, a daytrip to Thailand’s amazing southern islands. We went to the famous islands from the Leonardo di Caprio movie “The Beach”, and did a short trip to Ko Phi Phi, an island I would return to later in my trip, when I’d capture a flag from a country I’d been to before but where I hadn’t caught the flag.

The
days flew by, and soon it was time for Julia to return home. We flew back to Bangkok and she had to take a flight back to freezing cold Russia. She cried uncontrollably the last two days of our trip and saying goodbye was hard on me too. After three weeks together on beautiful beaches and staying in fancy hotels I was actually devastated she had to leave. This was the first girl on my trip I came very close to having an actual relationship with before giving it all up.

The
days after she left I just sat in my bloody hot hotel room feeling sorry for myself. I barely ate and was very sad. The only thing I did in those five days was go to a Thai boxing event in the Lumpini stadium, which was quite spectacular. I had front row seats and was very impressed with the fights and the toughness of the very young fighters. But it didn’t relieve the gloom. For the rest of my time there I killed time reading my pick-up books and trying to learn stuff and watching Prison Break episodes on my laptop.

In
a few days I would go to Cambodia and everything would change for me and even my trip.  But I didn’t know that then.

New
Years Eve 2009/2010 was probably one of the most depressing moments in my life. I went to Khao San Road alone, got drunk on 7/11 store beer and just watched everyone else have outrageous fun. I didn’t have the balls to walk up to any girl or even to have a beer with some guys. Not only did my body freeze up when I even thought about it, I was still very down and depressed from Julia leaving. I wondered if it was worth it to move on. Julia was great, and the love of my life: was going around the world for another two years really worth losing that, when I couldn’t even bring myself to have a drink with someone else? What was the point of bumming around the globe if I couldn’t even enjoy it? Maybe I should just move to Russia and make the best of it with her.

Well,
that was pretty much hitting rock bottom so far.

Cambodia – Siem Reap

I left Bangkok early in the morning. Most backpackers buy a bus ticket at Koa San road and pay way too much for something you can easily do yourself. I hopped into a taxi to the north bus station and bought a ticket to the Thai/Cambodian border.

On the way
I met a Spanish guy in the bus who was doing a short trip and we talked a lot about travelling. We took a tuk tuk from the Thai border town to the border. I was wondering if the driver would try the Visa scam that I’d been warned about in Lonely Planet. And he did. We stopped at some “visa office” along the road. They insisted we should get our visas here. According to them, it was impossible to get a visa at the border and this was the last place you could. I told the driver that we would walk further and he would get no money at all if he didn’t take us right to the border. I also warned a few Russian tourists who were brought to the same spot not to buy the overpriced visas there. The “travel agent” saw he was losing his “customers” and told the tuk tuk driver to take us to the border.

At
moments like these I feel glad that I always have a Lonely Planet guide on me, because while the prices are always wrong in the book, at least they warn you about scams like this.

Formalities
at the border took one hour. That meant waiting in the sun for at least half an hour before moving indoors. They were a large group of Russian tourists around so it was a feast for the eyes but it also reminded me of my time with Julia. It took one hour to get a simple passport stamp and hawkers were busy trying to sell bus rides to Siem Reap. Some people trust anyone with a shiny laminated badge on their shirt and they paid double. The official Cambodian currency is the Riel, but pretty much everything is paid in US dollars. It’s the only currency available in ATMs. A taxi costs twelve dollars and a bus nine dollars a ticket. Normally, being the travel bum that I am, I’d opt for the cheaper bus but Stefan the Spanish guy was taking a taxi and I went along.