Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (2 page)

A
colleague told me about the trips he had made to India and some other countries and I was briefly introduced to an intern who had just traveled for six months in Australia. I remember seeing him only once or twice. I didn’t to talk to him much but his cool and laid back appearance intrigued me. Dare I say, I was fucking jealous of this young and confident surfer dude type of guy. Jealousy is a very rare emotion for me so it hit me hard.

Suddenly I became
interested in traveling and remembered that in the ten previous years my only vacations were one weekend in Paris in 2002 with a girlfriend and two weeks in Greece in 2007 with my long term girlfriend. Every other time my summer holidays rolled around I was either single or my lousy friends backed out of our plans to go somewhere. Two trips in ten years: that sounds really pathetic and it was. I spent my vacation days at home surfing the internet or watching movies. Did I already mention that for years I was a major pussy by not even wanting to listen to people telling me to travel by myself? The thought of traveling alone had horrified me for nearly a decade but now I decided to do something about it.

In the summer of 2008 I signed up for a group tour to India and Nepal and went there with about twenty other Dutch people for twenty-four days. At least I wouldn’t be totally alone. The trip was amazing and disastrous at the same time. I got so sick that I lost 25 pounds and by the end looked like a concentration camp survivor. But despite my terrible attempts of getting with a few girls in my group and all the horror of being sick for weeks and being forced to keep travelling in stinking hot buses and disgusting trains in the most unhygienic country in the world, I still got a taste of travelling and I liked it a lot. I discovered that other cultures fascinated me.

After
spending a month recovering, I was back working at the office. Well, working is an overstatement; most of the time I had a pretty easy life there. The company was doing poorly because of the financial crisis, though in my opinion it was mostly due to bad management. In the two and a half years I worked there we had six re-organizations and I survived them all. I had five different bosses and I managed to get a lot of stuff out of them, something most colleagues didn’t appreciate, especially the ones who’d been working there for years but were too dumb or timid to profit from their job. I was getting paid a great salary, got a suitcase, a laptop, and company phone, bought myself a good car and a quality suit – but most importantly, for the first time in my life I felt like a somebody instead of a nobody.

My
social skills were improving fast but not with girls; I didn’t have a girlfriend for a one and a half year. Although I was dating a lot via dating sites, I was getting no results, except for a few fuglies and one attractive girl who lived in another city and broke my heart after a few weeks. I highly pedistalized her.

One day
I went out with an extremely hot girl who had travelled a lot in South East Asia. We went for a drink but I couldn’t keep a fun conversation going with her and things died out fast. I realized this was my major weak point. I was a typical boring beta male with bad traits like neediness and nice behavior. Nice guys don't get laid. Ever notice how all the hot girls keep complaining about guys they got laid with who turned out to be an asshole? You could be that guy!

It
was the week before New Year’s Eve 2008/2009 when I found out that most of my few friends were staying at home with their girlfriends and children. I was looking at two options: sit at home alone like some pathetic loser or man up and do something about it.

Two
days before New Year’s I jumped in my car at seven in the morning with only a small backpack and some food. It was minus twelve degrees Celsius outside and my wiper fluid was frozen because I was too cheap to buy some decent anti-freeze fluid. Half the ride I couldn’t see a damn thing and was driving on the German autobahn, the only highway in the world where you can drive as fast as you want. I drove for eight hours straight to Prague in the Czech Republic. I parked my car in a sketchy underground garage and after a while found a hostel.

Those were the best three days of my life to date. I met lots of people of all nationalities and enjoyed hanging out with them, especially thanks to Jonathan, the Peruvian-Norwegian guy who got me involved in most of the activities. He’s still a friend and visits me from time to time.

On New Year’s Eve I was dancing, kissing and touching a big-boobed Singaporean girl all night. I didn’t get the Singapore flag, but I still had one hell of a time in Prague. I mean, I’d never stayed in a hostel before and suddenly there were hot nineteen-year-olds walking around in their underwear in front of me. Lots of people were asking if I had Facebook, which wasn’t very popular in Holland at the time. I quickly set up an account and got fifteen friends instantly.

From
this moment on I was certain what was really missing in my life: Fun and Adventure. I couldn’t believe how it was pretty much normal for every European or Australian college student to go abroad and have lots of fun. How much had I missed out all of those years? 

When
the company I worked for finally went bankrupt, 125 people lost their job and I was the only one kind of happy about it. This was my chance and my excuse. I figured that if I could backpack alone for three days and have fun, I could also do it for three years.  Apparently a decent three days in Prague didn’t keep me from being clueless; it never occurred to me that Prague would be a walk in the park compared to what I was about to experience.

My
last few months at home, I was anxious to leave it all behind and saw only the negatives of staying any longer in this adventureless life. My friends were not going out much anymore because they already had girlfriends and children. And if I went out with one of them, we basically stood around and watched other people have fun, downing a few beers and/or being too stoned to even talk to girls. We had fun but together as buddies, not with girls. Sometimes we were so zombified by the insanely strong Dutch weed that if we started speaking to each other, it felt like we were coming out of another dimension. Like someone just violently woke you up in the middle of the night. Needless to say, I wasn’t at all successful at getting girls.

A few weeks
later I started dating a nice but pretty plump girl. I met her online, the way I met most girls back then. My “girlfriend” was fat but had some huge melons and could give hella blowjobs. I guess she was hungry all the time. Coming out of a long dry spell, I was fine with it. She was five years younger than me, had her own place and was a pretty good singer and guitar player. I like it when girls sing for me. She tried to teach me to play guitar but after a few weeks I got bored with the slow progression and gave up. I was pretty good at giving thing up back then.

Having
this “girlfriend” was like hitting an all-time low and I was embarrassed to be seen with her. We never went anywhere together, just met up for sex at our houses so I guess she was more a fuckbuddy than a girlfriend anyway.

After informing my friends that I was going away for a long time, I told her that I was leaving for a while and broke up with her. She wasn’t happy with it and tried to convince me to try a long-distance relationship. I was thinking of all the hot girls I was going to meet and said no to that.

So
at this point, I was out of a job and single again. By day I was planning my trip and getting rid of everything connected to me. I started sending letters to every company or website that had my address. Basically I made myself disappear off the radar. In the evenings I played darts with my buddies, smoked a lot of weed and had some beers and chips while listening to the greatest reggae singer still alive: Alpha Blondy. Those days were great, getting stoned and having fun with my friends every day of the week. Yes, at 31 years old I still wasn’t very mature.

For
those wondering how I was planning to afford to travel around the world without working; as said I owned an apartment in the city center of my home town. I had bought it in 1999 at the age of twenty-two, just when the real estate boom started in Holland. It took me nine months to totally renovate the whole place, something I did 95% on my own since my “good” friends were somehow never around to help. I sold it in 2006 with a 40K Euro profit, months before the market started to collapse. Those who did their homework in those years saw the collapse coming and got out when I did. I’d been sitting on that money ever since and from then on had just rented a decent house and bought a nice car. I set my moving-out date at just two days before I left on my trip, so I had plenty of time to sell a lot of stuff and box up the rest.

There was a lot of stuff.  You may remember me mentioning that I spent a lot of time at home watching movies. 
I had a specialized home cinema room in my house which took me months to build. It had a hundred-inch projector screen, a top quality projector, Cinema love seats, a 7.1 sound system with big JBL speakers, special cinema lighting and carpet and about three thousand DVDs. It was my first dream come true, and I couldn’t bear to sell it, so I boxed everything up and stored it at my sister’s house. The DVDs alone filled twenty-one boxes.

I
went to city hall and registered myself as a homeless person and told them I was leaving for at least a year. This is the only way in Holland to get out of the expensive health insurance. So the only thing I had left in Holland was a bank account. During my last week I sold my beloved car, sorted out a few last things and said goodbye to my family and friends. It was time to see what I had in me and prove myself to the world.

It was time to break up with old habits and improve myself in every way possible.

All my
life I’ve been fascinated by Russia and its cold, dark past. I grew up in the eighties and was always intrigued by the cold war and the military stand-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. My father once visited St Petersburg for his work in 1984, when it was still called Leningrad. It was a short visit but the stories he brought back fascinated me – the monotone and grey lifestyle of the people, the whole communist system and its many flaws. Coming from the West it just seemed like another world.

I have
also always been interested in military history and since Russia did the most fighting (and suffering) in World War II I had a great interest in seeing this country. After visiting several war museums and famous places throughout Germany, Poland and the Baltic states, I’d made it to Mother Russia. This is where my trip would really start. I had raced through the first six countries, doing nothing more than high-speed sightseeing and some lame flirting with local or backpacker girls. Still, I was already proud of myself for the two cold approaches I’d done on local girls in clubs.

These
were things I barely ever did at home. The first one I tried was in Warsaw, in Poland. I had been looking for a bar to go to for the whole evening and finally found one. I sat down at the bar next to a couple of very hot-looking girls. Girls I would never dare to speak to back home. They told me they were Ukrainian students and I talked with them for a little while. I even quoted a funny Russian line to them. I had met a Russian guy in Berlin who taught me the phrase “Idite na guy”, which is basically the Russian way of saying “Fuck you”. What it literally means is “Go to the dick”. The girls laughed hard but warned me never to say it out loud, because Polish or Russian guys would beat the crap out of me if I did. The conversation died out quickly and our glasses were empty. After excusing myself I never returned. What the hell could I talk about with these girls? I was never a student so my knowledge of university life is zero, and at that time I had no pick-up skills whatsoever. Avoiding an expensive round of cocktails was the best thing I could do.

Still, even if it wasn’t a success, it was a start.  You can’t boost your self-confidence all at one go. 
The second time I did a cold approach was on a local girl in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. I went to a club named Tarentino’s with a big group from the hostel. It was an awesome place to go. I approached two girls but the hottest one, named Edita, barely understood English. I took her by the hand to a quiet spot to avoid the loud music. She spoke some words of German but my German was terrible and so was my beta style of picking up. If I had a time machine and went back there now, I could do way better on both those approaches, but looking back on it, it was still a giant leap from online dates with average-looking Dutch girls. At least travelling made me feel like somebody and not so socially awkward in clubs and bars. It was a bad start but at least it was a start.  I was trying.

Russia – St Petersburg

The bus finally drove into St Petersburg after a ten-hour ride from Tallinn in Estonia. Russian Customs were surprisingly easy – they didn’t even check my bag or give me any trouble.
So much for the strict Russian borders
, I thought. After being dropped off somewhere, I had to find my way to the hostel, which isn’t easy in a country that uses a completely different alphabet. Most places in Europe, you can work out the sounds, like ‘hôtel’ in France, but how on earth is the innocent tourist supposed to know that he’s looking for the ‘общежитие’? Still, though it took me a while (and the metro was super-crowded), I finally found the hostel. It was a simple one, with the crappiest beds I’d seen in three weeks on my trip. The bed had no bedsprings; it was just a wooden board with a two-centimeter mattress on it. You might as well sleep on the floor.  Welcome to Russia.

During
the day, I met an Australian and two Finnish guys. That night, after drinking a bunch of vodka shots, we went out to a club called Achtung. It was a fun night. I noticed a hot girl with model-quality looks glancing at me a few times from the dance floor, and after a few vodka shots of courage I went over to talk to her. Her name was Sofia, and she came from Uzbekistan. She was studying and modeling in St Petersburg. We danced for a while and I got a quick kiss out of her. She was at least an 8.5 on the hotness scale, but after a while she lost interest. In other words, I didn’t have the skill set to keep things going. Also, I think she was looking for a rich dude rather than a backpacker.

The
guys and I tried another bar before going back to the hostel. They were going on about what a good job I did talking to that hot girl – and that is just what beta guys do. Congratulate each other on nothing. I was actually proud for having the balls to walk up to a strange hot girl and saying “Hi, how are you doing?” Saying that is nothing. It’s just a simple opening line, one anyone can use on anyone.  All it does is what it’s designed to: open a conversation.  It’s nothing to be proud of.  What’s worth being proud of is managing to keep the conversation up.

St
Petersburg is a beautiful city with far too much in it to see in only four days, even with the almost inexistent nights and endless days where the sun comes up in the East almost while it’s still shining in the West, a city of palaces and canals and incredible history. Just as an example, I went to the Hermitage, one of the biggest museums in the world. It’s been calculated that The Hermitage has so many art objects on display that if you look at every item for just eight seconds, then it would take seven years to see everything. And the basement is filled with about fifteen times more stuff! There’s so much in storage that people with access can just walk in and carry things out – there’s no way of cataloguing it all, and no-one will ever notice that the object’s gone missing. 

Sightseeing
in St Petersburg is not cheap, but luckily, I studied at the University of Driver’s License, which got me massive discounts everywhere. My Dutch driver’s license is a pink plastic card with my picture on it. It also has symbols of cars, motorcycles, and trucks, and says “Driver’s License” in five different languages. None of them, however, was Russian, or written in Cyrillic, and since the employees at the museums didn’t speak any other language than Russian or read the western alphabet, I got away with using it as a student card every time. The entrance fee for the Hermitage alone costs about sixteen dollars but is free for students, lucky me!

Not everything’s beautiful, though. 
The city is full of old Ladas, the ugliest and crappiest cars ever. They look like nothing so much as the old T-34 tanks from Stalin’s days. The weirdest one I saw was parked and had a giant dildo for a shift stick.  I asked no questions.

But to make up for the cars, t
here were three Russian girls at the hostel, and one was very good looking. I asked her if she spoke English and she said no. Sometime later, I ran into the second one, and I asked the same question. Again the answer was no. I had almost given up on them, but the third one turned out to speak very good English and the four of us talked all evening while she translated everything. They were from Yakutsk, a city in the northeast of Russia where in winter time, it drops to seventy degrees Celsius below zero, unbelievable temperatures. When I told them that I had wanted to go dancing with them a few days before but didn’t ask because I thought they didn’t speak English, they were disappointed, because they loved to dance. Soon after that, the English-speaking girl left for a day, and the two others moved to my dorm. I used my Russian language pocket book and had fun with the naughty sentences in there. The hot blond girl already had a boyfriend; the second girl, Anna, was definitely interested in me but wasn’t that good-looking.

The
day after, the four of us walked around the city and visited some places together. That evening, I had to take the train to Moscow, and the three of them showed up at the train station, bringing an extra girl with them. She spoke a little bit of English and said she wanted a picture with me because she wanted a picture with a handsome guy. I looked around, but she actually was talking about me. Naturally I let her take it.  The girls even went on the train to make sure that everything was alright and that I got the right sleeping bunk in the overnight train. We said goodbye, and that’s the last I saw of them – but I noticed I was sharing the compartment with a hot MILF in her early thirties and her young daughter. The woman slept in the bed next to me and was barely covered by the blanket, wearing only a thong and bra. So I’d say I had a good start in Russia. It would only get better from there.

Russia – Moscow

The train ride to Moscow took about nine hours and all the time I could enjoy the view of this half-naked woman sleeping in front of me, so I was in a pretty good mood when we arrived.  It didn’t last.  The metro system in Moscow, with its ten lines and almost two hundred stations, is huge. And of course everything was spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet and I couldn’t understand a word. It took a while before I found some people who spoke a bit of English and could help me out.

Arriving at
the hostel I got a new surprise – it was another rathole! There was one toilet for a whole hostel with about twenty-five people. The toilet seat was just lying loose on the toilet – I nearly fell off the first time I used it. The door had a little hook to lock it, but the hook didn’t fit in the little metal ring so you needed to leave a little crack to lock it. So one time I was taking a big dump, the door didn’t close well, the couch was one meter away from the toilet door and there was no radio or television in the hostel to cancel out the noise I was are making. This was one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. I ended up going to the McDonalds every time I needed to crap.

The
whole hostel was a dump and the grumpy young girl working there wasn’t any fun either. I had booked this hostel because the two guys from Chile I’d met in Lithuania and later in Estonia had told me they’d be staying there. So in St Petersburg I told the Australian guy and the two Finnish guys I was hanging out with to go there too. Well, let’s say they thanked me for booking this dump.

I
in turn thanked the Chilean guys for it. Still, when I arrived already knew five people there, no need to make new friends. That night I went to the famous Red Square with Gustavo and Nico from Chile.

It
was amazing; Red Square is huge, just below the Kremlin, and the wildly-colored St Basil’s Cathedral looks spectacular when it’s lit up at night. Of course seeing shitloads of hot Russian girls adds to the fun.

On
the way back to the hostel, the three of us got stopped by a policeman. He stopped in front of us and when he got out of his car, he first looked around to check if anyone was watching us. Then he asked for our passports. Gustavo and Nico’s passports were in order, but mine had no visa registration. It turns out you have to register if you’re going to stay in the city longer than seventy hours after arriving.  Though I’d only just arrived, we didn’t understand the rules. The policeman became very serious and told me I had to come with him to the police station. Gustavo spoke a bit of Russian and translated what he could for me, while the copper just stood there playing with his whistle. He kept repeating “Gustavo, nje problemi, Nico nje problemi, Neil PROBLEMI!” He looked quite relaxed but also rather serious. I asked Gustavo to ask him if he wanted a bribe but Gustavo, a law student, was a bit anxious about asking him directly. In the end I took my Dutch/Russian travel book from my pocket and showed the cop a line which said “can I pay the fine on the spot?” He smiled and agreed. I asked him how much the fine would be, and he said “I don't know”. I flipped to the section on numbers and pointed to the number five hundred. His smile got even broader as he agreed with it. So I paid five hundred rubles (about fifteen dollars in 2009) and we went on our way. Gustavo told me that before we left, the cop said that the money was for his family. At a guess his children’s names are Vodka and Bottle. When we got back to the hostel we woke up the girl who was working there.  She was now even grumpier than before and explained to us that I didn’t have to pay a fine at all.  I had already kind of figured that.

The
next day the hostel girl, Julia, was in a way better mood, and told me she’d had a major hangover the day before. Me and the two guys from Chile couldn’t stop joking around with her about the night before, and kept pointing out things about the hostel and bellowing PROBLEMI! This pretty much covered the whole hostel.

After our
shameless adventure in bribing a public official, the Chileans and I visited numerous sites throughout the city.  On our second trip to Red Square we saw one of the hottest girls ever.  Soon they were using the time during our long walks to teach me a bit of Latin Spanish – but only the words to describe a woman. As a test of how well I was learning, with every smoking hot girl that walked by I had to give them a full description in Spanish.

One
day we had an unexpected city tour when an eighty-four year old guide just walked up to us in the street and started talking. He spoke excellent English and had lived through the Second World War and Stalin’s days. After he had showed us around the city we gave him a generous tip. He was doing tours because his retirement fund had almost completely disappeared in the 1998 Ruble crash. That old geezer was definitely in better shape than us: we’d walked many miles and were dead tired afterwards, while he was probably going to do the same again.  He was probably snickering at the wimpy young tourists that we were as he left us.  I couldn’t blame him.