Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (26 page)

“I saw a nice big plastic diamond ring at the toy store in the mall, is that OK with you?”

Now she laughs and probably pushes you away or something. You had some solid touching  by holding her hand, you put the image of a relationship and probably sex in her mind and you made her laugh in a way that other guys don’t.

Now
completely drop the subject and talk about something else from there on. If you see her again you can use it a recurring joke. Bring it back up and make some jokes with her but remember not to act the funny joker but still be seductive/flirty. I thought about buying a few of those big colorful candy rings to joke around with on a later meeting, but I’ve never actually tried it.

Works
well when meeting the girl several times, especially with restaurant, hotel or bar staff where it’s clearly not a date,

Philippines – Island of Bohol

Now there came another test of my courage after that crazy bus ride.  I had to take a Philippine ferry for the first time ever.

Back
in Holland the only news you ever hear from the Philippines is that Manny Pacquiau’s won a boxing match or that another ferry’s gone down with everyone on it. So even though objectively I knew it was safe, I couldn’t help being a bit nervous when stepping on board. 

The
ferry ride took about four-and-a-half hours and it wasn’t bad at all. I had bought the cheapest ticket and had to stay on the deck, where there were many rows of bunk beds. I got talking to a girl/woman with an amazing set of lips. Most Asian girls have big lips, but hers were phenomenal – big, luscious, sensual. I tried to game her a bit but she wasn’t too receptive. We shared a tricycle ride into town but the driver tried to rip me off, asking ten times the normal amount. She translated and said it was the normal price. I got really angry with the guy and just pressed some bills into his hands.

It
was still too much but at least I got rid of both of them. She probably thought I was some stupid foreigner she could rip off too, and I threw away the telephone number she had given me. Other girls had also asked for my phone number on the ferry and some of them were damn cute, but they didn’t speak a word of English. It’s almost no use trying anything that way.

Early
in the next morning I took a local bus to see the famous Chocolate Hills, one of the main attractions on the island. The local bus was amazing, I was the only foreigner on the bus and everyone was just looking and smiling at me. Call it ego-tripping if you will but when this happens to you every day of the week, you start to feel damn special, even when you know any other foreigner would probably get the same treatment – but other foreigners aren’t taking the local bus like you are. Especially children are always happy in Asia: they run along the bus, waving and shouting at you. I saw massive green rice fields and ate the local bus food, a dry paste of rice and something else wrapped in a banana leaf. The old wrinkly grandmas who sell it along the way are not the cleanest-looking women and taking local food is always a risk, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t tasty. You learn how to live with it after a few weeks. I was fine this time, and it had actually been a few months since the last time it made me really sick. My stomach was finally getting used to the unhygienic situations. By now, I had forgotten the taste of bread.

The
bus stopped every few minutes when people on the roadside waved the bus down. It’s really interesting to see and experience a simple bus ride, and just one will teach you more about the culture than reading half-a-dozen travel guides.

After
two hours the bus dropped me off at the road next to the Chocolate Hills. After making sure I wasn’t getting ripped off by a local motorbike driver and getting driven there, there was only one more obstacle before I could finally see these hills that had been hyped up by everyone I met.

That would be
the 400+ steps to the top of the hill. It’s not that they were uneven or anything: they were perfectly normal concrete steps, with a railing to hold on to. There just happened  to be over 400 of them. Before long I felt like the big bad wolf, huffing and puffing away. I actually had to stop in the middle and catch my breath like an old man. I was getting out of shape.

Maybe
I’d already been spoiled by seeing so many beautiful things in the fourteen months I’d been on the road already, but the Chocolate Hills just didn’t seem that impressive to me. It’s just a series of small, brown-colored hills. I’d still recommend seeing it but only if you’re going to take a local bus there, which will be a lot more interesting.  The Hills are a good excuse to take that bus.  Also, you get some exercise.

The
motorbike guy was still waiting and took me downhill when I got back; I gave him twenty pesos for the ride back instead of the forty he’d asked for and he got all angry, but I just told him he wasn’t getting more and walked out on him. He was cursing me for a few minutes before he gave up. To the inexperienced reader I may seem like a fucking cheap bastard but I figured: why would I give a guy who does nothing all day and just hangs out with some friends and occasionally rips off a tourist eighty pesos? (His first price was even two hundred for a return ride.) A girl who works in department store for ten hours a day makes little over a hundred pesos a day, and what about the people breaking their backs in the rice fields in the countryside? They make even less.  Them I’d pay.  They actually work.

After
waiting half an hour a bus came by and took me back to Tagbilaran. The way back was even more interesting than the first trip. My teeth were playing the xylophone against each other because of the terrible roads, I was inhaling exhaust fumes, the wooden benches were so tight and crowded that I had to sit with my arm out of the window and it got sunburned really bad, and then there were the people: the guy sitting next to me trying to talk to me without speaking a word of English, the 3-year-old poking me with his little finger just because he’d probably never seen a white guy before, a guy sitting two seats away from you with a giant rooster on his lap, the teenage schoolgirls poking each other and giggling when they looking at me. I loved all of it and laughed at the people in the air conditioned bus that passed by us. What were they experiencing? Absolutely nothing!  A fucking bus ride like you can get on any air-conditioned bus in the world!

Since
there isn’t a whole lot to do in the city center, I went to bed early and got up early. I wanted to visit the Tarsier wildlife sanctuary to see the mysterious creature that was used to model my good friend Yoda.

I
took a jeepney to a small village and had to stop at the side of the road to walk a few hundred meters to the wildlife sanctuary. Jeepneys are a typical Philippine thing. It’s kind of a big pick-up truck with benches that seats twelve to twenty people, depending on its size. They are always covered in religious quotations, spray-painted Jesuses and lots of chrome. Some of them are real works of art. They are almost always crowded and a tall guy like me has trouble walking between the people and finding a seat. It’s not unusual to have to sit tight betweens some hot young girls.

There
are two ways of paying. The bigger jeepneys have a guy standing or hanging out the back who collects the money. In the smaller ones you have to give the money to the driver. The fare is dirt cheap, usually seven or eight pesos, which is something like fifteen cents. If you sit in the middle or the back you have to give the money to the person next to you, who passes it on to the driver. Sometimes your money changes hands four times before reaching the driver. The driver gives your change back and your change returns the same way. This system would probably never work in Western countries because someone would just pocket the money, but they don’t even think of that there. They all drive on the same routes and when you reach your destination (and don’t speak the language), you take a coin and knock it on the metal frame of the jeepney and the driver takes the hint and stops. If you want to get on one, then you stand at the side of road and watch for the jeep with your route number on it, wave your arm and the driver stops.

A
group of teenagers on this particular jeepney invited me to join them on a picnic in the park. Although there were a few cute girls I had to say no since I needed to take the ferry. The jeepney dropped me off close to the wildlife center and I went to see the famous tarsier, a small 4 inch/10 cm creature. It’s hard to describe the tarsier: it’s known as the world’s smallest monkey, but it isn’t a monkey, just like the Koala bear isn’t a bear. It had giant eyes which are actually bigger than its brain, but then I’ve met some people in my life that applies to as well. Their legs are very long and so are their thin, bony fingers. I was able to take some good pictures of this extremely shy creature.

As
I mentioned before, this creature was the inspiration for the appearance of Yoda from
Star Wars
. The force is strong in this one!! This sanctuary is the only place in the world where you can see the Tarsier out of its natural habitat and the owners have succeeded in breeding them so that the tarsier population can grow again. The Tarsier is on the list of most endangered primates in the world. They only live in the Philippines and some parts of Malaysian Borneo and Indonesia.

I
recommend that anyone in the area go see the Tarsier in the Bohol sanctuary and leave a small financial contribution to its keepers.

By the time I left the sanctuary
I was in a hurry to get back and didn’t have time to wait for a jeepney, so I stopped a teenage boy with a motorcycle, agreed on a price and got driven back to town. He was speeding like a maniac except when he passed people his own age; he was kind of parading me around and even stopped to show me off to his friends. I was just in time to catch the ferry at noon.  Back in Cebu I stayed with Jenna again. I left for Manila three days later.

Philippines – Manila and Cebu

I don’t have much to say about Manila. I hung around in the guesthouse for a while, drank a lot and wasn’t much into picking up girls at the time. I missed Jenna and went back to Cebu again. This wasn’t in my plans, but at this point I didn’t care much. When a one-hour flight only costs thirty-five dollars it’s easy to move around the country.

I
stayed in Jenna’s room for a few days again and then her landlady told her I wasn’t allowed there anymore, I guess because we weren’t paying double rent or maybe she just didn’t like people hooking up in her building. I was quite grumpy about it because now we had to move to a hotel nearby, which cost me about $140 for two weeks. We couldn’t move to the other hotel close to her office because too many people would see us there.

Jenna
had lost her job because the owner of the guesthouse and office building was a friend of Jenna’s American boyfriend and had told him about her and me. He had dumped her and stopped sending her money. He was a cheap bastard anyway, only sending her $150 a month even though he owned his own business. I still felt guilty about her losing all her electronics when I was picking her up, and now because of me she had lost her job and her steady money-sender. Basically I had made a mess of her life.

In
the next two weeks we went out to Club Pump on the weekend and visited a few sights around the city like the San Pedro fortress and the biggest skyscraper in Cebu, which includes a sort of rollercoaster ride on the outside of the building on the thirty-seventh floor. In the morning she had to go to university and at night we would have steaming sex. I remember her screaming so hard one day that the management was knocking on the door asking if we were all right.

The
day came when I had to say goodbye to Jenna, and I hated it. She was crying her eyes out and I didn’t feel like leaving, but I had to make a decision: stay with Jenna and slowly run out of money or continue my round-the-world trip. It was the same decision I had to make with Julia.  I’d chosen to move on then, and it didn’t seem right, or fair to Julia, if I didn’t do the same this time.  I was sure I would regret it afterwards if I didn’t continue my trip.

Malaysian
Borneo was my next destination and I had to take a plane from Angeles City, the prostitution capital of the Philippines, a city comparable to Pattaya in Thailand. I went there one night before the flight to check it out but hated the long line of bars full of bored go-go dancers and sleazy fat old man. There may be some people in the city who look like angels, but I doubt there are any who act it.

One
teenage boy selling cigarettes convinced me to buy a pack of Cialis, the boner pills; they were only three dollars for four tablets so I thought
What the hell, I’ll just buy them
. I had no idea it would be nearly two months before I got laid again. The next day I flew to Kota Kinabalu and a long dry spell began.

Malaysian Borneo – Kota Kinabalu and Sabah

After four months of the Philippines I had major trouble getting used to Malaysia. It’s a Muslim society, and that comes with lots of limitations. A lot of girls wear head scarves and that almost immediately rules them out as potential dates. Kota Kinabalu is the biggest city on Malaysian Borneo, but there’s not much to do, either in terms of nightlife or of sightseeing.

The
city was almost completely destroyed during World War II and this means there are no historical buildings whatsoever. I found some bars but hardly saw any opportunities to find a girl. The tourist girls I saw were either with a boyfriend or unattractive girls who come to a country like Malaysia purely for sightseeing and immersion in local culture. I have nothing against that, but it makes my mission a lot harder.