Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (27 page)

A
small part of the Malaysian population is of Indian descent and that was good news for my stomach. I love Indian cuisine, even though you end up sitting on the toilet more than usual. There were also a lot of Chinese restaurants around with big buffet meals for about four dollars. Kota Kinabalu was also the hometown of the crazy Malaysian bitch that nearly stabbed me to death. I even considered contacting her since she was (and still is) in my Facebook friends list. She was good in bed and maybe I was up for a shot of drama and adrenaline. After thinking about it for a moment – not a very long moment – I settled the matter by considering that seeing her again would be a sign of genuine craziness and that if I did so I might as well give up my trip, fly straight back home, and check myself into the nearest insane asylum.  Since I intended to continue my trip, I didn’t call her., sparing myself both psychiatric treatment and the possibility of having my throat cut.  Or my balls cut off in the night, since I wouldn’t put that past her, either.

After
visiting the Japanese prisoner of war camp and museum in Sandakan in the north of Borneo, I took the local bus to Sepilok, a place famous for its interesting orangutan rehabilitation centre which is on every traveller’s list. It was a farce. I had to pay about a $10 entrance fee, and there was another $4 camera fee, which I didn’t pay.

The
park had a giant entrance and a two-meter wide wooden walking bridge through the “jungle”. After barely one minute’s walk I arrived at the feeding platform where there were some two hundred tourists waiting with their big cameras. And when I say tourists I mean tourists. They came straight of the air-conditioned bus and were all wearing the tourist uniform: big hiking shoes, trekking pants, temperature reducing t-shirts, small backpacks with water tubes and a jungle hat. Most of them even had the nerve to give me a strange look when I walked up the platform with my flip flops, shorts and wife-beater t-shirt. I probably looked too poor for them.

I
n my opinion these are the worst kind of tourists. They stay in fancy hotels where they eat western food or pay tenfold to try the local cuisine, only go on group tours. The only locals they speak to are the guides and the underpaid but still smiling staff at the hotel. They think they’ll get robbed the second they leave the hotel so they never go for a walk and actually try to see something real like a poor area of town or the countryside. Wearing a fortune of North Face clothes and accessories and never using them, contributing barely anything to the local community because they spend all their money at the same place, the five-star hotel that also doubles as a restaurant, gift shop and travel agency/tour operator. And to think that most people think
I’m
the worst kind of traveler out there, because I’m just “bumming around” and don’t dress prettily.

At
ten in the morning a couple of bored park rangers walked up to the feeding platforms with a few baskets of bananas and watermelon. Somewhat later a couple of orangutans came swinging through the trees and sat down and ate the bananas. It was boring and I couldn’t stand all the ooohs and ahhhs from the crowd while hearing a hundred cameras clicking away. This was definitely not what I’d expected and after taking a couple of pictures I left. I would not recommend anyone to visit this park and sit on chicken buses for ten hours twice to see this farce. It’s just a tourist trap for fat Westerners too scared to go into the jungle. You get better views of orangutans in a zoo. Try a real jungle tour instead, one where you go into the jungle for one or two nights with a guide. At least you can be sure you’ll never meet one of
them
there – and if you do, you can always live in the hope that something will eat them, though they’d probably give the poor animal indigestion.

I
still had plans to climb Mount Kinabalu but after I heard it can cost up to $300 for a guide and hammock space in a mountain hut, I decided not to go through with it. I had already climbed Mount Fuji in Japan and there are other mountains you can climb for free. Besides, I’d already sent my hiking shoes from Bangkok along with other travel stuff I’d paid big money for but realized I had barely used.

Back
in Kota Kinabalu I met a German guy in the hostel who was learning some pick up/gaming techniques too, and he gave me some good tips for books to read and an online forum. We went out to a club but failed horribly. A beer was already six dollars each and we were both too scared to approach the girls there who were drinking shots. I suspected they were either expensive hookers or rich girls and this way I had an excuse to myself for not doing anything.

When
I think about it now I almost feel ashamed that after all the successes I’d had so far I still had some approach anxiety from time to time in Asia and even when visiting the Philippines. The German guy now lives in Thailand where he works on some software project and has some devious tricks (even by my standards) to pull in foreign girls.

Th
is visit to the province of Sabah had been a bit disappointing and I wanted to move on to Brunei, a small oil state that is famous for its extremely rich leader, the Sultan. To get there I had to go to Labuan Island first, which is still part of Malaysia. It’s the place where the Japanese surrendered to the Allied forces at the end of the Second World War, and I went to visit the monument commemorating that and a few other historical sites.

The Kingdom of Brunei

Brunei is an extremely wealthy oil state, and that comes with lots of benefits for its 400,000 inhabitants. There’s free education and healthcare, no income tax, and the government can provide cheap mortgages and car loans. The downside is that you have to live by strict Islamic rules and regulations. Nightlife is non-existent, there are no bars or clubs, alcohol is strictly forbidden and even the cinema was closed down.

Behind
the giant luxurious mall and mosque are people living in wooden shacks built above the river water. If you look you can find an entrance to these water villages and have a walk around and see how the poor people live in shacks while overlooking a gold-covered Mosque. The giant mosque is visible from nearly everywhere in the city. It’s a beautiful mosque but for some reason I wasn’t allowed inside, even though it should be possible for foreign visitors. Possibly only Muslims are allowed in.

W
ith some time and determination, I think it would be possible to get a Brunei flag but it might take a few months and lots of tricks. I didn’t have the time or money to do that. The mall had some girls working in the shops but it was clear to see that most were still virgins. You’re welcome to try, but don’t hold your breath.

I visited quite a few places and museums and a
fter two days I moved on the other Malaysian province on Borneo – Sarawak.

Malaysian Borneo – Sarawak province.

On the bus from Brunei to Miri I met a Japanese girl and we travelled together for a few days. She was a typical nerdy Asian girl and unintentionally very funny. We took a bus to the Taman Negara Niah Park, a national park containing the famous Niah caves. To get to the caves we had to walk about 4 kilometers on a wooden walkway through the jungle. The caves were massive and the biggest ones I have been in my life. The views were breathtaking. The walking bridge through the caves was two meters wide and was missing the railing here and there. In some parts it was pitch dark and we had to use the light of our phones to navigate to safety. At some points the cave was seventy meters high and the walking bridges led to a giant staircase which took us minutes to climb and catch our breaths.

When
we reached the exit we had to walk a bit more to see what we’d come for: the prehistoric drawings on the wall. They were hard to see since we had to stand behind a fence at ten meters distance, which was a bit of a bummer, but I don’t regret making a detour and visiting the caves. If you’re ever anywhere near Sarawak, make sure to go.

When
we returned to the park entrance we were quite tired from all that climbing and walking, but took a bus down south the same day to Kuching, another large city in Sarawak Province. I stayed four boring days there. The only nice things to see were a Chinese holiday being celebrated and the riverside. I tried to go out a few times there but only found empty bars during the week. I spent most of my time doing stuff on my laptop. There’s another orangutan park nearby, but after my bad experience in Sepilok I didn’t go there. I also skipped the famous indigenous longhouses after seeing a few pictures of them online. They looked too modern to me and I didn’t trust the “traditional showcasing of culture”, which sounded like a tourist trap for the fat air-conditioned-bus folk. I had to wait my time before my flight to Singapore, where the Formula One Grand Prix was being held. I had bought a ticket for it while in the Philippines.

I
lost my second cell phone, which had my Dutch Sim card in it, so I had to call my phone company back home and cancel my card before someone made thousands of Euros in phone calls on it.

Singapore and Malacca

Singapore wasn’t a big success. In cities like this you’ll have to be travelling with some money in your pocket, not as a budget backpacker. One day I went to the party area, Clark Key, but I hated the place. It was c where middle to upper class people went for a drink. Everyone was dressed up in their best clothes and had an iPhone. A beer in a bar cost $12 and it was just San Miguel beer from the Philippines, not even some fancy imported beer from Belgium or Germany. I left the bar after one beer. Lots of people were there for the Formula One race and went out and smashed a lot of money. It really made you feel like a bum and I didn’t feel at ease at all. The only thing you can do there as a backpacker is stand on the giant bridge over the river and drink cans of beer from the convenience store.

I
also had to go alone to the Formula One race. I was supposed to go with a German guy I’d met at the hostel but he just disappeared a day before. What a dick! It was the first time I went to an event like this and I would rather have enjoyed it with someone else.

The
races were OK but I had to guard my seat for hours to avoid others stealing it. My bladder was nearly exploding. Prices were horribly expensive, even for Singapore, and most people were there in groups already. The Mariah Carey concert after the races was pretty good. I stayed five more days in Singapore, but mostly just because I had some serious stomach problems. I had fever at night and stayed in bed all day watching movies.

The
only good thing about the hostel was the incredible speed of the Wi-Fi connection. I think I downloaded about 30 movies that week. I flirted with an Indonesian girl for a while there but never got anywhere with her. My self-esteem and courage were leaving me after nearly a month in Muslim Malaysia. Self-doubt found its way into my head.

So instead of seeking out girls I indulged my taste for military history and
visited a British bunker complex from World War II, along with Fort Canning, which is where the British had surrendered to the Japanese. The story behind that defeat was quite interesting. Although the Japanese was heavily outnumbered and Singapore was considered a stronghold, they conquered Singapore in less than a week. A lot of the British POWs were sent off to to work on the airport at Sandakan in Borneo, and later marched the Death March to Ranau – the same places I was in just a few weeks before. It was a strange realization.

I
left Singapore and went to Malacca (a former Dutch colonized city/stronghold with beautiful Dutch scenery), where I stayed a day or two before taking the ferry to the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

Indonesia – Medan and Bukit Lawang,

After Malaysian Borneo, Brunei, Singapore and Southern Malaysia, I really needed a change of scenery – and, of course, I really needed to get laid. It had been nearly a month since I last had sex. Indonesia had always intrigued me because it’s such a big part of Dutch Colonial history and one of the reasons the little country of Holland is/was quite rich.

I
crossed the Strait of Malacca by ferry, and in Dumai I got a fresh new visa sticker in my passport, which by now already had twenty pages filled with stamps.

Indonesia is one of the most diverse countries in the world. It consists of over 17,000 islands and has everything you could possibly wish for in terms of scenery. There are tropical rainforests, mountains, caves, waterfalls, rivers, indigenous tribes, volcanoes, hundreds of languages, wildlife and, of course, beautiful beaches. I think the island of Sumatra already has all of these and there are thousands more islands to explore. One can easily travel around them for a year and still find new, surprising things. Sumatra is the biggest island in Indonesia and the fifth largest in the world.

I
knew I was going to see beautiful things here and experience a lot of local culture. I also knew that Indonesia and especially Sumatra is over eighty percent Islamic, and therefore that it was going to be hard to pick up girls here.

On
arrival at the Indonesian ferry port I had to do some brutal negotiating with a guy on a motorbike to take me to the nearest bus station. I had my backpack with me but taxi drivers were asking for ridiculous amounts of money. The first thing I noticed was how many words are similar to my own Dutch language, and there were also quite a few loan words from English. The guy on the motorcycle explained a few things to me and was generally a helpful guy.