Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (30 page)

Darren
and I sat down with a Dutch guy who was there to blow all his money on his Indonesian girlfriend, who wasn’t even that hot. There were a few other girls around and I talked and danced with one of them, named Henny. She gave me her phone number and the next morning we texted a bit. At one point I mixed up Henny’s name with Renny from Medan: I texted her something naughty about Renny’s boobs and meant to send it to her, but Henny got it instead. Oops. Renny was still texting me, as were the teenage sisters Cinta and Putri, along with Nazir from Bukit Lawang. I was getting forty to fifty texts a day from all these ladies, which sounds like a lot but was nothing compared to my later visit to the Philippines. After fixing the mistake about the boobs message by just saying it was for another girl (a cold-hearted win or lose pre-selection move), we agreed on meeting. She said she would pick me up for a ride around Samosir Island by car.

Th
is all sounded great, but when she arrived with the Dutch guy and his girlfriend I realized that Henny was a lot older than I had seen through my giant beer goggles the night before. I guess she was close to forty. Darren looked at me and laughed. I got into the car and we drove off to a viewing point.

The
Dutch guy is best described as a raving lunatic. He talked at high speed and it was all nonsense. He kept rambling on about the weirdest things and I was left looking to Henny for answers a few times. She would just smile. Then I’d turn my head away because I didn’t want to make her think I liked her too much. With a ton of beer in my system I would have captured the flag with her, but no way in hell was I going for it sober.

All
and all they were nice people, but clearly not my kind. The Dutch guy’s girlfriend was the only person I could have something resembling an actual conversation with. After a few hours driving we returned, and I never had much contact with Henny after. I had some beers with them on another day but that was it. The Dutch guy was just too much of a nutcase to hang with when sober.

The
guesthouse where Darren and I stayed rented out motor scooters and after hearing good things from the other group we decided to go for a trip around the island. Since there’s basically only one road, we figured it shouldn’t be too hard. We left early in the morning and after an hour arrived at the same viewpoint I’d been the day before. It was starting to get hot and we were only wearing shorts and t-shirts. Just an hour later our arms were totally sunburned and we still had to do six hours of riding.

Sunburns or not,
Samosir Island is an amazing place to visit. It almost has more churches than houses, all Christian since the Dutch colonizers introduced that religion to local tribes on Sumatra. The Batak tribe was completely Christian and that meant I could eat pork again. It had been quite a while and it was delicious. We saw traditional Batak houses with the steep roofs and beautiful woodcarvings; the views on the blue lake and surrounding mountains were stunning and the green rice fields looked amazing with the sun reflecting on them. As always in Asia, you had a crowd of children following you everywhere you stopped. We drove through small Batak villages with names like Loembanboentoe.

For
a Dutch guy Indonesian is actually very easy to pronounce: just read the word out as if it were Dutch and most people understand you. If you hang out in a country for a while you learn how people pronounce certain syllables and that makes it even easier.

We
had to stop at least every twenty minutes to get into the shade. Our arms and legs were already red as boiled lobster and it started to hurt. We both started worrying now since we weren’t even halfway there. The roads were in terrible condition, it’s mainly dirt roads full of potholes. Our scooters were quite fast but it took a long time to drive just fifteen or twenty kilometers. The sights were beautiful and we saw coffee plantations and endless rice fields.

At
one point we stopped for some lunch at a roadside restaurant and people gathered around us to look at the red lobster guys eating rice and pork. As always people were friendly and smiling at us. I asked for an apotek, which is almost the same as the Dutch word apotheek, which means pharmacy. After driving around a bit we found a few places that resembled a pharmacy. Of course they didn’t sell sun-block, since they’d never even heard of it. I had to describe the situation by pointing at my arms and saying “auw, auw” and making a painful face. It wasn’t very hard to do because my skin was already screaming at that point. We were desperate to find something to lessen the damage and bought body lotion and put that on our faces and arms. I still don’t know if it helped, or in because lotion has oil in it it just made it worse. At least it had a cooling effect for a few minutes. I figured it was best to keep our arms hydrated.

When
we thought we were about halfway round the island we stopped again to eat. The owner of the shop and restaurant was very friendly and even spoke some English. He told us about the glory days at the end of the 1990s, when he still was a younger guy himself chasing tourist girls. Darren opted to stop there and wait for it to get dark. We still had four hours of driving to do and I convinced him to keep on driving despite our severe sunburn. If we had to wait for sundown then we had to wait for hours since it was only two o’clock and the roads would be dangerous to drive in the dark. The shop owner also advised to keep on going because it turned out we weren’t even halfway there. We had been driving for five hours now but the roads were so bad that it looked like nothing on the map. We lotioned up and went off again after buying a shitload of water and cookies.

M
uch lotion later we arrived in a town named Pangururan, which was big enough it was worth looking for long-sleeve shirts there. Of course, for some weird reason we couldn’t find any long sleeve-shirts at any of the stores we passed. I know it’s always above thirty degrees here, but goddamn someone has to wear them sometimes. For some odd reason, even though our faces were melting too we didn’t look for caps. Pangururan is famous for its hot springs, but that was the last thing we had on our minds. Getting out of the sun and taking a cold shower was the only thing we thought about. I was ready to steal someone’s clothes if I saw a jacket or a sweater hanging to dry somewhere.

People
later told me that the hot springs were old, badly maintained, and in general a waste of time and money to visit, so luckily we didn’t miss much. There were a few small roads though the jungle and mountain leading to Tuktuk village, but tourists had been lost on that road and needed saving by local people to get back to civilization, so we avoided them.

Darren
had had enough of it by now and turned into Valentino Rossi, the famous motorcycle racer. He didn’t stop for anything anymore, even though we passed quite a few interesting places along the way. Luckily the last part of the circle around the island was mainly good road and we could hurry now. I nearly broke my hand when I drove through a pothole at seventy kilometers an hour. My rental bike survived and so did I. By the time we made it back to the guesthouse our faces and arms were purple and I feared that I’d get an enormous blister, like the one I had in Nepal a few years before. Back then my skin had looked like wrapping foil with the air bubbles in it and I’d had to get a doctor and medical treatment to get rid of the, horrible pus-filled, one inch across and half-an-inch high blister. It was too disgusting to look at. I still have a scar from it, though it’s only visible when I’m tanned.

For
some reason the showers in our rooms were ice-cold and despite (or maybe because of) the severe sunburn I couldn’t bring myself to stand under it. I had to just splash myself to get clean. Darren had a bathtub in his room, filled it with water and sat in it nearly two hours to cool down. He looked like a Popsicle when I saw him again.

The
next days were mainly filled with us avoiding any contact with sunlight and using massive amounts of body lotion to keep our skin from falling apart. We swam a few times in the lake and watched a DVD (Machete) we been meaning to watch for a long time.

The
people in the guesthouse were a special bunch. There was a Danish guy who was totally creepy. He seemed to be there for the sole purpose of doing nothing; he never had any money, never talked and gave off a disturbing vibe. Then there was a fucking hilarious German guy. With his short curly hair and the dumb hoggish expression on his face, you wouldn’t give him any chance with girls. But if you asked him, then he was a real Casanova. He told us that he’d had a threesome with two extremely hot girls in Jakarta. “How did you do it?” I asked him. “ I just showed them my breakdancing” he replied. Well, later on we all went out to the local bar and he showed us.

It
was the most horrible breakdancing I have ever seen. People were laughing and clapping and he considered it a compliment and turned it up a notch. And if that wasn’t bad enough he went on stage and asked the guitarist if he could sing a song. I have a video of it and still watch it when I need to get out of a bad mood.

He was a better guitar player than me, but not by
much – and I can barely play two chords. His singing was horrendous and sounded like some kind of long stretched-out death moan. It was the worst sound humanly possible.

All
the people inside the bar were loudly laughing and clapping. By the end of his “song” I’d nearly pissed my pants laughing. I usually admire people with the balls to go on stage and sing even though they can’t, like you see in karaoke bars worldwide, but this guy was just too much. Anyone familiar with the Astérix comic books will remember Assurancetourix, the village musician. Well, this German guy sounded just like him. Back in the guesthouse he told us that he had fifty thousand Euros in his bank account and travelled ultra-budget. He was planning on travelling through South America for eight months, spending only three thousand Euros. Anyone who’s ever travelled there knows that’s absolutely impossible. I’ve never seen a guy make such a fool of himself. You might think it would work in terms of getting girls: some girls will go for a guy with the guts to publicly make a total ass of himself. But not this guy.

I
later found him in the Facebook friends’ list of one of the girls we met there, and I checked his pictures. He never went to South America.

Indonesia – Bukit Tinggi

The next part of my trip wasn’t that interesting, but it gives me an opportunity to give an insight into how a ride to an off-the-beaten track destination on an Indonesian HELL bus goes down.

In
this case we were lucky to be able to buy the tickets to Bukit Tinggi directly at the guesthouse on Samosir Island, after asking around a bit what the prices were at other places. I remember that it wasn’t cheap, but then again it was a twenty-hour bus ride in what we were told was a luxury bus. I would have opted to go totally local but almost everyone advised me not to, and Darren didn’t feel like it. So luxury it was. We woke up in the morning, packed our stuff and walked to the point where a wooden passenger boat could bring us back to Parapat on the mainland.

The
trip across the lake took only about half-an-hour. There’s a local market directly where the boats arrive in Parapat, and it’s a small mayhem of fruit and vegetable vendors, scammers trying to sell you overpriced or fake bus tickets and people selling meat that’s lying there in the open air, covered with flies. There’s the stench of garbage and the sight, sound and smell of people butchering chickens and cleaning fish. We finally found our way through this chaos to our bus company and waited for the bus to leave.

Luxury bus my ass.  It
was a complete disaster. The seats didn’t recline at all so we had to sit up straight the whole night. We were the only foreigners on the bus and it was packed with curious locals and their many boxes and plastic bags full of merchandise and household products. People were eating all kinds of food and even smoking was allowed, so the whole bus smelled like sweat, exotic food and cheap tobacco. The only thing missing were chickens and goats going up and down the aisle.

By
nightfall the bus was filled with a fine blue cigarette mist. With the smell, the lack of sleep, the loud music and the extremely bad and bumpy roads, this had a nauseating effect. We even ended up taking strong 10mg valium tablets, but still couldn’t sleep at all. The bus was stopping in every little bumfuck village, and the worst was yet to come. One of the two teenage boys sitting in the seats before us got sick and projectile-vomited in the walkway. He even hit the guy sitting in the other seat and didn’t even apologize. Half of the guy’s leg was covered in vomit and he didn’t even get angry at the teenager. There was a large puddle of barf close to our feet and the stench was awful. If you covered your nose you could almost taste the vomit and if you covered your mouth then the smell was unbearable. The teenager vomited a few times and made no attempt to clean anything up.

We
stopped at a roadside restaurant but neither of us was hungry any more, and we just bought a few bags of chips to get through the night. We flirted and took pictures with the local teenage girls selling the chips and soda at the roadside. It was the middle of the night and we saw Barfboy eating a giant bag of chips and smoking a cigarette. Within half an hour on the bus he vomited again and was even joking with his friend about it. I think it was the bus driver or the guy helping him who “cleaned” the walkway by covering the large puddle of vomit with newspapers.