Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (50 page)

On one of the sparse nights I actually slept in the hostel after going out yet another time, I walked into the dorm and saw she was still awake and already in her bed. We exchanged a few words and said goodnight. As I was getting ready for bed and undressed I saw her peek over to me and wondered what to do.  I sat down and gave it one final thought: should I walk over and just ask her if I could stay over in her bed or should I just go to sleep? I decided against it to avoid awkwardness if things didn’t work out, lay down and closed my eyes. For the next half hour I twisted and turned and thought about cuddling up with her and to warm each up a bit. Of course, warming up starts with kissing.  It was too late now and I regretted not pushing through my last doubts. I’m pretty sure she would have said yes.

There
were only a few bus rides a week to Montevideo in Uruguay. I finally left on a Friday, staying three days longer then I’d planned.

Uruguay – Montevideo

The trip to Montevideo should have been a nice one. The ticket for the 26-hour ride was really expensive but it was the most luxurious bus I had ever been in. Instead of having 2 rows of 2 seats with an aisle in between, it had a row of 2 seats and a row with just one, each as big as a couch. I was looking forward to relax a bit after all that banging, drinking and going out in Asunción.

But a
fter just one hour the brand-new bus broke down and we had to wait nearly two hours for a mechanic to show up. He replaced the v-snare and we moved on.  Half an hour later it broke down again and after another hour wait we had to change bus to a shit one. Luckily there weren’t that many people on board. Normally I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about a delay in a bus ride, but this time I wanted to be in Montevideo on time. I would arrive on a Saturday afternoon and I wanted to buy a local SIM card and look for info on places to go out.

I
was visiting Uruguay for the sole reason that I’d decided to visit every country in South America, and had no specific interest in it. I had heard it was a boring country and in many ways just a clone of Argentina. It would have saved me at least a few hundred dollars if I’d gone straight to Florianopolis in Brazil, but since I’m hard-headed I went to Uruguay anyway. It was already nine-thirty in the evening when I arrived there after taking a local bus, and I spent a long time looking for the first hostel. They turned me down there, but gave me directions to the RED hostel and I walked over there.

I
ran into a group of French people in the hostel’s kitchen who studied in Buenos Aires and had taken the ferry across to see Uruguay a bit. They were all very friendly and the two girls in the group were average-looking but bang-worthy. We drank some liquor in the kitchen and later went out to find a place to party. They had been looking for a club the night before but didn’t find anything good. Most of the places were restaurant/bars and not dance clubs/discotheques.

The
Frenchies were already boozed up before we left and got tired after riding around in a taxi trying to find a place to dance. We soon went back to the hostel and I was disappointed. It was a Saturday night; there must be a place to go in the center. The Uruguayan guy working behind the counter wasn’t any help and gave me a stupid look when I asked him for a club in the center. If I owned that hostel I would fire a guy like that on the spot. How can you not give advice on a place to go to on a Saturday night? You work in a hostel, do your job! I looked on the Internet and found something that resembled a club that was within walking distance. The importance of doing your homework before arriving in a new city became very clear and I had learned a lesson that night. I had no SIM card so I couldn’t call or text any of the girls who had already given me their phone numbers online. I refuse to make a call with a regular phone because I sometimes barely understand what people are saying if they have a heavy accent or are trying to explain me how to get there. There’s always noise and I can’t understand directions and addresses. If I can’t text to set up dates, times and directions how to get there I don’t even bother with the phone number.

I
walked over to the bar I found online and was surprised to see how many poor and drunk people were hanging around on the street. This city is known as an unsafe place and I stood out with my long blond hair. The club was a bit hidden and I couldn’t find it, but there was another club was in the same area and I went in.

It
was a Cumbia club. You either love or hate this music. It’s a popular music style and Jewel had told me in Mendoza it was a typical music for poor people. If you hate Cumbia you are shit out of luck travelling through South America, because you will hear it everywhere. All the Spanish countries in South America listen to Cumbia, and every country has its own style. The most famous are the Colombian and Argentinean styles. The Argentineans also invented Cumbia Villeria, which is a faster style more for young people. Look for “Mc caco - No es culpa mia” on YouTube if you want to hear real Cumbia Villeria. Singing a few lines of this song will help you out with Argentinean girls. They will be very surprised you know this song and it will get you a big smile.

I
happen to be one of the few tourists who actually likes this music. It was clear as soon as I walked in that this was a real Cumbia Villeria club. Guys were dressed in sneakers and training suits. There weren’t many attractive girls around, even though most of them were in their late teens or early twenties. Of course I was the only foreigner there and judging by the looks I got from most people it didn’t look like I was very welcome.

I
walked over to the bar and ordered a beer. The barkeep gave me one of those liter bottles people usually shared with a group. After taking a few sips I put the bottle on the bar and looked at the people dancing, trying to spot if any girls were checking me out. There were a few waitresses dancing on the bar and some reggeaton was played too. When I turned around I saw that my bottle was gone. After one fucking minute! I had paid six dollars for that bottle so it really angered me. Maybe the barkeeper had taken it away, or the people standing next to me. Half the people in the club were standing around with a bottle of beer so I couldn’t tell.

I
went upstairs and looked around a bit. I didn’t get approached or manage to make much eye contact. I bought another bottle and kept an eye on it. After downing that beer fast I tried some approaches but bombed out because absolutely no-one spoke English in there. I had wasted a few hours and some money. I needed a proper dance club with people who actually had some sort of education beyond high school, or even elementary school. This is why I’d rather go through online trouble to find good-looking girls on the travel website. They have similar interests, look up to foreigners and speak at least some decent English.

When
I walked back home, I found a hundred-peso note on the street and thought,
Yep, that’s my beer refund
. A few meters further I saw a five-hundred pesos note and was really happy about it and looked for more but didn’t find anything. I had spent about twenty dollars on that club visit and had found about thirty dollars on the way back. Not a total loss then.

The
guy working the nightshift was a lot nicer than the previous guy and told me about a different club in the suburbs and how lucky I was to stay in the Cumbia place for hours and not get beat up or stabbed.

During
the day I tried to find a SIM card at the mall close to the water, but for some reason the Claro phone stores had a problem activating SIM cards that day and the Tigo cards were too expensive for a three-day stay. I walked around the city a bit and took some pictures. Montevideo isn’t a very exciting city and everything is very similar to Argentinean cities. The people look similar too. Lots of people were walking around with a thermos can under their arm – another country where people were addicted to the stimulating Maté tea. I had tried it in Rosario and Cordoba a few times but didn’t really like its strong herbal taste.

That
night I tried to motivate the Frenchies to join me to the club in the suburbs, because I didn’t want to pay the taxi back and forth to the club. Taxis weren’t cheap in Montevideo: though they drive on the meter they use strange methods to calculate the actual price, which is always more than the meter says. The Frenchies were lame again and stayed in that night, even when I asked them to join me at the nearby club I’d looked for the night before. It was just around the corner but I had walked past it. This time I found it, paying about eight dollars to get in.

I
t was another Cumbia-salsa-merenque place but it looked like there was more action going on. After a few beers and having built up some liquid courage I started approaching. The fact that I didn’t have a place to bring a girl was in my head constantly and it threw me off my game a bit. The girl working at the hostel had looked at me funny when I asked her where to find a love hotel, and so did the guy working there after she left. They didn’t even know where a love hotel was, which is weird because South Americans use them a lot since they tend to live at home with their parents for ages. It’s similar to Asia and totally different from Holland and other Western European countries (except countries like Spain, Italy and Greece where staying with La Mamma is considered normal until kids are in their thirties) where people move out of the parental house as early as possible.

After
some more beers I forgot about not having a place to bring a girl and just hoped for the best. The language barrier hit me hard again and I found the perfect solution only as I was about to leave. Four deaf girls – yes, deaf – approached me while I was smoking outside. It was obvious they were on their night out and asked me to take a few pictures of them with their camera. Three of the girls were downright unattractive but one of them was quite cute and up for some dancing. I kissed her not much later and she didn’t mind me touching her ass. Her lips were soft and wet and she was a quite passionate kisser. I tried to get her to leave with me to a love motel or something. Once I had her in a taxi I would make it clear to the taxi driver to take me to a love hotel. I slowly lipsynched the Spanish word “vamos” which means “let’s go” to her and pointed to the door with my head. Her eyes were sparkling and I could clearly see she was considering it. Yes! I was finally going to get my deaf girl experience after the debacle in Manila and capture a Uruguayan flag in the process. All I needed to do then was find a Colombian girl somewhere in South America and I would be back on flagging schedule.

The
girl was ready to say yes, but then the cock-blocking started. Her friends convinced her in sign language to stay put and forget me. They must have been pretty convincing because it worked. I left them not much later but ran into them again in the club later that night. It didn’t work out, and although I had some actual talks with some people who knew some English I had to return to the hostel dick in hand again. This is a country you need to speak Spanish.

My
only chance was to get a girl through the Couchsurfing website because my day game is non-existent and the chance I would find a good-looking girl on the streets who happened to speak English and who would be into me was very small, so I didn’t even bother with it. One of the girls in a phone store helped me get a SIM card and activate it but it was already too late to set up dates with online girls. The cute girl in the phone store didn’t bite either. The weekend had passed and girls were busy with studying and whatnot during the week. One girl showed a lot of interest in meeting me but didn’t have the time for it. She asked me to wait a few days, but I decided against it. I was already a week behind on my travel schedule and needed to move on. I gave up on the Uruguayan flag.

She
emailed me a lot even after I left Uruguay. Maybe I missed out here but I will probably never know, since I won’t return to Uruguay unless I have good Spanish skills and some more money in my pocket, as the country isn’t that cheap if you want a private room and take a few taxis. I guess seventy-five dollars a day would be a good minimum budget.

What
did I do wrong here? First, I had made the stupid mistake of fucking up my bus ride from Asunción to Montevideo.  I wanted to arrive on Thursday and get ready for the weekend but arrived as late as Saturday evening. The hostel wasn’t the greatest either; the one I looked at first seemed a lot nicer but was already fully booked. Not having a working SIM card fucked up my chances to meet girls through the travel website and my limited Spanish and money cock-blocked me as well. I think if I had spoken some basic conversational-level Spanish I would have scored in that club. Club gaming is mostly a numbers game. Approach enough girls and you’ll find one who is into you. Not speaking the local language rules out 95% of the approachable girls.

I
had lost my jacket the night before and had no time to wait for the club to open again. It was the third jacket I’d either had stolen or lost on my trip and I bought a twenty-dollar hooded sweater at some local market. I wouldn’t need it much since I was going up north, where temperatures would be better and the winter would finally be over. Brazil was waiting

Brazil – Florianopolis

After another terribly long and expensive bus ride and a short stop in Porto Alegre I arrived in Florianopolis. According to all the Brazilian guys I had met on my trip this was the city in Brazil with the most beautiful beaches and bitches. They were right about the beautiful women; I saw loads of them on the streets in the center, but I didn’t see the beaches at all. All four days I was in Floripa it was either cloudy or windy. It was still early in the season and I was coming out of the South American winter. The weather would only get better with every new destination since I was headed north and for the Caribbean islands. It had been mostly cold ever since I had arrived in Argentina in late March. During the days it would be ok but after sundown the temperatures would drop fast. All of this would be over now that I was in Brazil.