Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (6 page)

On
the way there we drove through the countryside, which was quite spectacular. The country has lot of mountains and grassy fields everywhere; we saw cows, wild horses and sheep all the time. There were lots of gers, the traditional Mongolian tents that a lot of people mistakenly think are called yurts. I was not in the mood to take pictures because of my fucked-up stomach. I assumed I would take pictures another day, something I didn’t do because I was sick for days over there and didn’t want to repeat my near-death disaster in India and Nepal the year before. I will do whatever it takes to avoid making the same mistakes I made there that basically ruined my holiday.

We
arrived in Ulan Bataar, the capital of Mongolia, and went to the famous golden Gobi hostel only to find out it was fully booked. They sent us to the Golden Gobi 2 hostel, which was not as good but fun anyway. By now, along with my stomach troubles I had also developed a cold, so my misery was complete. The two Jameses went on a three-day tour but I didn’t join them. The tour consisted of one day of sightseeing, one day of horse riding and staying with a nomadic family in a tent, and then some more sightseeing. The idea of horse riding and the eating of sheep intestates/guts didn’t appeal to me and my stomach. I just stayed in the hostel and watched some movies. There was a nice Mongolian girl named Deeggi working as a maid there and I tried to get with her, she showed interest but the language barrier and the family watching all the time wouldn’t make it a successful pick-up. Deeggi was a young girl but also a single mom and I didn’t want her to lose her job over it.

Anyway,
later that week when I was feeling a bit better I went out with some people from the hostel. We went to a bar called Strings, which had a good live band and reasonably-priced beer. After I ate a meal there I hit the dance floor. There were plenty of good-looking Mongolian girls dancing around. Within a minute I was dancing with a slutty-looking chick in an ultra-short skirt. She started grinding her ass up to my dick like crazy. I thought to myself,
Wow, they must really like white foreigners
. How naïve of me in a city visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. She pulled me off the dance floor and took me by the hand to the side. The conversation went like this.
 

Girl:
You like me?

Me:
Sure I like you!

Girl:
Want to have fun with me? Let’s go have sex!

Me:
(thinking) Damn, that’s easy, I already like it here.

Me:
Yeah sure, let’s go!

Girl:
Ok, fifty dollars!

Me:
Eh what? Hmmm, no way!

Girl:
Why? You like me yeah, you pretty boy, have fun with me! I give you good time.

Me:
Eh, No thanks!
 

That
was the first time I encountered an Asian prostitute. I still had so much to learn. Me and the sleazebag German guy I was hanging out with returned to our table and drank some more beer. I went to the dance floor again to dance with some other girls and the first girl/prostitute got jealous and started grinding her hot little bum on me again. That’s when I realized that probably all the girls in there were prostitutes. We left not much later. 

The
next day the German guy and I went to hear a sort of rock/folklore band in a big theatre. It was pretty pricy and filled with tourists. I didn’t like the show much because in my opinion the music sucked and it was ridiculously loud. It was so loud that we went to sit in the back of the hall and the German guy even put pieces of paper in his ears to avoid ear damage. It was a mix of opera, Mongolian chanting, loud rock and hip hop. Strangest concert I’ve ever seen.

Later
that night we went to Strings club again. This time we were able to meet some “normal” (i.e., non-professional) Mongolian girls and sit down with them. Nothing happened that night but at least we had some fun. The little bum grinder was also there and tried to steal me a few times but I told her to go away after a while.

Although
Mongolia is a very poor country, the city center is very nice, with an enormous square and giant statues of Genghis Khan, the father of the country and one of the most successful warlords in history. The Mongolian empire once stretched from Pacific Ocean to Hungary. The Mongols were feared all over the world and famous for their technique of shooting arrows from horses sprinting at full speed – something you can still see them do in some of the more remote parts of the country.

After
a while I had to say goodbye to everyone there and take the train back to Russia. I was forced to buy a ticket for the tourist wagon, because I wasn’t allowed into other wagons with Mongols in it. When I entered the small four-person compartment there were two Mongolian guys sitting in there. They looked like decent people and were well-dressed. They helped me to put my heavy backpack on the rack above the beds. It took a while before the train left. I went out of the compartment and smoked a cigarette, then talked to some Scottish guy I met.

When
I came back to my compartment the two Mongolian guys were gone. I didn’t think anything of it until I looked at my bag. It looked different than before.

I
looked inside and saw that my expensive Ralph Lauren jacket was gone. I was furious and tried to talk to the train lady, but she didn’t speak English. Luckily there was a Mongolian tourist guide on board who did. She explained what happened to the train lady but she didn’t seem to care. I became angrier and told her I was going to search the train for those bastards. I was going to knock their teeth out as soon as I saw them.

I
searched the whole train but didn’t see them. When I got back to my compartment there were two train cops and they asked what happened. Again the tourist guide explained things and then the two cops and I went looking for my jacket. We searched the whole train together and every time there were two guys without families, the cops roughly opened their bags and searched through. It was quite a spectacle. In the end we didn’t find the guys or my jacket. I let the train cops write a paper confirming that my stuff had been stolen, and they handwrote a paper in Mongolian. I asked the train lady to put some stamps on it to make it look more official. Months later, this helped me get a bit of insurance money back, but not nearly as much as the jacket was worth.

Russia (Far East) – Chita

After that partly unfortunate week in Mongolia I was back in my beloved Russia. I quickly bought a ticket to Chita and soon fell asleep on the train. When I woke up the next morning I got to talking with a Russian guy who was sleeping in the bunk below me. After I’d answered a few of his questions he told me I was a hero for travelling alone in Russia. He spoke a bit of English and I spoke a bit of Russian so together we managed a conversation. Sergei was a guy in his forties who was visiting his family for a few days, and he got me a fully-furnished two bedroom apartment for only five hundred rubles a day. That was about fifteen dollars back in 2009. Super cheap if you compare it to the crappy hostel in Moscow where I paid the same for a shitty dorm with sixteen beds and a toilet I couldn’t bring myself to use. That day I walked around Chita a bit and in the evening Sergei and his girlfriend showed me around different places in the city.

The
next day was pretty much the same. We went to some forest where Sergei proudly showed Russia’s pride: the massive taiga, that endless spread of conifers that covers about half the country. Sergei paid for just about everything, including the food and drinks; I almost had to fight to manage to pay something in return. I did finally succeed in buying us some beers.

The next day was a weekday, so there wasn’t much to do till the evening, when
I went out to meet some girls. I met two hot girls on the street and got to talking with them. It wasn’t the most peaceful of conversations: about ten meters away there was a fight going on, with a guy getting severely beaten up by three other guys. The girls wondered I wasn’t scared, but I pointed out that it wasn’t my ass getting kicked. Still, when the guys walked by us I thought it was better to stay quiet and not let them know I was a foreigner. It’s a technique I often use when cops are walking by.

I
asked the girls for their phone numbers, and they said “Give me yours”. Doing that’s a stupid mistake I don't make nowadays. Always get the number of the girl and don't only hand out your own. I typed my number into her phone but was fucking the numbers up because her phone had the Russian alphabet.

Later
in my room I realized I forgot to type in one number and was screwed.  And not the fun kind of screwed I was hoping for, either.

I
went back to where I’d met them, but I didn’t see them again. Still, I wasn’t going to waste too much time on something hopeless, so while walking back to the apartment I approached two girls. They didn’t speak English at all but somehow I got them to a bar. I paid shocking prices for three beers and tried to make the best of it. The personnel were happy to see a foreigner and we joked around a bit as we drank. When we were done we started walking back towards my apartment and I tried to convince them to join me. This is not an easy task if you only speak very bad Russian. Unfortunately, the ugly one of the two was cockblocking me and wouldn’t stop whining to her friend that she wanted to go home. I thought,
Do or die
, and looking at the hot one, a skinny girl named Ilona, I said the Russian word for kiss. “Da”, she said and her red lips touched mine. We kissed. She definitely liked it, but her crazy and probably jealous girlfriend was pulling her arm, looked shocked and yelling “Ilona, stop it”. We parted ways pretty soon after. Another almost sure thing ruined by someone else. The look in Ilona’s eyes had already told me she was up for anything, and I had my own apartment close by.

Russia – The wedding in Chita

When I told Sergei I was about to leave because my visa was running out, he burst out “No way! Tomorrow’s my cousin’s wedding, you’ve got to see a Russian wedding!”  How could I refuse?  The next morning I bought a big bouquet of flowers and we went to the bride’s house. It was still only ten in the morning and when we entered the house the bride was still walking around in her underwear. She was a totally hot girl, the kind they only make in Russia. Her bridesmaids kicked us out of the house. A bit later when she was dressed we went back inside and I was introduced to the whole family. The groom was a biker and all his biker buddies came over on their motorcycles. Luckily I found out that one of the bridesmaids (Natalia) spoke perfect English and I talked with her for a while.

In
the afternoon we went to a park where the couple had the pictures taken. There was a lot of food and people started drinking vodka. Welcome to Russia. I had at least five double shots of vodka before we moved on. There was a whole truckload of hot girls there, but unfortunately most of them didn’t speak English. Still, when we drove to a small church for more pictures I ended up in a large SUV with the hottest girls from the wedding crowd. We were sitting in the back of the car and suddenly the girls opened the small rooftop and stood up and started shouting and cheering like something out of the movies. I just sat there with the two finest asses a man could ever see waving in my face. I took a sneaky picture, because my friends back home would never believe me if I told them about this.

Later
that night we all went to the wedding party where I kind of felt like a wedding crasher. But still, most people seemed to like it that I was there: at one point people almost stood in a line to toast with the foreigner. I was downing so many vodka shots that I had to switch to champagne so that I wouldn’t get completely wasted. I danced with some girls and Sergei did half a drunken striptease. I got the feeling that Sergei was the disreputable uncle of the family, the one his brothers and sisters probably warned their kids about. I still found it almost unbelievable I was just attending a Russian wedding in the countryside like it was something perfectly natural.

I
got talking with one of the bikers who had studied English once, and after the wedding he and a few other bikers drove me to a garage in some back alley. It all looked pretty dodgy but once inside they showed me their bikes and we drank some beers. After a while we smoked weed.

They
had some sort of weed oil that they smoked with a sawed off plastic bottle and a bucket of water. I had never used that sort of bong before. Needless to say, after all that vodka and champagne and now this, I was pretty fucked up that day. Afterwards three of the rough bikers brought me home in a car and walked me all the way to the door of my apartment. At first it looked a bit sketchy when they walked up the stairs with me but they were just being nice and making sure I got indoors alright. Just as well, too. Russian people hardly ever smile but are among the nicest, friendliest people I met around the world.

I
had a massive hangover the next morning but Natalia and a lot of young people from the wedding picked me up anyway, and we went with four or five cars to some lake a few hours away. It was still very hot outside. We all lay on the beach that day, eating leftover food from the wedding and drinking vodka again. (Welcome to Russia.) I made a sorry attempt to score with one of the girls but no success – I really wasn’t in any state to carry it off anyway. Natalia was watching from a distance and acted like she didn’t mind, but to this day she asks me to return to Russia and hang out with her. And one day I will and who knows what will happen then.