One night I decided to stay in one of the famous capsule hotels. Capsules are one-by-one meter wide and two meter deep sleeping places. It’s a bit like sleeping in a coffin. The price was about the same as the hostel. It took a bit of getting used to living in Japan, especially coming from Russia. Everything was so clean. Japanese people are highly disciplined and don’t throw rubbish on the street, they put their trash in their pockets and throw it away at home. The only places with trashcans were the 7-11s in the street. Some of the stereotypes about Japanese people are true but I prefer not to mention them. You can figure it out for yourself if you ever visit. Still, despite all the cultural differences and the high prices I loved being in Japan and wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
At first I missed Russia and all the people I met there, but I was slowly getting used to having left. I still emailed a lot with girls I met in Russia, especially Julia from Vladivostok.
Japan – Climbing Mount Fuji
One Friday night I climbed the famous Mount Fuji (or as the Japanese say, Fuji-san) with Dave and Sander, two Dutch guys I’d met in Tokyo. A bus took us to the base of the mountain and as usual we were totally unprepared. No warm clothes or rain gear and almost no food or water. This was the first time I used my hiking shoes and I was glad I found a reason to because I’d been carrying those heavy fuckers around for three months. Dave and Sander were just wearing sneakers. When we arrived at the base camp (Fifth station), there were loads of professionally-equipped Japanese people. I bought a flashlight at the base store because I’d forgotten mine. That sucked because now I had to spend twelve dollar on something I already had. Japanese prices were killing at that time.
We started climbing at 8:15 PM and rushed up the mountain; we passed whole groups of tiny Japanese and took giant steps with our long Dutch legs. I had no problems keeping up with the two Dutch guys even though they were ten years younger than me and I had black lungs from smoking and had just spent two months on the vodka drip in Russia.
We had to be careful in the dark; on some parts of the mountain you had to use your hands and your feet to climb, though at other parts there were steps cut out of the rocks.
After a few hours it was pitch black and it started to get very cold, and we had to rest a bit more often. Around 1:00 AM we reached the top of Fuji-san – just before a rain storm. So, there we were; tired, cold and wet. There was almost no place to hide from the rain and unlike the Japanese, who clearly knew what they were getting into, we hadn’t brought any rain clothes. At the very top of the mountain there was a wooden shack where people could stay during the night at extremely high prices. The roof stuck out a bit and we stood under it with our backs to the wall to avoid the rain. We stood like that for hours. No need to say it was really cold up there. I was only wearing a shirt and a very thin jacket and was very hungry and thirsty. Funnily enough there were some vending machines along the way and at every level the price of a small bottle of water went up a hundred yens (a dollar).
After a while the door to the wooden shack opened and we went in there to sit around the fire. We ate some horribly expensive noodles but we didn’t care about the price, we were starving and too cold. Around 5:30 the sun came up and we saw the most amazing sunrise ever. The view was absolutely stunning. The morning sunshine is called Go Rei Kou, which means “spiritual light”, and it’s easy to see why. I was really proud of myself. Mount Fuji is 3776 meters high and it was quite an accomplishment to have climbed in the dark, in less than five hours. It takes most Japanese climbers way over six hours to get to the top.
But we were already dead tired, and the worst part was still to come. It turns out that getting down Mount Fuji is a lot harder than getting up. Mount Fuji is a volcanic mountain covered with sandy ash. You have to brace yourself with every step you take. After a few hours of descending your legs really hurt. But we made it without injuries, and after two hours of expensive bus and trains I was back at the hostel. I didn’t sleep all night and thought I’d be knackered the next day but I ended up being quite awake the rest of the day. Dave went straight from the mountain to some DJ-ing convention and night party that followed. He looked pretty rough when I saw him again. I checked out the next morning and just hung around the city till 11:00 at night, when I took the last metro to the train station. I stayed the most of the night at a McDonalds where they handed out free water to bums like me and took the train for Kyoto at five in the morning.
Japan – Kyoto
Arrival in Kyoto was a classic bum-trip. I left the train station and walked around for over an hour with my backpack on. The humidity was killing me. I had stayed in the McDonalds the whole night before and the last time I’d had a shower was the previous morning. Since I was late buying a ticket I had to change trains at small stations about five times. When I arrived in the hostel, I stank so much that people were running out of the dorm room. The first thing I did was taking a long shower and then spray on a lot of deodorant to show them all that I was actually a clean guy.
Within a few hours I’d connected with a couple of people and after drinking some beers in the hostel we all went out to find a bar. The one we ended up at wasn’t a bad place – we even got to play some darts, my favorite pastime in Holland. We met a Japanese boy and girl and joined their table. The girl was drunk as fuck and kept repeating the same questions: “Wheee you fom? Wha you name? Why youuu here?” It was fun at first but it soon became really annoying. I sat down next to her and decided to see how far I could go with her. I remember one of us asking the Japanese teenager next to her if he was her boyfriend. She said “Noooooooooooooooooooo!!” very loudly and I almost felt sorry for the guy. He was clearly not amused. Meanwhile I gamed her a bit and was able to touch her a lot under the table. The Japanese guy never noticed a thing.
At one point the group wanted to leave, so we all got up to go. The Japanese girl gave me a wink and that was that. I was pretty sure I could do a lot more but didn’t know how to isolate a girl and didn’t have a place to bring her anyway.
That night I met a cute Japanese girl in the hostel named Sayuri. She had studied in the States and was more westernized and liberal than most Japanese girls; she also had a nice pair of knockers, especially for an Asian girl. Even so, she was damn hard to pick up. Girls were so conservative and I didn’t have the money to go to nightclubs to find the wilder ones. We went with a small group to a nearby park and drank our beers there. On the way we walked hand in hand but she backed out when I tried to kiss. I’m still in touch with her from time to time.
Japan – rest of the trip
For the next eight days I travelled with an Austrian guy named Mark. He was a tall 6.5ft bodybuilder but still complained he was small compared to his training buddies. He looked pretty massive to me. He was a compulsive tooth-brusher. Every morning he would brush his teeth for no less than twenty minutes.
From Kyoto we made daytrips to Kobe and Nara with a few other people. Then we went to a few other cities together, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where we visited the Atomic bomb memorial museums. We mostly travelled by Shinkansen bullet train, which was one of the world’s fastest trains at that time, reaching a good 300km/h – which seems pretty fast till you realize that they’re now experimenting with trains that can reach 581km/h. It was quite impressive to see the world flashing by while sitting in a luxury leather seat. Of course, this came at a price: my funds were getting depleted daily and my budget was shot to hell as a result. I spend about 2500 dollars in just twenty-four days there while staying in hostels, capsule hotels and eating cheap food from the local 7-elevens. It was the public transport that killed your daily budget. Every metro ride cost a few bucks and you had to make loads of rides a day. The system in Tokyo is insanely complicated, with all sorts of different operators who don’t necessarily work together, so buying a day pass didn’t really help. Taking the trains between cities was horribly expensive too. It wasn’t money wasted, since I did get to see lots of places and attractions,
but compared to Russia it was murder.
Mark and I are both tall blond guys and we got a lot of looks from schoolgirls, but it was hard to take a picture with them. I’d already found out that talking to those hot Japanese schoolgirls is almost a waste of time. First because most of the time they’re very young. The second reason is that they’re super shy and sometimes just run off when you approach them. The third reason is the enormous language barrier you’re dealing with, that makes even a basic conversation impossible.
We ended up in Fukuoka, which is where I said goodbye to him. I was taking the ferry to the Asian mainland, beginning with South Korea. In retrospect I regret not going out because I heard Fukuoka has a decent nightlife. But I was still more focused on travelling than on picking up girls, so I just stayed at the hostel that night, buying some beers and having fun with the other guests. I did some minor flirting with a young French girl from Paris.
South Korea – Busan
My first day in South Korea was also the most fun. I got onto the ferry at Fukuoka in Japan and I spotted a nice-looking girl in the crowd. She approached me before boarding and we got talking. This Canadian girl was teaching English in South Korea and did a visa run to Japan. On the boat we shared stories and downed shitloads of beer during the five-hour boat ride. She told me that she had also travelled large parts of the world. She worked on giant private yachts owned by millionaires, mostly in South America. They had crazy parties on board with lots of hookers and blow. She told me she was a lesbian and got offered girls (pros) all the time. Then she told me about how her ship got hijacked and robbed by pirates on the coast of Honduras and she barely survived. Next up was a shark attack. After this she worked as a paparazzo and she told me some crazy stories about some celebs.
When we drunkenly stumbled off the ferry, we agreed to see each other again in Seoul, which unfortunately didn’t actually happen – she worked crazy hours.
I had arrived in Busan, the second-largest city in South Korea, with a population of 3.6 million. I took the metro to the hostel and got talking with a Korean guy. He was very impressed with my plans to travel the world and invited me for dinner. His brother-in-law owned a restaurant and we ate a huge amount of food there and drank some Soju, Korean rice wine. After this he took me to a karaoke place. I became a bit skeptical at so much friendliness.
Inside the karaoke place we sat down in a private room and drank some more Soju. After a while a few girls walked in and my Korean buddy told me to choose. I chose a tall girl, but I was getting a bit worried what was going on. I didn’t want to get landed with a huge hooker bill at the end of the night.
Apparently the girls were there to keep us company. They poured our drinks and spoon-fed us fruits. Later the girls started singing and dancing and you could touch them a bit but not too much. The Korean guy was getting drunk and he paid the bill. After this we walked through the lobby and there was a Kung-Fu movie playing on TV. The Korean guy wanted to show off and dared me to spar with him. I said OK because I’d done about ten years of martial arts myself and the Korean dude was pretty drunk. To my surprise he was lightning fast and pretty much kicked my ass in that little play fight. I wasn’t sober myself but still, that was impressive. We took a taxi to my hostel and said goodbye. Looking back at this experience, I should have boldly asked for a girl in a Korean schoolgirl outfit. I loved the Japanese schoolgirl look and it’s the same in South Korea, although girls there are build a bit huskier.
I was hungover as fuck the next morning and spend most of the time in bed. The owner of the hostel later told me that the Korean guy and a friend were at the door but he had sent them away. The owner wanted to keep his place secret and only for foreigners/backpackers and not have it become a place for drunken businessman looking for a late-night sleeping place.
That afternoon I went sightseeing with two guys I met at the hostel, one from Switzerland and one from New Zealand. We took a cable ride up a nearby mountain and got a spectacular view over the city. At night we went out with a small group. I remember sitting outside the 7-11 and drinking the cans of beer we bought there while Robin, a Korean/American guy, told us an insane story about an English guy in a hostel he stayed at in Rio de Janerio. It’s a long story but let me sum it up: one English guy, two transvestite Brazilian “girls”, lots of coke, a fight about one of the trans chicks having too small a cock and the English guy therefore not wanting to have sex with them, angry drugs dealers waving guns around, the trans chicks sitting out the whole day in front of the hostel waiting for the English guy to come out and pay them, and sketchy cops looking for bribes. And the English guy didn’t care that the whole hostel knew what happened! As Robin described it, the guy was a Zen master of not caring. He just sat in the hostel reading a book.
My last day in Busan I spent with the New Zealand guy, Greg. We went to a local fish market and ate a lot. You could just point at live fish in basins and a few minutes later it was on your plate. The food in South Korea is a lot cheaper than in Japan and you could eat a decent-sized meal for just five dollars. At one point there was no place in the hostel for Greg and me because of prior reservations, so we found an all-night bath house to stay at for only seven dollars a night. You could bathe and soak for hours in the large complex and then sleep in a capsule. As I was almost the only white guy, I got a lot of stares from the Korean guys, especially below the belt. I’m not saying I’m hung like a horse, but I was compared to them.
South Korea – Seoul
After six hours on the train Greg and I arrived in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Greg is an English teacher there and went home to his place in the suburbs. I went looking for a hostel because I hadn’t booked anything this time. When I reached a hostel the woman/owner said she had no bed available for me but also said she’d just opened a new hostel that week. She drew up a route description and gave me the security door code, and I walked over there. When I arrived I saw that it was a massive villa, and all for me because I was the only one there except the guy who worked there, Bong. He was so bored that he kept making me sandwiches all the time just to have something to do.
That night I went out to the Monkey Beach Bar (go there if you’re in Seoul), where I met up with Greg and four others from the hostel in Busan. That was a great night out. We had lots of drinks and around 3 in the morning, the bar staff handed out super-soakers and everyone started shooting at each other. It was funny to see how some guys turn into hyperactive Rambos as soon as they’re handed a water gun. Grow up, dudes. After this, everyone was soaked in water and it was getting cold outside. I tried to pick up one of three drunk, crazy girls from the USA I met outside, but of course I failed, having no game and never even having heard of pick-up artists or techniques at that point. I’d taught myself a few tricks during my trip but they weren’t going to be not good enough. A lot more happened that night but I’d best keep it short.
After a few days I had to leave the hostel because a group of thirty Dutch engineering students had booked the villa. I went to the other hostel. After checking in I walked outside for some food and a blonde Swedish girl approached me. She had just arrived and was going to stay a semester to study. We started talking and had some coffee. Johanna was a pretty girl and we visited a lot of places together that day. Sightseeing was still high on my priority list. At one point we had to cross a busy street and at that moment I came up with some touching techniques. At first I put my hand on the middle of her back: ok, no negative reaction. Then I grabbed her hand and we sprinted across the street. Once on the other side I didn’t let go of her hand and she held on to mine. From that day on I always use this technique. It’s a perfect way to “protect” the girl, and yes, girls like this. It’s a good way to test if the girl has interest in you.
After visiting a palace Johanna and I sat down in a small park together and something crazy happened. We were just sitting on a bench, looking at the map and all of a sudden an enraged red-headed Korean guy showed up about forty meters away. He wa
s about forty-five years and he was shouting at us: “This is Korea, get out, go away!” I‘s been warned that a lot of Koreans are (silent) racists but this was just insane. He walked towards and I got up in front of Johanna.
Some other Korean guys got of their benches and tried to calm the situation down. The crazy guy was furious for no reason at all. Johanna started pulling my arm. “Let’s go,” she pleaded. One old Korean guy tried to reason with the mad man and got slapped in the face really hard. At this moment I stepped forward to do something about it but got pushed away by the other Korean guys telling me it was better to leave. Johanna pulled my arm again and I walked off with her.
When walking away I got really angry because I kept thinking of the poor old man getting slapped that hard because of us. I wanted to go right back and kick that fucker’s ass but Johanna didn’t understand why and asked me why I was so aggressive. At that very moment I realized it must have been a huge turn-off for her and I calmed down a bit.
A day later I met her again and we went to a park. We were lying in the grass close to each other and I looked her deep in her big blue eyes. She asked me: “Are you flirting with me?” All I could think of was: “Maybe”. This triggered another thought in me and I’ve been using this line ever since, although slightly changed.
Me: Are you flirting with me? (Look her deep in the eyes and smile at her, aka a flirty look)
Girl: Eh… no
Me: Are you sure? (Keep looking flirty at her, touch her somewhere)
Girl: Eh… eh yes
Me: Sure you’re sure? (Keep flirting)
Ok, now you just have to size up the situation. If she answers “Yes” or “maybe” after the first or second question, go for the kiss. If she keeps denying, say you’re just joking and try something else later. Don’t give up!
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 8
