That night he and I went out to a bar but it wasn’t too crowded. There were a few gold diggers/pros around and drinks were very expensive. I remember El Mariachi telling me to “just get your lips wet” when taking a sip of the beer, which I found very funny and still use from time to time. We bailed after a while.
The morning after, El Mariachi and his girl had to work and I stayed in the flat when Dan arrived and took the last bedroom. Dan was a tall American guy and another English teacher. The three of us went out to a big club where you had to pay about fourteen dollars to get in but after that got free drinks all night as long as you held on to your glass. There were loads of (Far East) Russian students in the club because China is a booming country. Everywhere you look people are building new roads, railways, bridges and buildings. I spoke to people from cities I visited when in Far East Russia. I couldn’t pull a girl but I didn’t try so hard either.
After waking up with a hangover the next day I went to a local street food place with El Mariachi and ate some weird stuff, though not as gross as the stuff in Beijing. The chicken hearts on a stick were delicious. After this we went to a park where he showed me some marijuana plants growing along the roads. He wanted me to confirm it was real as I was a Dutch expert on weed, aka The Bongmeister. It was real marijuana and we took a few handfuls back to the apartment. I sorted it out and microwave dried it and rolled it up. This sounds bad and it was. The only buzz I got was being dizzy from the horrible crap we were smoking that evening.
That night I wanted to go out again but El Mariachi went to bed early and wouldn’t join me, so I went out alone and spoke to lots of Russians again in the same club. At the end of the night a Chinese girl named Carol walked up and started talking to me. We flirted a bit and when the club closed I took her back to the apartment, where we slept on the couch. It was almost daylight and getting cold when I heard Dan get up, but before he left the house he took a blanket and put it over us. Yeah, Dan was a nice guy.
As soon as he left I got up and took the girl to his room and banged her in his bed. Carol was quite young, only twenty-one years old. She had a rock hard body and was quite inexperienced in bed. It was my first Asian girl ever and I took that opportunity to bang her well.
After the deed I noticed there was a giant blood stain on the sheet. We took the sheet off the bed, talked a bit and fell asleep. We woke up in the afternoon and Carol left. I was quite hungover from lots of drinks and lack of sleep and didn’t know what to do with the bloody sheet and just hung it outside without cleaning it.
That evening I hurried to the train station to get a train ticket. I gave El Mariachi some money for a new sheet and got the fuck out of town. I didn’t know how Dan would react but for sure he wouldn’t be happy. Dan, if you ever read this, I’m sorry for being such a dick. I still have regular contacts with Carol and El Mariachi on Facebook. Carol lives in Singapore. El Mariachi really got into The Lord and married a pretty girl on the west coast of California.
China – Xian
A short stay in Beijing and a few long train rides later I arrived in Xian. Xian is a major tourist destination because of the discovery of the terracotta warriors some thirty-five years ago. I slept in a dorm and heard there was a Dutch girl staying there but I didn’t see her that day. The next morning as I was eating breakfast I all of a sudden saw Nicole, a Dutch girl I met in Mongolia, walk by. I tapped her on the shoulder and she was even more surprised than I was. What was even weirder was that just two days before in Beijing I’d met up with Odette, an American girl who looked like Brooke Shields and had been in the same Mongolian hostel as Nicole. Nicole and I talked for quite some time that morning. I explored the city a bit but it was not that interesting, just another giant Chinese city.
I woke up early the next morning and I got on the bus to the area where the famous terracotta warriors were. It was an enormous park with three giant halls filled with archeological finds. I started with the smallest one and worked my way to the biggest one, which was most impressive. There were thousands of statues and it was hard to imagine that everything was over 2200 years old. The statues were made of clay and were originally fully painted, but the paint came off when the statues came into contact with oxygen when they were excavated. The nine thousand statues were discovered in 1974 by a Chinese farmer who was digging a water well. There was no history of the statues – no-one knew they’d ever existed – and it was one of the biggest discoveries of that time. All the statues are about 1.70m high and very detailed; they were modeled after real servants and soldiers and they all have different facial expressions. Legend has it that they were buried with the emperor to protect him in the afterlife, instead of burying the actual servants alive the way they would have done in earlier times.
In the evening I met an American woman in the hostel. I’d moved dorms and she was staying in my new one. I gathered some free beer tickets from the hostel and Christa gave me hers too. Christa had also travelled for a few months in Russia and we shared some stories. She told me a crazy story about how she took a train with hundreds of drunken Russian soldiers on it and was the only (foreign) woman. Christa was about thirty-three years old and chubby. Not a looker but she was nice and had tits the size of watermelons. They were hard to miss and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, especially since she was wearing a low-cut shirt.
That night I had quite a few beers and later talked and flirted with Christa again in the dorm. When we went to sleep I asked her if I could sleep in her bed but she said no because of the couple who was also staying in the same dorm.
The next morning after breakfast we were internetting in the dorm room and I threw on some charm. At one point we were sitting and flirting on a bed and I was looking her in the eyes and I said to her, “All I want is to kiss you.” “What are you waiting for?” she said. Of course I went straight in for the kiss and things heated up fast. I took a chair and put it under the door handle. We got in her bed and she gave me a blowjob. At that moment a cleaning lady walked in and the chair just fell to the side. I have to improve my chair under the door handle technique a bit. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, the cleaning lady or Christa, but I found it quite funny. Christa wanted to stop but I convinced to go through and she did. I got my American flag but it wasn’t one to be much proud of, it was just a one-noon stand.
After this, we walked over the huge defense wall in the city. I was leaving in just a few hours and my hands were almost glued to her giant breasts. Back in the hostel I tried to bone her a second time but she was afraid of people walking in again. One hour later I took the train to Shanghai and never had contact with her again.
In Shanghai I had a night out at a club with lots of Russian girls. Although I succeeded three times in Russia, I pretty much bombed out due to the fact I was a poor backpacker with close to zero pick-up skills. One of the Russian girls working at the club seemed to be into me, constantly giving me free drinking tickets but I didn’t like her physically. Not all Russian girls are hot – just a lot more than other nationalities.
I went on to the city-states Hong Kong and Macau, where I had lots of fun but nothing outside the usual drinking and weed smoking backpacker fun with lots of cool people and failed attempts to pick up a few girls from several nationalities. A hundred pictures later it was time to go off the beaten track a bit by visiting Taiwan, which isn’t a major tourist destination. By now I had decided to visit every country in Asia, so I couldn’t skip Taiwan and had to bite the bullet on the prices of the flights.
Taiwan – Taipei
In a hostel in Taipei I met D-Lux. He was a fully tattooed Canadian bodybuilder with a strong appetite for women. We went to a big club together to pick up some Taiwanese girls. At least, that was the plan, but the club kind of sucked and I found it hard to talk with the local girls. They all seemed very childish. We tried to hook up with a few chicks but didn’t get anywhere except for getting some phone numbers which were later flaked on. I had my doubts about D-Lux at first,
mainly because of his foul language regarding women and crazy character. Little did I know that he would become one of my best friends on this trip.
I was getting tired of hanging around only in big cities; I needed a break from pollution and noise. So I decided to visit the Taroko Gorge nature park. I ended up getting to the Taipei train station way too early – I got there at 9:00 in the morning and the train to Shincheng didn’t leave till 13.00, so I had to wait for a long time.
I arrived at 16.00 and there were no more buses to Tianchang, the small mountain village I wanted to get to. A few taxi drivers were happy to take me there but asked for prices that were pure extortion. I told them to go fuck themselves and started walking. I was determined to reach the village no matter what, but my twenty-two kilogram backpack started weighing me down, the village was twenty kilometers away and the only road up there went through some steep mountains. An unrealistic plan.
Hitchhiking there would be a smarter option, so I stood by the road for about an hour but none of the passing cars wanted to take me up the road. Out of desperation I signaled down a bus.
After lots of pointing at maps and trying to pronounce the Chinese words, the guy let me in and sometime later he dropped me off at the headquarters of the park. It was already after 18:00 and near dark so the park was closed. I banged on the door but nobody came.
A few minutes later a park ranger that was doing some overtime walked up to me and asked me what I was doing there. Luckily he spoke a bit of English. He told me that the small village was still miles away. I asked him if I could wait until 6:00 in the morning so I could get the first bus to the village where there was a hostel. He said it was OK to wait in front of the door and I asked him for a chair to sit on. He brought me a chair and a few moments later a couple of office ladies brought me cookies and drinks. How nice of them. I was sitting on the chair for about an hour and the guy came back. He said I could stay in the dorm with the park rangers who were young students. A bed for the night – and free!
It was a four-bed room and the guys were friendly and spoke a bit of English. They showed me some pictures of the park on their laptops and I helped them repair a motor bike. They told me that most of the walking routes were closed because of dangerous weather. That disappointed me a lot, I was afraid I had come for nothing.
I barely slept because I had no pillow and one of the guys was snoring like a chainsaw. The next morning I woke early and took a well-needed shower. One of the park rangers asked me to come with him and took me on his newly repaired motorbike. He drove like a madman on the wet mountain roads. It was a bit scary but I figured he did it daily. He dropped me off in the middle of nowhere and he said it was twelve kilometers back to the park headquarters. I thanked him and he drove off on his motorcycle.
I started walking the road back and took lots of pictures. The mountains were almost vertical and a spectacle to see in the early misty morning. There were quite a few small waterfalls but no big ones. The hanging bridge was impressive too but off-limits for non-park workers because it was too slippery after the storm a couple of days before.
After a few hours of walking I was pretty much through the food I brought from Taipei. I had one snack of rice wrapped in seaweed left, which is not enough for the whole day. I guessed I had to take the next best thing: cigarettes.
After a while I reached a big open spot where a small monastery had been built on a mountain with a waterfall under it. This was a place where some tour buses stopped so people could take pictures. I was sitting on the fence when a few women walked up to me and asked me where I was from. I said I was from Holland and travelled around the world. I told them I hitchhiked up to the park and although they were Canadian/Taiwanese women who spoke good English they misunderstood me and thought I’d said I hitchhiked around the world. They offered me some food and soon other people from the bus were bringing me food too. I was kind of starving so I didn’t say no to that. I got three bananas, some rice snacks, a chocolate bar, a warm cheese sandwich and a couple of bottles of water. I thanked them all and went on my way. People are friendly on this side of the world.
After another couple of hours walking I came back to the headquarters and got some food and tea again. I waited for a few hours for a bus to the train station and went on my way. The whole trip didn’t cost me much. I didn’t have to pay much for the bus up to the park headquarters and I got a free night of sleep instead of paying for the hostel in the small village, which charged dearly for a dorm bed. I got free food and drinks and I saw some amazing nature and lots of waterfalls. There are worse ways to take a trip.
Taiwan – Kenting and Kaohsiung
After returning from my small adventure in the nature park, I returned to Taipei. I stayed one day in the hostel and relaxed a bit before moving on to the south of Taiwan. I was glad to escape the polluted city where it rained most days. The bus ride to Kaohsiung, only took five hours, which after some of the Russian trips I’d taken was nothing. The massive bus I took had only eighteen chairs as big as couches, along with a TV and video games. The chair had a massage function and I slept like a baby after playing some old school Nintendo games. I arrived in Kaohsiung and met up with D-Lux, who had gone there the day before me.
We took a bus to Ken Ting, a famous Taiwanese beach town. We shared a room in a place called the RICH Hotel even though we were far from rich. The room was quite luxurious and it was on the street were all the party places and bars were. Or so we thought. We went out later that night and it turned out there wasn’t a damn thing to do in Ken Ting. Most bars closed down early and only a place with some lady boys was open. No thanks! On the streets were a lot of T-shirts shops and most of them were selling T-shirts with marijuana leaves and stoner pictures. We were happy for a moment and tried to score some weed but our happiness was only short-term. No one actually sold weed, or if they did they gave us ridiculous prices. All grumpy we bought some bags of chips and lots of beer and watched the movie channel in our room for a few hours.
A girl knocked on the door in the morning and told us that we had to check out. When we did that we were told that the room price doubled because it was the weekend. Great. We decided to go back to Kaohsiung to see what was happening there, since we both had some time to kill before flying to Vietnam. We shared a taxi with a Taiwanese couple back to Kaohsiung, which was even cheaper than the bus. Most bus and taxi drivers in Taiwan eat beetle nuts, which like chewing coca leaves gives you energy throughout the day. The problem with beetle nuts is that they makes your teeth rot away and the liquid inside the nuts and leaves is red so it looks like the buses and taxis are driven by bloodthirsty vampires. The upside of those beetle nuts is that they’re sold by girls in bikini in little glass houses. When I first saw them I thought I was back in Holland in one of the several red light districts throughout Holland – not only in Amsterdam, as most tourists seem to think.
D-Lux and I stayed in a big apartment a block away from the hostel that rented it out. On Saturday we went out with an American guy.
When we walked into the club and ordered a drink, two girls approached me and said I looked like a movie star. Something I was getting used to by now. They pulled out their phones and I had to give my number to them, which I gladly did. A second later three other girls pulled me onto the dance floor, which was still empty, and the first two girls joined us. So, there I was dancing with five girls on an empty dance floor. Other people started to dance as well and within moments the floor was packed. Everyone was checking me and the five girls out and I nearly felt like a real movie star. D-Lux was not too happy about it because nobody asked him. At the end of the night I had five phone numbers in my phone. I tried to escalate a bit with one of the girls at the club but didn’t get far. Asian girls are very shy and conservative even though they dress up sexy and come on to you sometimes. Even when they are in their early twenties they mostly act like fourteen-year-olds. Hate to say it, but it’s true from a guys perspective.
Over the next
five days I got a lot of phone calls from them but it wasn’t more than a lot of giggling and badly spoken English. I couldn’t pin anyone down. D-Lux and I got into a small argument about the girl who worked in the hostel, he wanted to bang her but she started flirting with me. Later that week we went out with a few girls I don't even remember meeting. That was a bust as well. I was going to leave the country without capturing the local flag.
D-Lux took his flight to Saigon and I followed a day later. I was about to explore the poor parts of Asia. Up till now I hadn’t seen much poverty. There were some bums in Japan and South Korea but those guys didn’t look like they were starving. I had seen extreme poverty in India a year before I left on my round-the-world trip. It looked like people were dying right in front of you on the streets. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to see that again. Julia and I still had close contact and agreed to meet again somewhere. Thailand was a good option and it was not that far away from Vietnam. For now it was time to visit ’Nam, as the country was named in the many war movies I saw. I didn’t know what to expect but I sure was excited.
Chapter Three – South East Asia
Vietnam – Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)
After a short flight from Taipei I arrived in Saigon, the southern capital of Vietnam. I was finally in South East Asia and ready to see what everyone was raving about. The country got off to a good start – I got a very luxurious hotel room for only fifteen dollars in one of the many alleys in the tourist area.
There were a huge number of white tourists around, something I didn’t see since Xian in China. I had mixed feelings about this, since I hadn’t come to Vietnam to see foreigners, but I enjoyed the western food sold in the restaurants after spending the last months eating rice and noodles. That’s not to say I didn’t try the local food, though. I ate Phô for the first time and loved it. It’s a kind of thick spicy noodle soup with vegetables and pork meat that really fills you up for a while. When you buy it from street vendors it’s always a gamble and I don’t recommend trying it if there’s no toilet around.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 10
