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

by Neil Skywalker

  There are literally millions of motorbikes in Vietnam and it’s normal to see a mother with three small children on one bike while she’s holding the groceries or a sun umbrella with one hand and using the other to steer. When people drive their bike, they don’t look to the left, right or over their shoulders. They just watch right in front of them and it works surprisingly well.

  D-Lux and I did go out in the hopes of finding some girls, but it was all No Money, No Honey. D-Lux even got his thousand-dollar iPhone pick pocketed while he was drunk that night.

  Three days later we both went to Nha Trang by overnight sleeper bus, which had three small rows of beds. It was like being in a can of sardines, but still comfortable enough to have a few hours of sleep. Later I realized that Vietnam is the only country that has overnight buses like that, that actually take into consideration the fact people are going to want to sleep. I would spend many sleepless nights on countless buses in other countries fondly remembering the buses of Vietnam.

  Vietnam – Nha Trang

  Nha Trang is a city on the coast of Vietnam and quite a touristy one. We were there during the off-season and hotels were ridiculously cheap. I paid seven dollars for a room with marble floors, a decent bathroom, a king-sized bed, a fridge, cable television and an air–conditioning unit.

  Across the street was a small bar/restaurant named Zippo. D-Lux and I went there a couple of times and had fun with the girls working there. I kind of liked one of them. Her name was Nga and she was a short twenty-two year old cutie. She barely spoke English but with the help of a small translation book we could communicate a bit. You can buy loads of knock-off Lonely Planet books for only three or four dollars there. I learned some Vietnamese but pronouncing it right was very difficult. Vietnamese is a tonal language and the same word can mean different things depending on the pitch of your voice.

  I went out with D-Lux that evening, but a lot of clubs had girls who were working P4P (pay for pussy). It was quite obvious that they were hookers and D-Lux and I didn’t stay long inside. Back at the Zippo restaurant I kind of picked up Nga, but not much happened with her. There was never really a chance with Nga, who was still a virgin and had never had a boyfriend before. I later heard this story many times but with Nga I still have the feeling she wasn’t lying to me.

  One day she took me to her parents’ house in a rural area. It was fun to hang around the house with her family and lots of kids. She cooked me some food and it was delicious. We rode on her motorbike and we visited a few sites on the way there and the way back. Nga was super shy and she told she had never even kissed anyone before. After some charm talk she went to my room nonetheless and we kissed a bit but she wouldn’t take her clothes off no matter what I tried. She weighed only thirty-eight kilos and I could easily throw her around the room and on the bed. We had fun but I also wanted to actually get laid. I decided to go out alone.

  D-Lux had met a girl while in Saigon and she came over to see him. She wasn’t my type but she was nice. At least he was banging. One night I went out with a Vietnamese girl I met in another restaurant. We went to a club together but I really didn’t like the atmosphere there, it was very expensive and the hot girl I was with got kind of bitchy after a while. I cut my losses and went back to my hotel.

  I later met an English couple in their forties and we went to a bar with them. Inside the bar were two hot blonde Swedish girls. There were no other foreigners around and they were eyeballing me a lot. I went over to their table and started talking my ass off. It looked like everything I said hit the spot. We were drinking quite a few beers and I couldn’t figure out which one to go for. One girl was very tall and had model-like features, the other one looked like a porn star. She told that they were leaving for Cambodia the next day and I didn’t know what to do exactly. They shared a room together and bringing one of them to my room would split them up, which was unlikely to happen. Going for a threesome came to mind but seemed impossible. The problem when getting clear signals from two girls at once is that if you choose one, the other one will probably cock block you. I couldn’t think of a way to bypass this problem.

  So I made the stupid decision to ask them to dance at another place. We walked over to a place on the beach and danced a bit. This was the beginning of the worst cock blocking ever. There was a group of Australians lurking around but they were too scared to approach the girls. They just watched from a distance. There were about eight of them. One of them asked me if I was with the girls and I told him that they were with me there. They kept lurking around. Suddenly one of their moms (!?) asked the girls if either of them was my girlfriend and she said no. The mom called all the guys over and started introducing all of them to the Swedish girls.

  I was floored by this and couldn’t do a damn thing now that a few other moms were also introducing their sons to the girls. I mean: Seriously, their MOMS were picking up girls for them. What a bunch of pussies.

  Of course the girls liked all the attention and the whole group sat down. The guys were just on a family holiday and had shitloads of money to spend and they were buying expensive cocktails for the blondes. I was completely cock blocked because those asses kept talking to me while others talked to the girls. What to do when there are eight horny guys in your way and there’s no way to isolate the girls now that they’re getting all the attention from those buffed-up guys in their own age group? The situation was getting hopeless.

  One guy wanted to go to another club and the whole group went there. I tagged along but could already tell it was a lost cause. The tall blonde was into a really tall muscular guy and they danced closely together. The other girl was also occupied. At one point I decided to call it quits and went home. I got their names for Facebook but never found them on there. I had this problem a lot with Scandinavian girls; many of them have the same or similar last names. Or yeah, they might have changed them a bit but they didn’t seem the type to do that.

  I felt like shit when I went home drunk and alone. The girls had to leave the next day, which was just a few hours later, but I was pretty sure they at least kissed those guys or maybe even banged them somewhere. The thought was killing me. I did all the fucking work in the first bar, they were hanging onto my lips and then I lost them to a bunch of money-throwing Aussies who needed their mothers to get talking to girls. Months later when I was getting to know more Swedish girls I started to suspect that probably nothing actually happened: they’re not easy to pick up and always have cock blockers around.

  Well, I still was hanging out with Nga a lot. One day there had been a giant storm that flooded the city: in some streets the water was standing to my knees. I couldn’t go to the beach for about five days. I spent the time in my room or at the bar/restaurant where Nga worked. She worked every night till midnight but couldn’t spend the night with me because she shared a room and her motorbike with a coworker. In the morning she went to school. She worked twenty-eight days out of the month and earned only fifty dollars for it. I felt bad when I ordered breakfast and it cost more than her whole day’s pay.

  When the sun returned I went to the beach a lot and even jogged on the beach three times after a night of heavy drinking and smoking, after which I swore off booze and cigarettes because I was feeling so terrible the next day. My getting-back-in-shape mood only lasted three days before I started hammering beers again.

  One night I went to the beach bar again but had to get money out of the ATM first. I took out 1.5 million Dong, the local currency. On the way to the beach bar I was stopped by some street girls looking for a customer. They pulled my arm but I refused to go with them. I was kind of drunk and one of them was feeling my nuts, which actually felt pretty good. Hands were all over my body but I pushed them all off, saying that I don't pay for sex. One of the girls hit me gently in the balls then, and like all guys know, even a small graze to the nuts will hurt. I felt them pulling on me again but managed to shake myself loose and go on to the bar. I ordered a beer, but when I wanted to pay I felt my
back pocket and half a million dong was gone. I’d been pick pocketed. Luckily I had put the other million Dong in the front pocket and it was still there. I was fuming and ran back to the corner where I’d met the girls, wanting to slap them in the face to get my money back. Half a million dong isn’t a fortune (about twenty-six dollars) but you can eat and drink a lot for it. I was still a very cheap bastard because I had a lot of travelling to go. Of course I never saw those girls again.

  Anyway, after a while it was time to move on. D-Lux had other plans; he was going to stay there and was thinking of taking over a bar/restaurant. I gave Nga about thirty dollars to help her with her school and kissed her goodbye. I thought about what it would be like to have some short of a relationship with her. It was probably doomed to fail, with all the cultural differences between us. It would be great for a few months but wouldn’t last.

  I was approached by a happy Vietnamese guy who offered guided motor rides through the rural areas of the country. It’s called the easy rider experience. At sixty dollars a day it wasn’t that cheap but it was the only way to really see the country.

  Vietnam – 8-day motor ride

  This part of my story focuses more on sightseeing and less on pick–up, because it was a journey through the countryside, where there aren’t really any opportunities. It was still one of the best parts of my trip.

  I had booked an eight-day motor ride through the countryside with a local guide. There were several motor guides in Nha Trang and my guide’s name was Eddy Murphy. Eddy was a crazy guy who spoke good English. I’ve had my motor driver’s license for many years (you’ll remember how I used it to get into museums for cheap back in Russia) but I’m not an experienced off road rider, especially on Vietnam’s dangerous dirt roads. I choose the cheapest option which was to sit on the back of his bike. We strapped my giant backpack on the back of the motor so I had something to sit against. It was quite comfortable.

  The first day we took a short coastal road and then we went into Vietnam’s countryside. The water at the rivers was quite low and it was strange to see people standing knee-deep in the middle of the river. They were fishing for lobster and shrimp, which were sold everywhere for next to nothing.

  We stopped along the roadside and I met an indigenous family living in a straw hut. They lived very basic lives. There are fifty–four ethnic minorities in Vietnam (population 92 million), and most of them live in poverty in the rural areas. Eddy gave the man of the house some money and a few cigarettes and we rode into the mountains where the air was a lot colder. We saw many tea and coffee plantations along the way, a beautiful sight.

  We then arrived the medium-sized city of Da Lat, which has many temples. Most of them are beautifully decorated with thousands of colorful small tiles. After this we visited a train station housing the first steam train Vietnam ever had. It wasn’t very interesting, but Eddy was making sure to stop every half-hour to show me something new, whether it was interesting or not.

  The second day we visited a silkworm farm and silk factory to see how silk is made, and afterwards a temple with strange statues of Buddha. One had countless arms and a lot of heads. Outside was a giant smiling Buddha. I’m an atheist but I like the Buddhist religion. They’re generally peaceful and don’t try to force their religion on you.

  There was an enormous waterfall close by, and if you climbed a lot of dangerous wet rocks you could get to a cave behind it. You didn’t want to slip and break a leg in the middle of nowhere. I got completely soaked but it was worth it. How often do you get to look at a waterfall from inside?

  We rode through a part of the country where there were a lot of coffee plantations. You could buy a cup of coffee at roadside stalls and the taste was amazing. I never had better coffee anywhere else in the world. The plantations are small and all family-owned; the families build small palaces to live in next to their piece of land. We ate at roadside restaurants along the way and my stomach survived everything. We stopped at a school where I took a picture with a group of school kids. They were scared of me at first because I’m so tall compared to rest of the people. People in the countryside are not used to tall white people and my arm got tired from waving to everyone. On one occasion a whole army platoon stopped marching and waved at me, their machine-guns dangling around their stomachs.

  At the end of the second day we stopped in a native village where I met some other easy riders. One of them was a Dutch girl with beautiful red hair and two others were oversized fat American sisters. I met them a couple more times on my trip. Most easy riders take the same routes, but Eddy liked to get off the beaten track as much as possible.

  The houses in the village were built on stilts to avoid flooding and tigers. After eating and drinking together I went to sleep and in the morning I was woken by a family of hogs sleeping under the house. I could see the mother pig and all her little ones through the large cracks in the wooden floor.

  When I opened the door in the morning there was a giant elephant staring at me, his trunk just half a meter away from my face. It shocked me because I was still half asleep. I got my camera but the elephant had already started moving away.

  After breakfast we got on the bike again. My bum was getting sore from sitting on the bike all day. We visited a mushroom farm and there were lots of animals around – dogs, ducks, chickens, rabbits, even a big scorpion and a giant python snake which I both held and took pictures with. We saw a lot of nature that day and visited a noodle factory and a brick factory. It seems that all the heavy labor jobs are done by women. The only man in the brick factory was a guy driving a bulldozer. The women are short and skinny but strong as a horse.

  The only guy I saw working hard was a guy breaking rocks in the hot sun. I’m guessing he fought the law and the law won? He earned even less than Nga, back in Nha Trang. The guy was breaking rocks with a hammer all month for the amount of money an average American family spends taking their kids to McDonalds. I’m not preaching socialism here but sometimes you have to take a moment and realize how good we have it our western countries.

  The day after we rode almost all day to go see two waterfalls, one big one and one giant one. They were spectacular. At night we stopped in a small town and I told Eddy that my back and ass were sore from all that sitting on a bike. He said there was a massage parlor close by the hotel we were staying.. We went there together. I jumped on the massage bed and a gorgeous short girl walked in. She must have been about five feet tall, had a beautiful face and sexy slim body. She had quite a special way of massaging, mainly stretching the limbs. She was pretty strong. When she was done I had her walk on my back, just like you see in the gangster movies sometimes. It felt great.

  This was really the agricultural countryside, so in the days after I went to a glue plantation, a rubber plantation, a black pepper plantation. I even cut rice in the field with some local family. The children would catch rats in the field and they’d be on the dinner plates at night. It’s a different world out there. You hardly see any cars because everyone is driving motor scooters, yet I didn’t see any accidents with people getting hurt; in fact, the only accident I saw was a guy losing his unbelievably huge load of bananas. Quite a sight. The whole street was covered with them.

  We later visited a small village where the village elder was this super happy short man. He kept laughing and cheering because of my height. He gave a long musical demonstration on his bamboo drums, which was boring but I acted as if I was enthusiastic so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings and come off like some spoiled foreigner.

  As we were leaving, our motor broke down and Eddy made some phone calls. He said that someone would pick us and the motor up. My western brain was thinking about a pickup truck but instead a guy on another motorbike came and pushed our motor with his foot for a few kilometers through the city we were in. No, seriously. Repairs took a few hours and we moved on. I took pictures of several war monuments and with an old (Russian) tank. After this we visited “Hamburger Hill”, a famous battle zone
were many soldiers on both sides died for a small piece of land. There’s a very good movie about it with the same title.

  What makes Vietnam beautiful is not just the amazing natural scenery but mostly the friendliness of the people in the rural areas. People were always waving and taking pictures with me and children were always cheering or running behind the bike.

  The sixth day of my trip we rode to the Marble Mountains, where there are several Buddhist temples and pagodas in the mountains. I flirted a bit with a Vietnamese tourist girl and took many pictures with a school class full of teenage girls who visited the mountains. Even after visiting every country in Asia, I still say that Vietnam is the country with the best-looking girls, with have great legs and cute faces – although the Philippines is a close second.

  Eddy wanted to return to Nha Trang a day earlier than planned, and had found a new customer for the ride back. I didn’t mind giving up my place, because my body was very sore after sitting on the back of a motorbike for seven days. So I said goodbye to Eddy and took the bus from Hue to the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone. It was a tour bus and I hate those buses full of fat holidaymakers, but I didn’t mind this time because it rained a lot that day, and given the choice between a comfy bus stuffed with fat holidaymakers and riding on a motorbike through an endless downpour, I’ll take the option with the roof.

  The tour included many bunkers and a few museums. It ended with the Vinc Moc Vietcong tunnels. The tunnels were deep underground and all the work was done by women since most guys and boys were fighting the US. They dug out six hundred tons of sand using nothing but shovels and buckets. Did I mention that Vietnamese women are though? A whole village of some three hundred people lived underground for about eight years. Seventeen babies were born underground and all of them survived. The US army never found the tunnels.