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

by Neil Skywalker

  Well, that was pretty much hitting rock bottom so far.

  Cambodia – Siem Reap

  I left Bangkok early in the morning. Most backpackers buy a bus ticket at Koa San road and pay way too much for something you can easily do yourself. I hopped into a taxi to the north bus station and bought a ticket to the Thai/Cambodian border.

  On the way I met a Spanish guy in the bus who was doing a short trip and we talked a lot about travelling. We took a tuk tuk from the Thai border town to the border. I was wondering if the driver would try the Visa scam that I’d been warned about in Lonely Planet. And he did. We stopped at some “visa office” along the road. They insisted we should get our visas here. According to them, it was impossible to get a visa at the border and this was the last place you could. I told the driver that we would walk further and he would get no money at all if he didn’t take us right to the border. I also warned a few Russian tourists who were brought to the same spot not to buy the overpriced visas there. The “travel agent” saw he was losing his “customers” and told the tuk tuk driver to take us to the border.

  At moments like these I feel glad that I always have a Lonely Planet guide on me, because while the prices are always wrong in the book, at least they warn you about scams like this.

  Formalities at the border took one hour. That meant waiting in the sun for at least half an hour before moving indoors. They were a large group of Russian tourists around so it was a feast for the eyes but it also reminded me of my time with Julia. It took one hour to get a simple passport stamp and hawkers were busy trying to sell bus rides to Siem Reap. Some people trust anyone with a shiny laminated badge on their shirt and they paid double. The official Cambodian currency is the Riel, but pretty much everything is paid in US dollars. It’s the only currency available in ATMs. A taxi costs twelve dollars and a bus nine dollars a ticket. Normally, being the travel bum that I am, I’d opt for the cheaper bus but Stefan the Spanish guy was taking a taxi and I went along.

  That turned out to be a mistake. We were cramped into a car with two big Swedish guys and could barely move for hours. A bus would’ve been a lot better. Lesson learned the hard way.

  In Siem Reap a tuk tuk driver took us to a range of expensive hotels. The Spanish guy wasn’t that well-travelled and didn’t put up much resistance and was fine with anything. I wanted a cheap place and after a while the driver “found” one. The cheapest place he showed us was a dollar a night, but that was just a mattress under an open roof. The guesthouse we chose was a lot better, six dollars a night for a room with bathroom. It was still a roachy place with a cold water shower, but suitable. There was a hangout place upstairs with some fitness equipment and a TV. A German girl was smoking weed and we joined her. The girl was a typical backpacker, the kind you see by the hundreds in South East Asia. Dressed like a slob in wide linen pants, a tank top and not much bothered by hygiene or looking attractive.

  Cambodian girls on the other hand looked a lot nicer. Asian girls have always intrigued me and by that time I had only slept with one of them; the 20 year-old Chinese girl in Dalian.

  Early the next morning Stefan and I went to the famous Angkor Wat temples, the number one tourist attraction of Cambodia. It’s a true spectacle. The Angkor Wat complex is not listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World but it should be. A tuk tuk driver picked us up in the morning and off we went. First to the ticket office along the road to the complex, where we had to pay a hefty $40 entrance fee for a two-day card. The tuk tuk driver took us around the most important buildings that day but around two o’clock he came up with some of the lamest excuses I had heard in a while. He said his mother was in the hospital and we had to return early. Stefan the Spaniard believed him but I didn’t and told the driver to keep driving us around till five o’clock. Although obviously it’s possible to have a sick mom, and in a poor country like that there’s probably no-one to look after her, it’s much more likely that he wanted to return early to be able to pick up some more rides that day.

  The second day, Stefan and I rented mountain bikes (only two dollars a day) and biked the whole day around the temples. I think we saw them all. It wasn’t an easy thing to do and we cycled some forty kilometers in the insane hot sun and I think I drank some five liters of water that day. There were women selling water and food everywhere and as soon as you came close to them, they started yelling at you to get your attention. I heard a lot of “pretty boy” and “handsome man” that day. We ran into a few French girls at some temples and they laughed at my t-shirt, which said “Beer is the answer, what was the question?” I talked to them a bit and we agreed to meet that night. I must say I was heavily impressed by the enormous buildings and the beautiful carvings. The temples overgrown with enormous tree roots are truly amazing. Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider was filmed there. Anyone going to Cambodia or even South East Asia who doesn’t visit this marvelous temple complex is a complete moron.

  We never saw the French girls again but had some beers at some bars anyway. There were lots of hot Cambodian girls around in the bar street but I was warned that they were all hookers and didn’t pay too much attention to them. If only I knew what would happen a few weeks later in Phnom Penh.

  We ate a massive meal at one of the street restaurants; the meat is cheap and well-prepared. I had a giant meal of spare ribs, a chicken thigh and plate full of rice for less than five dollars. While eating, a poor street kid came up to me and asked for money. I told him he couldn’t have money but could eat if he wanted. I never saw a little boy eat as fast as him. I felt sorry for him and the many other street kids I saw there, but it’s part of the street life and you have to get used to it. But it’s hard. At one point an old man walked up to another boy and took him by the hand. I immediately felt enormous rage boiling inside me. What did that old grandpa want from that boy? At the border there were warnings about child prostitution, and I’d read about drugged five-year-olds being forced to blow guys for a couple of dollars. I was furious at thinking I was seeing that in action –but the old guy and boy walked to a table and I saw an old woman next to him. They offered him a meal. My anger was unnecessary.

  Cambodia – Sihanoukville

  The bus ride to Sihanoukville was terrible, not the worst one on my trip but I still got a bit nauseous due to the bumpy road. I barely slept all night and was very tired when we arrived. A guesthouse a couple hundred meters from the beach was close by, but I still had to sit on a taxi motorbike to get there, fighting my sleep and nausea. When I finally fell into a dirty bed at seven in the morning I immediately fell asleep and woke up at three in the afternoon. The seven-dollar room had a bathroom, which was convenient. My nausea was still there when I woke up but I ate something anyway, and now my bowels were fucked up too. The rest of the day I relaxed a bit. Being sick doesn’t bother me too much, because it’s part of travelling, but it’s still irritating.

  The night after I met up with some Russian friends I’d met in Khabarovsk. There are quite a few Russians in Sihanoukville, and Vitaly had already told he was going to be there so I adjusted my schedule a bit to meet him again. Of course seeing Tanya again didn’t hurt either. Vitaly and Tanya were having a short vacation together with another couple, Alexander and Svetlana. We went to several bars and restaurants together, including a snake and crocodile farm/restaurant owned by a Russian guy who made Sihanoukville his hometown.

  Having travelled through Russia for two months and had three Russian girlfriends, I thought I had finally understood something about Russian culture. I was wrong. Even in incredibly hot Cambodia they wanted to visit a sauna. A sauna.

  The sauna was owned by another Russian couple. So off we went, with six people – another friend of Vitaly’s had joined us, I think his name was Victor.

  It was probably thirty-five degrees Celsius outside the sauna, but inside it was probably over fifty. And the Russians didn’t want to just go in once, quickly: no, we did five rounds in it, with short beer breaks in-between going back in
to sweat the beer out. Plus it turns out that the proper Russian way of taking a sauna includes beating each other on the back with bushes of eucalyptus leaves. I was “treated” by Alexander, who was a massive power lifter type of guy. He was beating the living daylights out of me, displaying his hulkish power. Luckily Tanya was a lot gentler with the leaves. It was just another crazy thing that would never have happened to me if I’d never met that crazy bum/night guard friend of Vitaly’s in Khabarovsk. Sometimes you just really do have to go with the flow and see what happens after meeting people.

  I advise anyone planning to go to Russia to do a short visit to St Petersburg and Moscow and then take a train east, because that’s where the real (and a lot cheaper) Russia is. You won’t regret it, because cities there are packed with girls and there are almost no foreigners around. If I had been more skilled at picking up girls during my time there, I could have done a lot more damage than I did. Meeting Vitaly and Tanya again reminded me of just how great Russia had been, and made me think how if I’d just done the usual tourist thing, I’d never have met them, and for that matter never have ended up in a sauna in Cambodia.

  The last day before I left we all went to the beach, close to a Russian nightclub. The nightclub was in an old airplane hangar including an airplane inside. For those who read this it must seem like Sihanoukville is run by Russians, but actually it’s just that by then I didn’t have much contact with Cambodians.

  For some dumb reason, I felt I had to prove my manhood when I saw a palm tree that was growing on the beach in a forty-five degree angle, and decided to climb it. Going up the tree was quite easy, even though the stem was only twenty centimeters wide. Going down was a whole other thing, and in the end I saw no other option than to jump, which was better than to try and fall down. The landing after the four-meter jump was hard and I nearly broke my ankle. I acted like not much happened but the next day and the week after I had troubling walking straight and couldn’t drive a motorbike with a shift. On the other hand I was still kind of proud that at the age of thirty-three I climbed up that crazy palm tree.

  At night we went to a popular club in the middle of Sihanoukville. There were quite a lot of Cambodian girls around, and they were eye-fucking me a lot. I just assumed they were all hookers and didn’t even bother talking to them. Man, was I wrong.

  What follows is shameless debauchery.

  And the death of a Nice Guy.

  Cambodia – Phnom Penh

  The use of the word Cambodian is not exactly correct, since down in Cambodia people refer to themselves as Khmer, but to make the stories more understandable for all readers I’ll just use the word Cambodian to refer to them.

  It only took five hours to reach Phnom Penh by bus. I took a motor taxi to the lakeside area, what locals call the Boeng Kak Lake. I chose the first guesthouse named by the Lonely Planet and that was probably a good choice. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this book.

  I took a room with a big bed and simple bathroom for only four dollars a night. After freshening up and unpacking a bit I sat down in the outside television area. There were about five people watching a movie and about ten seconds after sitting down I was already flirting with a Cambodian girl named Soriya. She said that she only spoke a bit of French and not so much English. I said some French sentences I learned in high school and the famous line “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” originally from Labelle but more famous because of the Christina Aguilera/pink version. I always use that line when meeting French girls, it’s lame but it works. It means: “Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” Not once did a girl not smile or laugh after hearing that and it’s a good way to start flirting with a girl. I watched the movie, used to the Internet café outside the guesthouse and went back to my room.

  The next morning I got up early and I took a motor taxi to the Myanmar (Burma) embassy. The guard outside told me that it took six days to get a visa. I thought that was way too long, so I left. I was only planning on staying three days in Phnom Penh. Afterwards I went to Laos’s embassy because that visa only took three days to arrange.

  I went back to Guesthouse Number 9, which had an outside television area, a bar and restaurant area, lots of couches to sit and relax on, a large wooden deck on the water where people would sit in the evening and night on blankets and pillows. The most popular part of the guesthouse was around the pool table, next to which were a few couches and a television. There were always some Nigerian guys around; most of them were dealing and smoking weed all day. They were friendly and never bothered or hassled me. The big boss of the Nigerians was a guy named King Kong; he was always dancing around and permanently high as a kite. I never had much contact with him but when I did he was friendly. The staff were all Cambodian and so were a lot of the guests – or so I thought the first day. I quickly found out that none of the Nigerians or Cambodians was actually staying at the guesthouse and it was a place where everyone could just walk in and hang out. The Nigerians were not even allowed to stay in the rooms, for a variety of reasons.

  At night I watched a few more movies with the rest of the backpackers, and talked to the Cambodian girl again, who smiled and admitted that she actually spoke pretty good English. There was a nice surprise when I walked back into my room. No, not a naked hottie lying on the bed waiting for me. A giant two-inch beetle lay on the bathroom floor, being eaten by ants but still alive. I ended his misery by flushing him down the hole in the floor that served as a drain for the shower. The rooms were built right above the water. A giant spider had drowned in the toilet bowl so I had to flush him away too with a bucket of water. Things like this don’t exactly make for a restful night’s sleep and I inspected the room like someone from CSI before going to bed. It was a one-time thing though.

  I went to the “killing fields” early in the morning. For those who don’t know, Cambodia lived through a five-year civil war that was supported and funded by Vietnam on the one hand and the USA on the other. The Americans dropped over 2.5 million tons of bombs on Cambodia. To put that into perspective, the total number of bombs dropped by the allies on Germany and Japan during the Second World War was under than two million. Cambodia is about 180,000 square kilometers; Japan and Germany together are around 735,000 square kilometers. For the math-inclined, that means that where on average, every square kilometer in Germany and Japan was hit by two or three bombs, in Cambodia the rate was 14. Relatively-speaking, that’s up to seven times as much. Cambodia is generally considered to have been the heaviest-bombed country in history and yet barely anyone knows about this. In the end, despite the bombings, the Khmer Rouge was victorious, coming to power in 1975. The dictator Pol Pot and his regime then decided to turn Cambodia into a communist farmer state and committed a massive genocide, slaughtering anyone who was considered intellectual, a minority or simply an enemy of the system. It was one of the most comprehensive genocides of the twentieth century, one not many people know of now or cared about back then. Cambodian cities were cleared of people and they were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day as farmers while barely being fed. Anyone who looked suspicious would be executed immediately; women and children were not spared. Owning a book or wearing glasses was reason enough for execution. Monks, teachers, doctors, musicians, writers and almost anyone with any sort of education were executed when caught, most of the times together with their just-as-innocent family. The whole world watched it happen but didn’t intervene. In the end, in 1979 Vietnam invaded and ended the destructive reign of the Khmer Rouge. By that time almost half of the population of 7.7 million people had been executed, starved or died of disease. The Khmer Rouge (still supported by China, Thailand and by most Western governments at the UN) turned into a jungle guerilla and kept fighting until the early nineties. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998, having never been put on trial. Despite all this, the people are very welcoming to all foreigners.

  The Killings Fields consist of mass graves, a museum and a large monument filled with skull
s and bones. Afterwards I went to the infamous Tuol Sleng (S21) prison, nowadays a museum, where I was horrified by the sights and many pictures of victims. It’s an uncomfortable sort of visit, but it’s unfair to Cambodia not to make it if you’re there.

  My visa for Laos was ready on Monday and I picked it up. I had no plans of staying any longer in Phnom Penh and wanted to leave the country. I had no idea that one girl would change my mind and that I’d end up staying eighteen more days and later return for another month.

  I went out with Soriya to a club called Heart of Darkness, a club with a mixed selection of foreigners and Cambodians. We danced and kissed and ended up in my room where we had sex three times that night and following morning. Soriya was twenty–four at the time and a single mother.

  In the afternoon she went (back) to Sihanoukville, where she stayed most of the time. I found out later that week that Soriya usually gets paid for some midnight pleasure, but she never asked me for anything, not even breakfast. I realized that I had “shored” a girl for the very first time. (Shoring is a term for having sex with a prostitute without paying for it.)

  In the meanwhile I got to know a lot of other people: a guy from Lithuania who gave me a giant bag of weed because he couldn’t get it across the border, a couple of English guys, I think one of them was named Matt, an cool Australian dude named Stewie and an African girl from Liberia. We smoked weed, drank beers and played pool all day. It was steaming hot and I was wearing just slippers and shorts. Every day new people arrived. Some stayed a few weeks while others went on their way in a few days.