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

by Neil Skywalker

  Maybe I’d already been spoiled by seeing so many beautiful things in the fourteen months I’d been on the road already, but the Chocolate Hills just didn’t seem that impressive to me. It’s just a series of small, brown-colored hills. I’d still recommend seeing it but only if you’re going to take a local bus there, which will be a lot more interesting. The Hills are a good excuse to take that bus. Also, you get some exercise.

  The motorbike guy was still waiting and took me downhill when I got back; I gave him twenty pesos for the ride back instead of the forty he’d asked for and he got all angry, but I just told him he wasn’t getting more and walked out on him. He was cursing me for a few minutes before he gave up. To the inexperienced reader I may seem like a fucking cheap bastard but I figured: why would I give a guy who does nothing all day and just hangs out with some friends and occasionally rips off a tourist eighty pesos? (His first price was even two hundred for a return ride.) A girl who works in department store for ten hours a day makes little over a hundred pesos a day, and what about the people breaking their backs in the rice fields in the countryside? They make even less. Them I’d pay. They actually work.

  After waiting half an hour a bus came by and took me back to Tagbilaran. The way back was even more interesting than the first trip. My teeth were playing the xylophone against each other because of the terrible roads, I was inhaling exhaust fumes, the wooden benches were so tight and crowded that I had to sit with my arm out of the window and it got sunburned really bad, and then there were the people: the guy sitting next to me trying to talk to me without speaking a word of English, the 3-year-old poking me with his little finger just because he’d probably never seen a white guy before, a guy sitting two seats away from you with a giant rooster on his lap, the teenage schoolgirls poking each other and giggling when they looking at me. I loved all of it and laughed at the people in the air conditioned bus that passed by us. What were they experiencing? Absolutely nothing! A fucking bus ride like you can get on any air-conditioned bus in the world!

  Since there isn’t a whole lot to do in the city center, I went to bed early and got up early. I wanted to visit the Tarsier wildlife sanctuary to see the mysterious creature that was used to model my good friend Yoda.

  I took a jeepney to a small village and had to stop at the side of the road to walk a few hundred meters to the wildlife sanctuary. Jeepneys are a typical Philippine thing. It’s kind of a big pick-up truck with benches that seats twelve to twenty people, depending on its size. They are always covered in religious quotations, spray-painted Jesuses and lots of chrome. Some of them are real works of art. They are almost always crowded and a tall guy like me has trouble walking between the people and finding a seat. It’s not unusual to have to sit tight betweens some hot young girls.

  There are two ways of paying. The bigger jeepneys have a guy standing or hanging out the back who collects the money. In the smaller ones you have to give the money to the driver. The fare is dirt cheap, usually seven or eight pesos, which is something like fifteen cents. If you sit in the middle or the back you have to give the money to the person next to you, who passes it on to the driver. Sometimes your money changes hands four times before reaching the driver. The driver gives your change back and your change returns the same way. This system would probably never work in Western countries because someone would just pocket the money, but they don’t even think of that there. They all drive on the same routes and when you reach your destination (and don’t speak the language), you take a coin and knock it on the metal frame of the jeepney and the driver takes the hint and stops. If you want to get on one, then you stand at the side of road and watch for the jeep with your route number on it, wave your arm and the driver stops.

  A group of teenagers on this particular jeepney invited me to join them on a picnic in the park. Although there were a few cute girls I had to say no since I needed to take the ferry. The jeepney dropped me off close to the wildlife center and I went to see the famous tarsier, a small 4 inch/10 cm creature. It’s hard to describe the tarsier: it’s known as the world’s smallest monkey, but it isn’t a monkey, just like the Koala bear isn’t a bear. It had giant eyes which are actually bigger than its brain, but then I’ve met some people in my life that applies to as well. Their legs are very long and so are their thin, bony fingers. I was able to take some good pictures of this extremely shy creature.

  As I mentioned before, this creature was the inspiration for the appearance of Yoda from Star Wars. The force is strong in this one!! This sanctuary is the only place in the world where you can see the Tarsier out of its natural habitat and the owners have succeeded in breeding them so that the tarsier population can grow again. The Tarsier is on the list of most endangered primates in the world. They only live in the Philippines and some parts of Malaysian Borneo and Indonesia.

  I recommend that anyone in the area go see the Tarsier in the Bohol sanctuary and leave a small financial contribution to its keepers.

  By the time I left the sanctuary I was in a hurry to get back and didn’t have time to wait for a jeepney, so I stopped a teenage boy with a motorcycle, agreed on a price and got driven back to town. He was speeding like a maniac except when he passed people his own age; he was kind of parading me around and even stopped to show me off to his friends. I was just in time to catch the ferry at noon. Back in Cebu I stayed with Jenna again. I left for Manila three days later.

  Philippines – Manila and Cebu

  I don’t have much to say about Manila. I hung around in the guesthouse for a while, drank a lot and wasn’t much into picking up girls at the time. I missed Jenna and went back to Cebu again. This wasn’t in my plans, but at this point I didn’t care much. When a one-hour flight only costs thirty-five dollars it’s easy to move around the country.

  I stayed in Jenna’s room for a few days again and then her landlady told her I wasn’t allowed there anymore, I guess because we weren’t paying double rent or maybe she just didn’t like people hooking up in her building. I was quite grumpy about it because now we had to move to a hotel nearby, which cost me about $140 for two weeks. We couldn’t move to the other hotel close to her office because too many people would see us there.

  Jenna had lost her job because the owner of the guesthouse and office building was a friend of Jenna’s American boyfriend and had told him about her and me. He had dumped her and stopped sending her money. He was a cheap bastard anyway, only sending her $150 a month even though he owned his own business. I still felt guilty about her losing all her electronics when I was picking her up, and now because of me she had lost her job and her steady money-sender. Basically I had made a mess of her life.

  In the next two weeks we went out to Club Pump on the weekend and visited a few sights around the city like the San Pedro fortress and the biggest skyscraper in Cebu, which includes a sort of rollercoaster ride on the outside of the building on the thirty-seventh floor. In the morning she had to go to university and at night we would have steaming sex. I remember her screaming so hard one day that the management was knocking on the door asking if we were all right.

  The day came when I had to say goodbye to Jenna, and I hated it. She was crying her eyes out and I didn’t feel like leaving, but I had to make a decision: stay with Jenna and slowly run out of money or continue my round-the-world trip. It was the same decision I had to make with Julia. I’d chosen to move on then, and it didn’t seem right, or fair to Julia, if I didn’t do the same this time. I was sure I would regret it afterwards if I didn’t continue my trip.

  Malaysian Borneo was my next destination and I had to take a plane from Angeles City, the prostitution capital of the Philippines, a city comparable to Pattaya in Thailand. I went there one night before the flight to check it out but hated the long line of bars full of bored go-go dancers and sleazy fat old man. There may be some people in the city who look like angels, but I doubt there are any who act it.

  One teenage boy selling cigarettes convinced me to buy a pack of Cia
lis, the boner pills; they were only three dollars for four tablets so I thought What the hell, I’ll just buy them. I had no idea it would be nearly two months before I got laid again. The next day I flew to Kota Kinabalu and a long dry spell began.

  Malaysian Borneo – Kota Kinabalu and Sabah

  After four months of the Philippines I had major trouble getting used to Malaysia. It’s a Muslim society, and that comes with lots of limitations. A lot of girls wear head scarves and that almost immediately rules them out as potential dates. Kota Kinabalu is the biggest city on Malaysian Borneo, but there’s not much to do, either in terms of nightlife or of sightseeing.

  The city was almost completely destroyed during World War II and this means there are no historical buildings whatsoever. I found some bars but hardly saw any opportunities to find a girl. The tourist girls I saw were either with a boyfriend or unattractive girls who come to a country like Malaysia purely for sightseeing and immersion in local culture. I have nothing against that, but it makes my mission a lot harder.

  A small part of the Malaysian population is of Indian descent and that was good news for my stomach. I love Indian cuisine, even though you end up sitting on the toilet more than usual. There were also a lot of Chinese restaurants around with big buffet meals for about four dollars. Kota Kinabalu was also the hometown of the crazy Malaysian bitch that nearly stabbed me to death. I even considered contacting her since she was (and still is) in my Facebook friends list. She was good in bed and maybe I was up for a shot of drama and adrenaline. After thinking about it for a moment – not a very long moment – I settled the matter by considering that seeing her again would be a sign of genuine craziness and that if I did so I might as well give up my trip, fly straight back home, and check myself into the nearest insane asylum. Since I intended to continue my trip, I didn’t call her., sparing myself both psychiatric treatment and the possibility of having my throat cut. Or my balls cut off in the night, since I wouldn’t put that past her, either.

  After visiting the Japanese prisoner of war camp and museum in Sandakan in the north of Borneo, I took the local bus to Sepilok, a place famous for its interesting orangutan rehabilitation centre which is on every traveller’s list. It was a farce. I had to pay about a $10 entrance fee, and there was another $4 camera fee, which I didn’t pay.

  The park had a giant entrance and a two-meter wide wooden walking bridge through the “jungle”. After barely one minute’s walk I arrived at the feeding platform where there were some two hundred tourists waiting with their big cameras. And when I say tourists I mean tourists. They came straight of the air-conditioned bus and were all wearing the tourist uniform: big hiking shoes, trekking pants, temperature reducing t-shirts, small backpacks with water tubes and a jungle hat. Most of them even had the nerve to give me a strange look when I walked up the platform with my flip flops, shorts and wife-beater t-shirt. I probably looked too poor for them.

  In my opinion these are the worst kind of tourists. They stay in fancy hotels where they eat western food or pay tenfold to try the local cuisine, only go on group tours. The only locals they speak to are the guides and the underpaid but still smiling staff at the hotel. They think they’ll get robbed the second they leave the hotel so they never go for a walk and actually try to see something real like a poor area of town or the countryside. Wearing a fortune of North Face clothes and accessories and never using them, contributing barely anything to the local community because they spend all their money at the same place, the five-star hotel that also doubles as a restaurant, gift shop and travel agency/tour operator. And to think that most people think I’m the worst kind of traveler out there, because I’m just “bumming around” and don’t dress prettily.

  At ten in the morning a couple of bored park rangers walked up to the feeding platforms with a few baskets of bananas and watermelon. Somewhat later a couple of orangutans came swinging through the trees and sat down and ate the bananas. It was boring and I couldn’t stand all the ooohs and ahhhs from the crowd while hearing a hundred cameras clicking away. This was definitely not what I’d expected and after taking a couple of pictures I left. I would not recommend anyone to visit this park and sit on chicken buses for ten hours twice to see this farce. It’s just a tourist trap for fat Westerners too scared to go into the jungle. You get better views of orangutans in a zoo. Try a real jungle tour instead, one where you go into the jungle for one or two nights with a guide. At least you can be sure you’ll never meet one of them there – and if you do, you can always live in the hope that something will eat them, though they’d probably give the poor animal indigestion.

  I still had plans to climb Mount Kinabalu but after I heard it can cost up to $300 for a guide and hammock space in a mountain hut, I decided not to go through with it. I had already climbed Mount Fuji in Japan and there are other mountains you can climb for free. Besides, I’d already sent my hiking shoes from Bangkok along with other travel stuff I’d paid big money for but realized I had barely used.

  Back in Kota Kinabalu I met a German guy in the hostel who was learning some pick up/gaming techniques too, and he gave me some good tips for books to read and an online forum. We went out to a club but failed horribly. A beer was already six dollars each and we were both too scared to approach the girls there who were drinking shots. I suspected they were either expensive hookers or rich girls and this way I had an excuse to myself for not doing anything.

  When I think about it now I almost feel ashamed that after all the successes I’d had so far I still had some approach anxiety from time to time in Asia and even when visiting the Philippines. The German guy now lives in Thailand where he works on some software project and has some devious tricks (even by my standards) to pull in foreign girls.

  This visit to the province of Sabah had been a bit disappointing and I wanted to move on to Brunei, a small oil state that is famous for its extremely rich leader, the Sultan. To get there I had to go to Labuan Island first, which is still part of Malaysia. It’s the place where the Japanese surrendered to the Allied forces at the end of the Second World War, and I went to visit the monument commemorating that and a few other historical sites.

  The Kingdom of Brunei

  Brunei is an extremely wealthy oil state, and that comes with lots of benefits for its 400,000 inhabitants. There’s free education and healthcare, no income tax, and the government can provide cheap mortgages and car loans. The downside is that you have to live by strict Islamic rules and regulations. Nightlife is non-existent, there are no bars or clubs, alcohol is strictly forbidden and even the cinema was closed down.

  Behind the giant luxurious mall and mosque are people living in wooden shacks built above the river water. If you look you can find an entrance to these water villages and have a walk around and see how the poor people live in shacks while overlooking a gold-covered Mosque. The giant mosque is visible from nearly everywhere in the city. It’s a beautiful mosque but for some reason I wasn’t allowed inside, even though it should be possible for foreign visitors. Possibly only Muslims are allowed in.

  With some time and determination, I think it would be possible to get a Brunei flag but it might take a few months and lots of tricks. I didn’t have the time or money to do that. The mall had some girls working in the shops but it was clear to see that most were still virgins. You’re welcome to try, but don’t hold your breath.

  I visited quite a few places and museums and after two days I moved on the other Malaysian province on Borneo – Sarawak.

  Malaysian Borneo – Sarawak province.

  On the bus from Brunei to Miri I met a Japanese girl and we travelled together for a few days. She was a typical nerdy Asian girl and unintentionally very funny. We took a bus to the Taman Negara Niah Park, a national park containing the famous Niah caves. To get to the caves we had to walk about 4 kilometers on a wooden walkway through the jungle. The caves were massive and the biggest ones I have been in my life. The views were breathtaking. The walking bridge through th
e caves was two meters wide and was missing the railing here and there. In some parts it was pitch dark and we had to use the light of our phones to navigate to safety. At some points the cave was seventy meters high and the walking bridges led to a giant staircase which took us minutes to climb and catch our breaths.

  When we reached the exit we had to walk a bit more to see what we’d come for: the prehistoric drawings on the wall. They were hard to see since we had to stand behind a fence at ten meters distance, which was a bit of a bummer, but I don’t regret making a detour and visiting the caves. If you’re ever anywhere near Sarawak, make sure to go.

  When we returned to the park entrance we were quite tired from all that climbing and walking, but took a bus down south the same day to Kuching, another large city in Sarawak Province. I stayed four boring days there. The only nice things to see were a Chinese holiday being celebrated and the riverside. I tried to go out a few times there but only found empty bars during the week. I spent most of my time doing stuff on my laptop. There’s another orangutan park nearby, but after my bad experience in Sepilok I didn’t go there. I also skipped the famous indigenous longhouses after seeing a few pictures of them online. They looked too modern to me and I didn’t trust the “traditional showcasing of culture”, which sounded like a tourist trap for the fat air-conditioned-bus folk. I had to wait my time before my flight to Singapore, where the Formula One Grand Prix was being held. I had bought a ticket for it while in the Philippines.

  I lost my second cell phone, which had my Dutch Sim card in it, so I had to call my phone company back home and cancel my card before someone made thousands of Euros in phone calls on it.

  Singapore and Malacca