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

by Neil Skywalker

  Much lotion later we arrived in a town named Pangururan, which was big enough it was worth looking for long-sleeve shirts there. Of course, for some weird reason we couldn’t find any long sleeve-shirts at any of the stores we passed. I know it’s always above thirty degrees here, but goddamn someone has to wear them sometimes. For some odd reason, even though our faces were melting too we didn’t look for caps. Pangururan is famous for its hot springs, but that was the last thing we had on our minds. Getting out of the sun and taking a cold shower was the only thing we thought about. I was ready to steal someone’s clothes if I saw a jacket or a sweater hanging to dry somewhere.

  People later told me that the hot springs were old, badly maintained, and in general a waste of time and money to visit, so luckily we didn’t miss much. There were a few small roads though the jungle and mountain leading to Tuktuk village, but tourists had been lost on that road and needed saving by local people to get back to civilization, so we avoided them.

  Darren had had enough of it by now and turned into Valentino Rossi, the famous motorcycle racer. He didn’t stop for anything anymore, even though we passed quite a few interesting places along the way. Luckily the last part of the circle around the island was mainly good road and we could hurry now. I nearly broke my hand when I drove through a pothole at seventy kilometers an hour. My rental bike survived and so did I. By the time we made it back to the guesthouse our faces and arms were purple and I feared that I’d get an enormous blister, like the one I had in Nepal a few years before. Back then my skin had looked like wrapping foil with the air bubbles in it and I’d had to get a doctor and medical treatment to get rid of the, horrible pus-filled, one inch across and half-an-inch high blister. It was too disgusting to look at. I still have a scar from it, though it’s only visible when I’m tanned.

  For some reason the showers in our rooms were ice-cold and despite (or maybe because of) the severe sunburn I couldn’t bring myself to stand under it. I had to just splash myself to get clean. Darren had a bathtub in his room, filled it with water and sat in it nearly two hours to cool down. He looked like a Popsicle when I saw him again.

  The next days were mainly filled with us avoiding any contact with sunlight and using massive amounts of body lotion to keep our skin from falling apart. We swam a few times in the lake and watched a DVD (Machete) we been meaning to watch for a long time.

  The people in the guesthouse were a special bunch. There was a Danish guy who was totally creepy. He seemed to be there for the sole purpose of doing nothing; he never had any money, never talked and gave off a disturbing vibe. Then there was a fucking hilarious German guy. With his short curly hair and the dumb hoggish expression on his face, you wouldn’t give him any chance with girls. But if you asked him, then he was a real Casanova. He told us that he’d had a threesome with two extremely hot girls in Jakarta. “How did you do it?” I asked him. “ I just showed them my breakdancing” he replied. Well, later on we all went out to the local bar and he showed us.

  It was the most horrible breakdancing I have ever seen. People were laughing and clapping and he considered it a compliment and turned it up a notch. And if that wasn’t bad enough he went on stage and asked the guitarist if he could sing a song. I have a video of it and still watch it when I need to get out of a bad mood.

  He was a better guitar player than me, but not by much – and I can barely play two chords. His singing was horrendous and sounded like some kind of long stretched-out death moan. It was the worst sound humanly possible.

  All the people inside the bar were loudly laughing and clapping. By the end of his “song” I’d nearly pissed my pants laughing. I usually admire people with the balls to go on stage and sing even though they can’t, like you see in karaoke bars worldwide, but this guy was just too much. Anyone familiar with the Astérix comic books will remember Assurancetourix, the village musician. Well, this German guy sounded just like him. Back in the guesthouse he told us that he had fifty thousand Euros in his bank account and travelled ultra-budget. He was planning on travelling through South America for eight months, spending only three thousand Euros. Anyone who’s ever travelled there knows that’s absolutely impossible. I’ve never seen a guy make such a fool of himself. You might think it would work in terms of getting girls: some girls will go for a guy with the guts to publicly make a total ass of himself. But not this guy.

  I later found him in the Facebook friends’ list of one of the girls we met there, and I checked his pictures. He never went to South America.

  Indonesia – Bukit Tinggi

  The next part of my trip wasn’t that interesting, but it gives me an opportunity to give an insight into how a ride to an off-the-beaten track destination on an Indonesian HELL bus goes down.

  In this case we were lucky to be able to buy the tickets to Bukit Tinggi directly at the guesthouse on Samosir Island, after asking around a bit what the prices were at other places. I remember that it wasn’t cheap, but then again it was a twenty-hour bus ride in what we were told was a luxury bus. I would have opted to go totally local but almost everyone advised me not to, and Darren didn’t feel like it. So luxury it was. We woke up in the morning, packed our stuff and walked to the point where a wooden passenger boat could bring us back to Parapat on the mainland.

  The trip across the lake took only about half-an-hour. There’s a local market directly where the boats arrive in Parapat, and it’s a small mayhem of fruit and vegetable vendors, scammers trying to sell you overpriced or fake bus tickets and people selling meat that’s lying there in the open air, covered with flies. There’s the stench of garbage and the sight, sound and smell of people butchering chickens and cleaning fish. We finally found our way through this chaos to our bus company and waited for the bus to leave.

  Luxury bus my ass. It was a complete disaster. The seats didn’t recline at all so we had to sit up straight the whole night. We were the only foreigners on the bus and it was packed with curious locals and their many boxes and plastic bags full of merchandise and household products. People were eating all kinds of food and even smoking was allowed, so the whole bus smelled like sweat, exotic food and cheap tobacco. The only thing missing were chickens and goats going up and down the aisle.

  By nightfall the bus was filled with a fine blue cigarette mist. With the smell, the lack of sleep, the loud music and the extremely bad and bumpy roads, this had a nauseating effect. We even ended up taking strong 10mg valium tablets, but still couldn’t sleep at all. The bus was stopping in every little bumfuck village, and the worst was yet to come. One of the two teenage boys sitting in the seats before us got sick and projectile-vomited in the walkway. He even hit the guy sitting in the other seat and didn’t even apologize. Half of the guy’s leg was covered in vomit and he didn’t even get angry at the teenager. There was a large puddle of barf close to our feet and the stench was awful. If you covered your nose you could almost taste the vomit and if you covered your mouth then the smell was unbearable. The teenager vomited a few times and made no attempt to clean anything up.

  We stopped at a roadside restaurant but neither of us was hungry any more, and we just bought a few bags of chips to get through the night. We flirted and took pictures with the local teenage girls selling the chips and soda at the roadside. It was the middle of the night and we saw Barfboy eating a giant bag of chips and smoking a cigarette. Within half an hour on the bus he vomited again and was even joking with his friend about it. I think it was the bus driver or the guy helping him who “cleaned” the walkway by covering the large puddle of vomit with newspapers.

  When we arrived at five o’clock in the morning we were totally broken down. I was already used to enduring some vicious bus rides, but this was the number one hell ride so far.

  Every hotel in our guide books had at least doubled their prices since the last printing, only a year before probably because they saw the book and knew everyone would go there. After a while we found one guesthouse with a German owner who still had a ch
eap room. His prices had also doubled, but at least they were still affordable. We both took a separate room and fell asleep. The German owner was friendly and helpful, but smelled very bad. He had terrible body odor and coffee breath. Apparently his local, Indonesian wife didn’t mind. The room had a bathroom but no shower. To wash yourself there was a large tub full of water and a bucket. Since I had no idea how long that water had already been in the tub, I just washed my body with it and used bottled water for my face and to brush my teeth, but I still felt dirty using the tub water. We knew one thing. We had to get the fuck out of that place and find something else. The next day we found a much better hotel and shared a room to split the costs.

  Bukit Tinggi doesn’t have much to offer. It’s a small city and not many tourists visit it nowadays. Just like Lake Toba, tourism is dying here. It was weeks since my last lay and I was eager to find a place to go out, but good luck with that in a city that’s known for banning holidays as Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve because the city’s administration considers them not in line with Islamic tradition and they might lead to young couples committing immoral acts like – shock! horror! – hugging, and kissing. All we did there was a bit of flirting with sales ladies in the local mall.

  There was the possibility of taking a hike in the nature parks surrounding Bukit Tinggi, but we didn’t really feel like it and just walked around the city a bit. We visited the Japanese headquarters from the World War II occupation. They consisted of an enormous tunnel and bunker network dug out by locals and POWs. It’s pretty impressive when you know in how short a time it was built, and ten times more interesting than the other “famous” fortress named Fort de Kock, a remainder from Dutch colonial times but nothing more than a few cannons lying around on a hill.

  Speaking of misery, I went for a wet shave with a one of those classic cutthroat straight razors. Darren and I went into a local barber shop after attempting to visit a mosque. The barbers were laughing and joking with us and the atmosphere was good. My mood changed completely when I sat down in the chair and the barber put some lotion on my face. It was a very thin layer of lotion and nothing compared to the thick shaving cream I usually use. That should have been warning enough, but I didn’t start to get a really bad feeling until I saw his razor. It looked old, like it was the first razor in human history. What followed was ten minutes of pain. I hadn’t shaved in four days and already had four millimeters of stubborn hair on my face. It felt like the barber was shaving me with a blunt axe. It hurt like hell, especially around the chin and under the nose. Darren had no mercy: he just stood back laughing, shooting some pictures and even a short video of my torture. When we walked out I swore never to do something like that again. I still had patches of hair everywhere and had to shave again just to get it smooth.

  I’d gone for the whole straight razor torture because I thought it was an ultimate alpha male thing to do, and was always trying to “man up” Darren a bit. We joked for weeks about buying one of those straight razors and using it in hostels to show everyone what tough motherfuckers we were. As of then, every time I saw Darren do something I considered wimpy or heard him complain about something, I’d act out sharpening (stropping) a straight razor on my arm and say “Man up, Darren!”

  We were running out of time on our visas and had to take a plane to the capital, Jakarta, to save time – not to mention avoid another nauseating thirty-five hour bus trip and a ferry to get to Jakarta. After a five-hour minibus drive to the neighboring city of Padang and a lot of hassles with the tickets, we were able to fly to Jakarta where I would finally bust a nut again.

  Indonesia – Jakarta

  It had been nearly two months since I last got laid. What had happened to me? Was I losing my dark powers? Was the Force no longer strong in me? I guess it has more to do with travelling on a budget that meant I couldn’t afford to have a good time in clubs – and by good time I mean paying for the entrance fee and a few drinks for me and/or a girl without making calculating how many meals I could have bought with the same money, or how two beers equals a night in a cheap hotel room. The other two factors in my not getting laid were that I was travelling in very conservative Muslim countries and the obstructing approach anxiety I still had sometimes. In hindsight I should probably have travelled a few months less and spend a little bit more each day.

  It was already ten o’clock at night when Darren and I arrived at Jakarta airport. The taxi took nearly forty-five minutes and because we were following the guide book’s advice we went straight to the backpackers’ area, named Jalan Jaksa. Of course all the guesthouses were full or too damn expensive.

  We found one dirty old place with rooms full of fungus that still cost eleven dollars. We were tired of walking around with our backpacks on in a bar area and having everyone look at us so I opted to take the room, get drunk and fall asleep in the stinking room, and then get up early and find something better. The only good thing about that place was the powerful shower. I felt really clean after washing my hair and taking a good shower after weeks of shitty showerheads where it was more like the water was leaking from the ceiling than having some pressure behind it.

  We went to a bar named Memories that had a live band playing and a good atmosphere. One of the staff told us that the bar also rented out rooms upstairs and we had a look. The rooms were modern and had very clean attached bathrooms. It cost only a dollar more than the other room with mold stains on the ceiling and we moved in straight away. Nowadays I wouldn’t share a twelve-dollar room, but back than I was still a cheap Charlie.

  The food was good and we flirted a bit with the waitresses there. They were young and a bit conservative and had probably heard it all before, given that they worked in a bar that was also frequented by freelance prostitutes. Finding a prostitute is South East Asia is never a problem, but if you’re not interested in paying a girl or not able to get her for free, then it’s rather annoying to have them around and it makes normal girls even more less approachable. They keep their guard up around foreigners because they see so many of them whore-mongering around them. They get used to seeing beta guys get drunk and acting stupid and submissive to anything in a skirt. Don’t be that needy guy and keep it cool.

  It was time to do some sightseeing again. We wanted to go to the Kota area, where there were supposedly ships from colonial times, when the city was still part of the Dutch empire and named Batavia. We took a train to the station nearest to Kota. The tuktuk driver who took us there didn’t know his own city and dropped us off at the wrong spot, in some embassy area. This was a whole other part of Jakarta and a real elite neighborhood, with clean roads and guards in front of fancy gates.

  After looking around a bit we decided to just walk to Kota, since we had a general idea of where we were on the map. We walked in the general direction of the harbor and straight into a local market filled with smiling happy people. We took some photos there and kept asking directions. After a while of walking down a street filled with massive water and mud puddles, we saw some ship masts, but they were still quite far away. It was next to a slum and at one point we walked into a terrain that looked and smelled like an open sewer. It resembled a swamp but one with garbage everywhere. Luckily we were both wearing flip-flops. At some places we were almost knee-deep in dirty-smelling water floating with crap and garbage. When we finally got close to the ships, we had to climb on to a wall big enough to walk on to see them and discover that they were actually not that old and clearly not interesting.

  We wanted to get back to civilization and had to go back through the partly-flooded slum. I think we were the first foreigners crazy or dumb enough to step foot in that extremely poor slum. Darren still had some manning up to do, because he was getting worried again. We were lost and people were giving us looks. But the looks were all friendly and we had kids running around us, posing for pictures, cheering and clapping. It was great, and the only time I was the least bit worried was when we turned around a corner and a large group of teenage
guys was staring at us. They frowned at us and it took a while before they knew how to react to seeing two tall white dudes in their area. In the end they waved and smiled at us. Kids were running after us, girls were giving shy smiles and people even offered us delicious food that we gladly ate because all that walking had made us hungry. I enjoyed all of it and took quite a few pictures. The one truly sad thing we saw was a guy with Down’s Syndrome walking down the street. The kids were cheering and pointing at him and even throwing stuff at him. He just smiled like a big happy baby and walked on.

  After hearing a happy “Hello mister” at least two hundred times we reached the end of the slum and took a tuk tuk to the train station. I later found out that we’d been really misinformed and that Kota wasn’t an area with old ships at all but one with old colonial buildings. Oops.

  We took the cheapest train back we could find. It had no doors and was filled with poor people; small street kids were hanging on the outside of the speeding train while looking at us. I hoped that they weren’t just showing off to us going to get in a deadly accident. I sure as hell wasn’t encouraging them. The fifteen-minute train ride only cost eleven cents.

  The evening found us hanging around at Memories and talking to some girls there. One of them, Annie, spoke reasonable English and tried to get me in a hotel room. I declined several times because she was clearly a freelancer, who might ask for money later. The girl she was hanging out with was a straight-up money-hungry ho and I thought Annie would be the same. At night we went out to a bar area whose name I don’t remember. All the bars were full of prostitutes and Darren even scored us a couple of free tequila shots of one of the girls there celebrating her birthday. Well done bro, you’re starting to learn. I’m not a big fan of tequila but if it’s free I’m there. Free is a magic word in Holland. Darren was on a year-long round-the-world trip and still in his second month, and sometimes he was even stingier than me.