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

by Neil Skywalker

  The next day, I went out with yet another girl from the Couchsurfing website while having a hangover for the third day in a row.

  We visited a local fish market and witnessed a demonstration against the government plans to build a hydro dam and ruin the natural beauty of the south of Chile. I was warned not to join the demonstration, because the week before half the city got tear-gassed and demonstrators got beat up. There was a big police force on their feet, but things kept quiet that day. It disappointed me a bit because I wanted to see some old school rioting like I’d seen and briefly joined at Football matches in my hometown.

  That night I went with Gustavo to a football match with his favorite team, Universidad de Chile or La U. It was the quarter final of some cup and they won seven-to-one against a team named O’Higgins. It was a great match and we had lots of fun there. Afterwards we had some drinks and a barbeque with his friends.

  One of the last days I was in Santiago I went to the cinema with Paula and had some drinks afterwards, but not too much this time. Later that night we went to a love hotel and banged a few times. The sex wasn’t really good and although I really liked her it was kind of a deal-breaker for the both of us. Despite the fact that she had a beautiful body with fake boobs and the most sensual big lips ever, I wasn’t that turned on by her and she noticed that, and we even argued a bit. The chemistry of our first couple of dates was gone. It just didn’t click for the both of us.

  You can’t always win – but the Chilean flag had been captured. She called off a date the next day with some excuse. I texted her that I was going to Valparaiso, a two-hour bus ride away, for a few days and would return to Santiago again later that week.

  Chile – Valparaiso

  I was hammering at the door of the hostel: despite having made reservations, there was no-one there. The other hostels were further away from the city center and on top of a hill. Most of the harbor city of Valparaiso is built on hills and this gives splendid views over the city. The houses are colorful and there’s lots of artsy graffiti on walls throughout the city. This is the main reason that lots of tourists and backpackers visit this small coastal city – and I didn’t expect to be locked out. After smoking a cigarette and waiting for half an hour, someone finally showed up and let me in. The hostel was a big one-floor apartment and I was the only guest. I took a bed in the big dorm room since that was the cheapest option.

  That night I met up with a girl through the travel website. Marisol was a good-looking girl and she smiled a lot. We went uphill to a small coffee place and I started throwing my coffee date game her way. I had my doubts if it would go as easily as it had with Paula in Santiago. I was now fully relying on my own rules about having a drinking date with an unknown girl.

  Marisol was a bit hard to figure out: she responded well to my game but I wasn’t sure where I was with her. I might have been in the dreaded friend zone. She invited me to meet some girlfriends and we had a few drinks in a small bar. It was there that I had the best Pisco-Sour ever.

  We said goodbye at night but I didn’t go for the kiss with her. I thought it might be too early for that. She wanted to meet again the night after.

  The next morning I wasn’t alone in the hostel anymore and met an Austrian guy with whom I went to walk around the city. The first thing we did was look for a map and some food. We had a big and rather expensive breakfast in one of the cafes in the center. I wanted to eat well because since I’d been there I had only eaten sopaipillas in Valpo, as Valparaiso is nicknamed. Sopaipillas are a sort of pancakes made from pumpkin that you eat with mustard sauce. I loved them and two of them would fill you up for a while for only twenty cents each.

  The meal at the café went straight through my stomach and what went in as chicken came out looking like coffee. I almost had to run back to the hostel.

  Half-an-hour later we went back to the city and walked around all day, seeing all the sites, taking one of the famous hillside lifts and visiting the Maritime museum. The museum also displayed the capsule that freed those miners who had been stuck underground for over six weeks. The Austrian dude wanted to go out at night but I had other plans.

  Marisol was half-an-hour late and it was freezing cold outside. I waited for her at a square and looked around a bit. There were street artists, lots and lots of stray dogs and students making some extra money by selling paintings and/or sandwiches. There were some bums around, but not many.

  Marisol showed up and I made fun of her for being a typical woman, late all the time. Someone later told me that South Americans don’t see time as a line as most punctual westerners do, but more like a cloud. This made a lot of sense to me, because I almost never met anyone who arrived in time on this side of the planet.

  Marisol and I went to a coffee bar, where we talked and laughed a lot, then we bounced to a street with bars and drank Pisco Sours while joking some more.

  I remember us crossing the street at the wrong moment and nearly getting run over. She was the one who said “go”, so I made fun of her a lot for trying to kill me.

  Afterwards we went to a club that was playing all kinds of music in three different rooms. Here I saw some other foreigners but I stayed in the Latin music part most of the time, dancing with Marisol and her girlfriends.

  At the end of the night, we kissed and we went to my hostel and had sex in the dorm. She’s a beautiful girl but was a bit shy between the sheets. I also remember really bumping my head on the top bunk bed and Marisols feminine, motherly instinct kicked in and rubbed the hurt spot like I was a small child.

  The next morning I smuggled her out the dorm without the owner knowing it.

  One of the things I always ask a girl is the exact moment she was attracted to me and the moment she decided to have sex with me. This is a good way to fine tune your game and quite interesting to know. She told me that she was attracted to me from the moment we had coffee that night before, which meant that my café date game had worked. She said she thought about having sex with me after we said goodbye the first night, the night when I didn’t go for the kiss.

  We said goodbye but I told her I would come back to visit her again.

  Chile – Santiago

  I found another hostel in Santiago, named the Bellavista hostel, and it was a lot more fun there. The building is a bit old but at least the personnel were very friendly and they had heaters everywhere. I met loads of cool people, including three Brazilian girls. I tried to game one a bit but was friend-zoned that night. They invited me to come visit them in Brazil. I tried to get a date again with Paula, who was still on my mind, but she flaked. After this I never tried again.

  Gustavo and his wife invited me for dinner at one of the best burger places in the country. It was the biggest and most expensive hamburger I ever ate in my life. My belly was growing an inch that night and the next day I went up the hill with the Maria statue again to get in shape a bit.

  A few days later I went up there again and noticed my stamina had already improved a bit because I was walking a lot those days and had cut back on the smoking a bit. I needed my power because I was going back to Valparaiso a few days later.

  Chile – Valparaiso again.

  I was planning on going north to La Serena and thought that I might as well go through Valparaiso to see Marisol again.

  When I arrived at the bus station in Valparaiso two hours later I saw that they also sold tickets to go south. I had skipped the south when I was in Argentina because of the high bus prices. I didn’t feel like paying over $400 on a return bus ticket and then have to whop out a shitload of money on accommodation there.

  Chile was supposed to be more expensive than Argentina, but I saw a ticket all the way down south for only $110. Punta Arenas was nearly as far down south as its Argentinean counterpart, Ushuaia, where half the backpacker population in Latin America goes.

  I wanted to go to a different place, one less crowded and more pristine, and told Marisol my plans when I met her again. She said that she’d though
t she’d never see me again. She was truly happy I was back and stayed with me in the hostel again, I had rented a private room now and we couldn’t stop making love that night. She has a beautiful face and body and a way of attracting me that was more than just physical.

  The next three days we stayed together and went out several times, to the cinema, to do some shopping including a hunt for the coolest sweater ever except that we couldn’t find the right size, even after visiting three shops of the same branch. There was none around and I had to be cold for a few more months. Marisol is a very sweet girl, very smart and has a good job, a bit shy and definitely marriage material. I might visit her again someday.

  The route to Punta Arena was closed due to an earthquake that had destroyed the only road there. Marisol called almost fifteen bus companies and tried everything but alas, the road was closed for at least a week and I was running out of time. I had to move on despite having such a great time with her.

  When she waved goodbye to me at the bus station I wondered if I’d ever meet a sweet and beautiful girl like her again and if I was a fool for letting go yet another beautiful girl who was crazy about me.

  Chile – Calama – San Pedro

  I stopped for half a day in the city of Calama, which has the world’s biggest open copper mine. It was one of those giant mines you see on the Discovery channel sometimes, absolutely huge. It was an interesting experience to walk around there.

  After the tour I took a bus to San Pedro de Atacama, the place every tourist in Chile goes to, that I wanted to skip it for that very reason, but there was one reason that made me go there anyway. It made a good stopover on my way to Bolivia and Marisol had told me about her younger sister living there. For the second time on my trip I had a chance to do a double whammy: the two-sister bang. I was close to it in the Philippines and I got another chance now. I’d thought it through on the bus and decided to go for it. I would feel like a rotten bastard later.

  I met Marisol’s younger sister a few days later and we went out. The sister thing turned out to be just another dream. She had a boring boyfriend who was a nice guy but totally unable to stand up to her. He was friendly though.

  Marisol’s sister was a lot wilder than her and got really drunk. We smoked some weed afterwards with a bunch of people. The weed was really bad and we only had one spliff for a whole group of people.

  Later on in my stay I went on a tour with two Dutch girls. One of them was even taller than me and we went to a salt lake where you could float in the water. I didn’t go in the water all the way, it was really cold and I’d already had a runny nose for four weeks by then and didn’t feel like another four weeks of snottering and sniffing.

  It was freezing cold while I was in Chile. Just because it’s South America doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to be warm – a lot of it is in the mountains, after all. Even in the hostel it was freezing again and I had to sleep with a beanie on. It was time to move to warmer places and I took the bus to La Paz.

  Bolivia – La Paz

  After taking another endless bus ride I arrived in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. The Loki hostel was recommended by everyone I had met in the South, so I went there. Within the first hour of arriving, I met a Portuguese guy and his friend I’d met in La Serena and San Pedro, saw a Dutch girl I met in Cordoba, and also caught sight of Chrystal, the Australian girl I had met in Cordoba and Santiago. The Loki hostels are a chain of party. It’s all about parties at night and mostly aimed for the very young backpackers travelling on Mommy and Daddy’s money in their gap year. It was also a hangout for hipster backpackers.

  The facilities were great, with nice big beds with fluffy blankets, nice bathrooms with piping hot water and powerful showers. I needed a good scrubbing after the horrible cold outside bathrooms in San Pedro.

  At night there were parties where people would dress up and get stupidly drunk. Afterwards the whole group would go to local clubs, which were shitty at best.

  Since I couldn’t really connect with the backpackers and was looking for a Bolivian flag, I only joined the parties the first few days.

  I got to know two people working at the hostel, Judith who was German and Hench a massive and ripped black guy from England. One morning I was talking with him and told something about my website, and he said: “Oh shit, is that you? I’ve heard about a Dutch guy travelling and banging his way around the world.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s me.” Hench started shaking my hand and introduced me to another staff member, saying “This is that Dutch guy we talked about”. I can’t say that I wasn’t a bit proud of being “that Dutch guy” and having my reputation precede me. It reminded me of the time when I heard some English guys in Bali talk about a tall Dutch guy raising hell in Cambodia. I was pretty sure they were talking about me at the time. The group was divided into guys hyping it up and others saying things like “That bloke’s a cunt”.

  One night I went out with the Portuguese guys and five young English girls. The girls gave off a party vibe but turned into a boring group when they started to play cards at a bar all the Loki backpackers went to. I still thought the two Portuguese guys had a chance with them but they didn’t capitalize on their chances and the girls soon lost interest. There were Bolivian girls around but most of them were very ugly.

  At the end of the night some hot girls came to the Blue house discoteca (an underground dump). They looked like they were richer, but were also very stuck-up when approached. Those who didn’t came with an overprotective boyfriend or orbiter shot me down or didn’t speak English. I went three times to this dreadful place and swore never to return to this dump no matter how many free drinks they gave away.

  I signed up for private Spanish lessons and went to a small office five times a week for two hours a day. The Bolivian girl teaching wasn’t that good at it and I should have asked for another teacher but since she had massive blowjob lips and responded well to my flirting I stayed with her. I pretty much fucked up my Spanish lessons by not having a really skilled teacher with only limited English skills and not doing my homework or any extra learning during the day. I had to sleep off hangovers.

  One night I went out to a place called Traffic, which is the only decent place to go out in La Paz, and saw a couple of Bolivian girls. Two of them looked like giant sluts and the other looked more decent. I approached the decent one, had a short talk and kissed her there. She was not bad-looking for a Bolivian girl, who are considered the least attractive girls in South America. Her name was Maria and I went out with her a few times. She was quite smart but in an annoying know-it-all way.

  I moved out of the Loki hostel and went to a two-star hotel, close to the city center but far away enough to be on real Bolivian territory so I wouldn’t see those damn tourists all day. The two-bed hotel room was almost the same price as a hostel bed at the Loki. I found it ridiculous to stay in a noisy dorm in the poorest country in South America. The only difference was the shared bathroom, which was a mess but had a good hot shower. It had one of those dangerous electric showerheads which were common in a lot of South American and Asian countries. You learn a great deal about how much you’re willing to take your life in your hands when you’re continually taking showers in places where there are live wires just hanging out of the showerhead.

  Maria and I went and saw Transformers 3 in a local cinema. It was even more childish than the first two. We got into an argument while making out. Although good-looking she was a bad kisser and didn’t excite me much, plus it was freezing cold in the cinema, so when she touched my dick nothing happened there and she said it was small. The movie stopped twenty minutes before the end and the personnel couldn’t fix the problem. Welcome to Bolivia! When we walked out on the street I was not happy with her for saying I had a small one while she had never even seen the damn thing. It’s possibly the worst thing a girl can say on a date. She didn’t see the harm in it and that made me even angrier with her. I said I didn’t want to see her again for insulting me this way, sa
id goodbye and walked off.

  When I woke up the next morning, I found she had send me a text message saying how sorry she was and that she had asked her girlfriends about the comment she made and they’d told her she was an dumb idiot for saying a thing like that.

  We met again and I took her to my room and banged the crap out of her. Maria wasn’t experienced at all and at one point I went extra deep. She asked me to stop because I was too big and she told about her Bolivian ex–boyfriend, who had a small one. I had made my point that night but wasn’t in a hurry to do it again.

  One night we went to a typical Bolivian disco party and that was fun. I was offered lots of free drinks and even had a funny dance with a young cholita. A cholita is a Bolivian woman dressed in traditional clothing, including a bowler hat. You will see them everywhere in Bolivia. They even have their own wrestling league, in the style of WWF.

  For some reason my Bolivian phone card stopped working and I never made an effort to call Maria again on a street phone or to buy another phone card.

  I was on a constant diet of rice and chicken that I bought in the neighborhood I was staying. Every night for at least two weeks I bought half a roasted chicken with potatoes, vegetables and a big bag of steamed rice for only four dollars. Enough for two meals. Although it was Bolivian street food, it was the only thing my stomach could hold without crapping my guts out all the time.

  The Spanish lessons were improving a bit but I hadn’t reached the level I’d expected after eight days of two-hour private lessons.

  I went out on a date with my teacher to a different cinema. I couldn’t wait to make a move on her and kiss those huge lips, but she kept giving me a head turn and saying no to it. She confessed she’d never been out with a foreigner and she was probably very conservative about kissing.