Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (25 page)

The
room in the guesthouse was a shabby one and the toilets in the hallway didn’t flush that well. I couldn’t bring Julia to a place like that and I moved to a hotel fifty meters away from the guesthouse. This hotel room at least had a clean bathroom and an air conditioning unit. It was also twice the price, but still only seven hundred Pesos which was about sixteen dollars at that time. A lot of things are very cheap in the Philippines, but compared to other South East Asian countries hotel rooms are expensive.

Julia
was going to arrive around 10pm and before that I still had time. I sat down with Jenna in the guesthouse bar again. We talked and laughed, and she showed me pictures on her laptop and Blackberry. She was totally focused on me and I knew I had her in my pocket. Somewhat later I went back to my room to freshen up when Jenna came to my hotel and asked for me at the reception. The reception called my room’s phone and asked me to come downstairs, where Jenna asked me if I took her small backpack, maybe as joke or something.

I
denied it and she told me someone took her small bag while she wasn’t looking and she had lost her laptop, Blackberry, other phone, camera and some money. It had a total value of eight hundred dollars, she told me. I felt really bad for her because I felt it was kind of my fault. I gamed her so hard that she couldn’t think straight anymore and didn’t pay her attention to her bag. We looked for her bag together but soon found out it was really gone. She was crying. In the meanwhile I had to pick up Julia from the airport. Jenna and I agreed to keep in touch a bit and that I would see her after I returned from Boracay.

Julia
was very happy to see me again. She cried when she saw me at the airport, the way she always did. We hugged and kissed and in the taxi to the hotel she told me I looked very different from before. I had longer hair and acted a bit differently, she said. She had probably hyped up this two-week trip over and over again in her own head, and for me it was totally different. A lot had changed since we last met in Thailand. It had been a turbulent half-year: I had visited six other countries and banged seventeen others girls of nine nationalities in just six months. Of course after this I felt different too; I still had feelings for her, but nowhere near as strong as back in Thailand. Back then, I nearly gave everything up just to be with her and almost ended my round-the-world trip for her. My sister and my own thoughts pushed me to continue my trip. And of course my rock star-like status in Cambodia had changed me a lot too.

Julia
knew something was up and told me she hated the idea of me being with someone else but knew that I had met some girl in Cambodia because I went there twice. She had no idea of how many girls I’ve been with and I hope she never finds out. I admitted there was another girl and when I said that I kept thinking about Dara, I still thought about her a lot. Despite all this, we had mad sex that night.

We
took a trip across the city and saw the usual sights and at night we were hungry so I took a risk and walked over to the guesthouse next to where Jenna worked. I wanted her to see me with Julia, I don’t know why but it was probably to establish Pre-selection, a jealousy plot and because I like to live on the edge of drama a bit. Pre-selection is a player’s strongest weapon. When she saw us she looked surprised and a bit envious. Julia has a bikini model body; she even did some modeling when she was younger. Jenna, the Filipino girl, is very short and had a small belly. Her giant boobs are her strong points, so to speak. . Physically speaking, I also liked her as a person a lot.

Julia
and I left the next day by propeller plane to the island of Boracay. I thought about joining the mile-high club with Julia but banging her in the toilet would be too obvious. It was only a fifty-seat plane and it only had two toilets without any curtains in front of it. She later told me she would have tried it, she fantasizes about those kinds of things. As always Julia paid her half of the rent so we could afford a nice air-conditioned room with a swimming pool. Our resort was only about 150 meters away from the sea and the beach road where everything was happening.

Boracay
is a small island with about four kilometers of white sand beach. It’s a typical tourist place and mostly visited by young couples like Julia and me. There were also lots of Asian tourists. One day I will return there and get that Korean flag. We did all sorts of activities like jet-skiing, the banana behind the speed boat and parasailing, which was an amazing experience. The Football World Cup had started and at night we went to an English bar to watch the matches with at least a hundred other people. Boracay has visitors from all over the world and it’s fun to watch the matches with actual people from that country. My Holland/Netherlands team was kicking ass every match and ended in the final.

I
noticed it became harder and harder to talk to Julia. Maybe it was because we spent twenty-four hours a day together but that wasn’t a problem before in Thailand, where we’d gone three weeks without separating.

It
was me who had changed; I just wasn’t into her as much. The sex was great and she was up for anything I wanted between the sheets but outside the bed our connection was becoming weaker by the day and that bothered me.

I
tried to text Jenna but didn’t receive any messages back and I stopped trying. A few days later I realized her phones were in the stolen bag, so the number she had given me was useless. I had to think of another way and broke my brain over the name of the company she worked for. When I finally remembered it I gave her a call immediately.

She
was very surprised to hear my voice after a week and acted a bit cold. This changed soon enough when we started texting each other on her new phone number. Julia became suspicious because Jenna wasn’t the only one sending me texts. I had handed out my Philippine number to a few girls in Manila and they were texting me too. I hid my phone and had put it in silent mode but Julia saw me checking the phone a few times and of course she wasn’t happy with that. She had every right to be angry about it; I would be pissed off myself if it was the other way around.

One
day we went to Puka beach. It’s only a fifteen-minute tricycle drive away from the main tourist strip but hardly anyone goes there. It’s the perfect beach to bring a girl.

The
sand is pearly white and you can snorkel and see amazing fishes just twenty meters from the beach. We also did an island boat tour which was cheap and a great day out. It included an unlimited buffet lunch and even two bottles of beer each. I ate and drank so much that I could barely stand up from behind the table and walk to the boat. The eyes were bigger as the stomach, as we say in Holland.

Two
weeks past very quickly and when we arrived at Cebu airport again I made a big mistake. I wanted to grab a lighter out of my bag and the necklace and bracelet I secretly bought for Jenna fell out of the top pocket of my backpack. Julia saw it and immediately knew I had bought it for a girl.

Call
it female intuition. She started crying and I made up a stupid excuse that I bought it to wear myself. I could have said that is was for my sister or mother, but I fucked up by reacting nervous and saying it was for me. She didn’t say anything on the way back from the airport to the hotel where we stayed before. She cried a bit and I felt like a rotten bastard.

That
evening things cleared up a bit. Julia had thrown the bracelet and necklace out of the room in the bushes. I “admitted” I’d bought it for a girl working in the Manila guesthouse who asked me to bring something for her when I returned to Manila. Julia believed my “confession” and that night everything was okay again. She was still very sad and cried because she had to leave.

We
woke up the next morning and had fantastic sex for the last time and I brought her to the airport in the afternoon. We said goodbye and she cried a lot. She didn’t have the holiday she expected and she was disappointed about our relationship. Julia knew I was going to continue my trip for at least another year and she wouldn’t have the chance to see me again. It would have been too expensive for her to visit me in South America but she did speak about it.

After
saying goodbye to her I took a taxi back to Cebu center and texted Jenna that I was coming to see her. I went straight to the McDonalds close to her house and met her there. She even brought a gift for me. Of course I had nothing for her since Julia had thrown it away. I gamed her hard and was lying in her bed within an hour and although Jenna was very horny and wanted to fuck, but I suddenly realized what a giant scumbag I was. I had just said goodbye to a crying Julia, who had saved up her money to see me, and there I was in bed with another girl. I didn’t want to have sex with Jenna anymore; I kissed her and went to sleep.

When
I woke up the next morning I didn’t even realize where I was, but I felt someone stroking her hand over my back. It was Jenna, who now realized I had woken up. She started rubbing other parts of my body and I soon forget about what happened the night before and boned the living daylights out of her.

Jenna
was very good in bed and performed miracles with her lips. I stayed another week in Cebu. She was only twenty-three and still had to go to university in the morning before working at the office/travel agency from 5:00 PM to 11:00.

At
night we would break sex records and she asked me to stay longer with her. During the day I had nothing to do and walked around the city a bit or went to the Ayala mall, which was packed with beautiful girls. I always took a jeepney bus there which was the cheapest way of getting across town. It was almost guaranteed that any time you get on a jeepney there’s always a hot girl on it.

I
started to fall in love with the Philippines. The friendly people, the fact that a lot of people speak English, that it was always warm and everything is quite cheap. If you look you can find delicious food for only a couple of dollars. I had to continue travelling but in my heart I didn’t want to. The same feeling I had before came over me; I was getting tired of packing my bag every three or four days and wanted to relax a bit with someone who actually cared for me instead of hanging with drunken backpackers all the time. I left for another island but promised Jenna she would see me again.

It’s a short flight from Cebu to Puerto Princessa on Palawan Island, and finding a guesthouse was easy. There were already some hawkers waiting at the airport and they took me to a place close to the water. The guesthouse was a nice place and had all the things a guesthouse needs: a restaurant and bar, television, bar and a few young girls working there. The place was owned by a fat old Australian guy who was married to a Filipino girl he yelled at from time to time. I didn’t like the guy but sometimes I could understand his anger. At times the cultural differences really show up, with some huge gaps. They probably say the same of us. Actually, they probably think we’re crazy, because they have a way of taking everything literally, so our way of looking at the world must strike them as totally nuts.

Accommodation
isn’t as cheap in the Philippines as in other South East Asian countries, so I took the dorm room, which I shared with two young French girls. They were both good-looking and I asked them to go out with me to find a restaurant and drink some beers in the city center. The girls were both studying in Kuala Lumpur and on a short holiday in the Phils. We choose a restaurant that also doubled as a karaoke place. It was a big outside place with a roof and a small podium in front. Filipinos are very musical and will grab any chance to sing a karaoke song. No matter what drunken state or how awfully they sing.

I
had the idea that the girls sort of liked me, but not in a romantic way. It’s not that easy to pick up a girl when she is travelling with a friend. So I focused more on one of the staff members back at the guesthouse, named Dana. She wasn’t the prettiest girl around but I could see she liked me and was up for some romance. I had all the time in the world to talk to her since I wasn’t very active in those days.

I
went with the French girls to a beach close by the guesthouse, but it was kind of dirty. Later an almost two-meter tall American, Greg, and a Swiss girl joined us. The beach was nearly deserted by then but there was a group of Filipino guys doing a lot of drinking. They came over and wanted to talk. One of them was an older guy who was only wearing an old-fashioned pair of underwear; he was covered in sand, even his face. He was very drunk and a bit annoying. He challenged me to a sparring fight. I declined, even though for sure I could kick his ass in a sparring or even a real fight, but he had at least seven friends with him. I had just met Greg, who was tall and strong, but I didn’t know whether he’d help me if the all those guys ganged up on me.

Once I’d said no, t
he drunk guy, who looked utterly ridiculous in his underwear and with his face covered with sand, started challenging the American. It was hilarious because Greg was at least two heads taller than him, muscled, and sober. As it turned out the drunk guy didn’t really mean it and all his friends apologized for him. I had forgotten that I was in the Phils, where people are super friendly. A similar situation in Europe would end up with Greg and me getting beaten up by a group of guys. Here, they just offered us the bottle of rum about forty times while the drunken guy started rolling around in the sand again. It was one of those situations where you had to be there to see how funny it was.

The World Cup was still on, and since the Dutch team had a match that evening
I went to a foreigners’ bar to watch it. The whole place was orange, Holland’s national color, since there are quite a lot of Dutch expats living in Puerto Princessa and they were all there to cheer on the team. I met a nice Dutch girl named Kyra who worked for an NGO there, actually. I’m still in contact with her every once in a while. She always hates it when I post pictures of me kissing girls on Facebook.

Not unexpectedly, the Dutch team won.

The next day, the French girls and most of the people in the guesthouse left the city to visit other parts of the island. Clearly my flirting with Dana had worked, because I got to kiss her that night. Now I wanted to find a place to bang her.

I
went to a club with her and the two other girls working there and was treated like a rock star. At this point my hair was already touching my shoulders. When I stepped in line for the toilets all the guys would let me go first and some even took pictures with me. “You look like Axl Rose,” they said, and one of them even compared me to Jesus, which was pretty funny. I mean, yes, by all accounts Jesus was a bit of a bum, essentially backpacking around Judea and staying in the equivalent of hostels, but I’ve never heard it suggested he was gathering flags from all the cities there. Or maybe they just left that bit out of the Bible.  You have to admit that “Hey baby, I’m the son of God” would be a pretty good pick-up line. I was told I look like Kurt Cobain a lot, but I guess that’s just because I had the same hairstyle. It surprised me a bit how popular I was there, because Puerto Princessa sees its share of tourists. Guys were handing me beers and it just became ridiculous at one point. I’m just a backpacker with long hair, people! Maybe it was because I rolled in with three girls on my side. Anyhow, ridiculous or not I didn’t refuse the beers.

A
day later one of the single rooms was freed up and I took it. Dana made a lot of last-minute resistance but I knew I was going to have sex with her. At one point when the owner and his wife were gone I finally got Dana in my room. We were-half naked when suddenly one of the other girls working there shouted “The boss is coming!” Dana didn’t want to lose her job and jumped out of the bed and out of the room, pulling her clothes back on. It turned out the girls had been joking and the boss wasn’t anywhere around. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy with her co-workers at that moment.

Later
that day I had sex with her anyway. It was a very different experience from Jenna since Dana was quite tall, especially for a Filipina girl.

Later
that week I finally got my laptop fixed. I still hadn’t managed to get rid of that stubborn virus I got in Malaysia on my own and now it was eating away my hard drive. Some guys at a computer store fixed all my drives and installed a brand new copy of Windows 7 for only six dollars. Back on track, I went to another part of the island.

Philippines – El Nido

El Nido lies in the far north of Palawan Island and I took a local bus there. It was the cheapest option and it was half the price of the tourist bus. Always take local transport if possible; not only is it a lot cheaper but more importantly you can enjoy the local people and culture way better sitting on an old chicken bus than being surrounded by fat stupid tourists in ugly hats being herded around like a pack of overfed hogs and all taking the same photos. And for immersing yourself in the local culture, nothing beats taking an over-packed, stinking and noisy local bus ride. It’s uncomfortable, there are babies crying for hours, the food in the “highway” restaurants is terrible, but most people respect you if you’re not a fat money-throwing day-tripper on an air conditioned bus with an underpaid guide. They respect the fact that you’re willing to see them instead of just looking at their country.  Most tourists just think the poor local people are part of the scenery. Taking their buses, you know that they’re real.

Nearly
the whole road was a dirt road and the driver was an absolute maniac. I don’t think he ever used the breaks – in fact, I’m not completely sure the bus
had
breaks – and it was more like a rally race than a bus ride. We broke down twice along the way and  stopped at a roadside restaurant where the driver repaired the bus with only a screwdriver and some duct tape. The restaurant looked horrible but I had to eat, so I took the risk. It didn’t taste bad but I feared my bowels were going to explode once I got back on the bus. By some miracle I was fine and had no trouble at all. Maybe it was all those young moms breastfeeding their babies on the bus that kept me distracted.

El
Nido is one of the most beautiful places to go in the Philippines, comparable to South Thailand. It has beautiful beaches with lots of coral, excellent water for diving and snorkeling and it’s still pretty secluded from mass tourism. Of course when I arrived the weather was terrible and the guesthouse there sucked. Instant karma for peeping at those breast-feeding MILFs. (Actually, I’m not sure if it’s fair to call them MILFs when most of them were ten years younger than me.)

The
weather finally changed after a few days and I took a daytrip to the islands. I took a small fisherman’s boat to the sea with two local guys and four tourists.

The
sites were beautiful; we snorkeled above the coral, saw hundreds of colorful fishes, went into a few caves and even fished at the end of the day. It was a perfect day out and only cost five dollars each. Where else in the world can you do that for prices like that?

Back to Puerto Princessa

After a day or five I took the bus back to Puerto Princessa. Just my luck – it was the same driver! Eight more hours of praying that I didn’t go home in a body bag. I’m not overreacting here. The guy was insane. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and remind yourself that he’s clearly done this run many times and he’s not dead yet. It’s just a bit hard to trust that his luck will hold.

Once
I was back in Puerto Princessa, amazingly alive, I looked up Dana and we took a hotel room in the city. I was lucky to be with her because I would never have found it on my own. The room was OK, had a bathroom and was even cheaper than the dorm bed I had in the first guesthouse. It was two hundred–fifty pesos only as they say in the Phils. Now Dana and I finally had some privacy and we banged till daybreak.

The
next morning we walked around town and she introduced me to a highly addictive sort of ice cream named Halo Halo. We relaxed a bit and then went to the TomTom club to watch the World Cup Final between Holland and Spain. 

I’d told people in El Nido about how this was a great place to watch football, and invited them down to
watch the final. All the people I’d invited were there and so were Kyra and her friends. Unfortunately my country lost the final from Spain. It was a very aggressive final and both teams were kicking the shit out of each other. It looked like they we’re up for another 80 years of war between Holland and Spain just like in the 1600’s. Unlike the Football final Spain couldn’t win that one.

My
last day on the island I spent with Dana and her family at the beach. It was a fun day. First we went with the whole seven-person family and all their food and drinks on one tricycle. The thing could barely drive and the family paid as much as I would normally pay for a 500-meter ride. No matter how much you haggle sometimes, if the (taxi) driver is smiling you are still paying too much. I don’t mind paying a bit extra since I have way more money than the driver, but I hate getting ripped off.

The
food brought by the family was delicious and I repaid the favor by bringing a bottle of Tanduay rum and a few bottles of Coca Cola. You can actually buy a bottle of rum for a dollar and a half there. We swam a bit in the water, which was filled with green goo and seaweed. I played football with the kids a bit, and it was just a good, fun day. The next morning I said goodbye to Dana and went back to Cebu to see Jenna again.

Philippines – Cebu and Bohol

Jenna was happy to see me and quite frankly a bit surprised too. She said she never expected to see me again. Unfortunately she was on her period, but when she saw the disappointed look on my face she said the magical words,

“I
will suck your dick for four days.”

A
nd she did. She works miracles with her big lips. I think she’s the best I ever had, even better than the Vietnamese girl in Phnom Penh.

During
the days while Jenna was working it was kind of boring for me and I flirted with Jenna’s girlfriend from university. She was a typical 18-year-old virgin girl and she ate up everything I said to her. She wasn’t the hottest-looking girl around but she still had that cute innocent look and I liked it. I gave her my diamond ring routine and she loved it. I was playing a tricky game this way and knew she would eventually say something to Jenna about it. I stopped when Jenna became a bit suspicious.

The diamond ring routine

This one’s a bit hard to explain because it’s a push-pull routine and you need to work some facial expressions, but it works very well in less developed countries.

When
I’m sitting down with a girl I always sit within reach of her. We talk a bit and suddenly I grab her hand or her fingers and look at them with a frown on my face.

Girl: “What? Why are you looking?”

Me: “Where is your diamond ring?”

Girl (smiling): “What do you mean?”

Me: “A pretty girl like you who doesn’t have a diamond ring on her finger, that’s just weird. You know what? Tomorrow morning I’m going to buy you the biggest diamond ring I can find and then I’m going to marry you the day after and we will make many babies together.”

Say this with a smile and then keep a straight serious face. Now, the girl laughs and gives you a funny face because she also knows I’m just a poor travelling guy – but still, she has to wonder if I’m serious or not. I just might be a gullible guy with some money in the bank, and she can’t risk passing up on that.  And then you go,