Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (31 page)

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 cheap 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.

The
last night was a big success. We met a nice woman and her gay guy friend. She invited us to play pool and ordered a lot of buckets of beer. At one point I told Darren to slow down the drinking because maybe we were getting set up for a scam. She was a bit too friendly in my opinion, and we started to worry about the bill. It turns out we worried for nothing. Mona paid for everything and we found out she had quite a bit of money. Our group went back to Memories, just down the road. It was our turn to pay for some beers now and we did.

Jalan
Jaksa is kind of a seedy street, with a mix of backpackers, expats, locals, hookers, gays and Africans doing “business”, so you can expect anything to happen there. I saw Annie watching me with Mona, and she walked past us a few times to make her presence known. Mona and I were flirting but I couldn’t get anywhere close to a kiss with her. I looked around and to my surprise saw Darren talking with a girl with giant tits I had noticed before.

When
I say giant, I mean giant. She had the biggest tits I’d seen since I left Cebu and Jenna behind me.

I
quickly said something like “just a moment” to Mona and walked over to join the conversation. The big-boobed girl, Donna, was sitting there with two gay guys and another girl. I soon found out that they were all colleagues working in a hotel. We got talking and things went very well. Almost everything I said was well-received and we joked a lot with each other. I wasn’t paying attention to her boobs at all because I know that a million guys must have stared at them before and she must have had a hundred complements about them. The trick is to look like you’re talking to hot girls all the time and are not even the slightest bit impressed by her appearance. Only guys who have high value do this and any girl will see this as special. You have to adjust your inner game to this, and the Force was strong in me that night. That night I knew how to hide a two-month dry spell.

Donna
and I made fun of each other and joked about the World Cup Football final, because she was for the Spanish team and I of course for the Dutch team. At one point I wanted to touch her hair for some reason – I don’t remember why, but I’m sure it was some pick-up line/routine – but instead of touching her hair I accidently touched her boobs and in a split second I said “Oh, sorry” in a very nonchalant way and just kept talking.

Now
don’t get me wrong. My hand had bumped into her boobs from underneath when my hand went from my knee to her head and I used enough power to actually lift her heavy boob a bit. I could see on her face that she didn’t know what to say or do at that moment. The sheer fact that I kept talking like I bump into massive boobs five times a day and don’t even notice this anymore helped me build enough pre-selection and value to keep her interested and not come off as a creep who wants to cop a feel.