Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (20 page)

The
same day I agreed to stay, Tina got jealous again, after a few days of calm. The problem was that we were hanging out at Nr 9 all the time and there were always at least five girls around that I have had sex with at some point. Also, Nina had returned to Nr 9 a few times and had openly flirted with me. I really wanted to be with her again, because I liked that crazy Vietnamese girl, but I’d made a promise to Tina that she would be the only one while I was in Phnom Penh. She had won, so to say.

The
beginning of the end came when Tina and I went to a bar called Sharkey’s, which is a large English pub with a lot of pool tables, a good band and lots of old guys looking for a taxi girl, as freelance hookers are called in Cambodia. I never made a secret about banging a lot of those taxi girls, but I never paid a dime for it.

Trouble
started when at first Bian and Ary, who were both there, and later Dara, came to say hello. Dara flirted a bit with me and Tina’s face became grumpier by the minute. We decided to go back to Nr 9 and hang out there a bit. After one hour Dara walked in. She had changed her clothes. She looked better than ever in a short mini skirt and her big boobs sticking through her shirt. Tina was talking to someone on the phone and I had to screw things up by talking to Dara in a far corner of the place so that Tina couldn’t hear what we were saying. Dara told me that she wanted to be with me again but couldn’t because of all drama and fighting before. Now that I was with jealous Tina it was out of the question. “I also want to be with you,” I said to her and I charmed her for a full 10 minutes. She was quite emotional and suppressed her tears.

The
one who was not suppressing her tears was Tina, who was crying out loud.  “Let’s go to your apartment and talk about it again,” I said to her, which we did. We got into an argument and Tina flipped. She was shouting and kicking things in her room. She went to the bathroom and lay half naked under a cold stream of water, shouting, crying and breaking stuff. It was like a scene from a movie, and I saw no other option but to leave, so I packed my backpack and went back to Nr 9 and got a room there. It was already past midnight now and I went to sleep alone and feeling bad. I heard a girl bang at my door in the middle of the night, but when I asked who it was and the answer wasn’t Dara or Nina I didn’t let her in. It was actually a girl I knew and was attracted to, but I wasn’t in the right headspace to be coldblooded once more and just let her in and do my thing.

When
I woke up I went to the guesthouse reception and asked them for my passport back without renewing the visa. It was due in five days and I wanted to get out of Phnom Penh as soon as possible. As I sat in the Internet café I was surprised to see Tina come in and give me the laundry I had forgotten at her place. She had folded and ironed everything but didn’t want to talk to me anymore. Her hand was wrapped into bandages. She’ probably hurt herself while breaking stuff in the bathroom. Later I sat down in the television area of Nr 9, and as soon some girls found out I’d had an argument with Tina they were swarming around me.

I could see
Tina having fun playing pool and laughing with some people, and thought to myself that if she could have fun with others, there was no reason for me to be down, and invited Nhu to sit on my lap. Of course, when I tried to get in contact with Nina or Dara I couldn’t reach them by phone. Just my luck again. All I wanted was to stay with one of them, preferably Dara. Ary and Jorani were trying to get with me too, but I told them both to get away from me.

In
the afternoon I went with Nhu to her room inside the water village on Lakeside. I have never seen a poorer place than the water houses there. I had to walk over several dangerous planks just to get at her place, which she shared with another girl. Afterwards I took her to my room and had sex with her again. I couldn’t resist her big lips and sexy little breasts with nipples that were always hard and poking through her shirt.

In
the evening, I was sitting with Nhu on my lap when I saw someone I didn’t expect in Phnom Penh. It was Sophon, Tina’s girlfriend, whom I’d met in Sihanoukville. Sophon was happy to see me. I told her I broke up with Tina and she said she’d broken up with the American. I told her I was going to Battambang to get close to the Thai border and leave from there to Bangkok. She looked up and said her mother lived there. Without hesitating I asked her to join me there. She happily said yes. I told her there was a bus in the morning and asked where she slept that night. She said “At my girlfriend’s house”. I told her to get her stuff and move in with me in Nr 9. She declined because Tina was there too during the day and night. “I can stay with you, but then we go to a hotel in a different part of town,” she said. I thought about it a bit, looked at her beautiful face and tight body and said “OK, let’s go”. I packed my backpack, paid the bill and said goodbye to the people in the guesthouse.

When
I walked out with Sophon by my side, Tina walked in and looked furious. At the time I thought I’d had my revenge on her, but now as I’m typing this, two years later, I feel stupid for treating her like an object. But on the other hand, I promised her I wouldn’t stay with other girls and still she flipped out every time I talked or looked at one. She is a beautiful girl but trouble all the way.

Sophon
and I checked into a room and I tried to bang her that night but she wouldn’t put out, except for some kissing. It was the first time I met some resistance from a Cambodian girl.

We
left in the morning and after a long ride we arrived in Battambang, where we found a nice luxurious hotel for only six dollars a night. After taking a shower and some lunch we went to see her family who lived in a forest outside Battambang.

The
house was made of bricks with a sheet metal roof; there was only one big room inside. There were chickens around the house and a dog that looked very old and miserable but was only a year old. Sophon was only twenty years old and her mother only a couple of years older than me. She breastfed the youngest son all the time and took out her big breast with giant nipples right in front of me.

Sophon
had two younger sisters around the age of seven and ten. There was also an uncle around who slept in a hammock most of the day. Sophon’s mother invited me to stay at her place but I declined. The house had only one room and one bed. Although I didn’t mind sleeping next to the mother for a bit, I decided to stay with Sophon in the hotel.

I
had sex with her that night. Although gorgeous looking she wasn’t very adventurous in bed and she said she had only had the American as a boyfriend. A blatant lie, of course. I saw her with quite a few foreigners on her Facebook in the years after.

The
next four days I stayed in Battambang, hanging out with the family during the day and most of the evening. I must say I enjoyed staying in a rural area, and laughed when the mother was drunk at night because she was not used to drinking. Every night she cooked a nice meal with ingredients I bought at the market with Sophon. Her two little sisters were cleaning my pockets out of small change with a Cambodian card game.

In
the morning I called Julia on Skype and we had a long talk and she was crying all the time. I felt bad because I just had sex with Sophon that morning, but forgot all about it as soon as I hung up.

I
didn’t mind buying food at the local markets and some extra soda for the kids every day but at times I thought they were taking advantage of me a bit too much. It bothered me a bit that her neighbor asked three and a half dollars every time we drove back to the hotel on his motor bike. Going back and forth twice a day it added up to fourteen dollars a day. I think I spend close to $120 for just four days on the hotel, food and drinks and motor rides. Sophon was clearly looking for a money provider/sender and didn’t really care that much for me on the inside. She was begging me to stay and extend my visa just like Tina had the week before, plus she wanted to get married and have kids. She is really very beautiful but I’m not falling for that trick and I left Battambang the next day, Sophon was nagging my ears off about having a baby and I was glad to be on the bus.

She
wanted to keep in touch but for the next two weeks I kept silent about my whereabouts. Now I have no contact with any girls in Cambodia anymore. I’ve unfriended them all. It may seem odd, but there’s a reason. Some guys aren’t very happy with me over there, and have started sending me more than a few threats. Point is, Cambodia’s still a dangerous place, and it’s worth taking threats there seriously. It wouldn’t be too difficult to find someone willing to kill someone for you, especially if you told them he’d been “dishonoring” local girls, and some of those threats have been death threats. I can probably never return to Cambodia, however much I’d like to.

I
came back for Dara or Nina but instead I had made another mess.

Short visit to Bangkok

I was fed up with all the drama and fighting in Cambodia and wanted to do some proper travelling again. I took a bus to the Thai border, where I met a Canadian girl named Kate while we were waiting for our passport stamps. Kate was on her way to Bangkok too and we talked the whole four-hour ride. Kate would be a seven in most guys’ opinions, and her blond hair and sometimes bitchy face made her attractive to me too.

I
tricked Kate into sharing a double room with me. We had walked down Khao San Road a few times already and I told her it would be better to share an air-conditioned room than to each get a cheap single one with a fan. It’s a trick I came up with in Laos, though the German girl I shared the room with there wasn’t up for romance, and it has the advantage of being true.

That
day we went to the MBK mall to hang out and eat. At night we drank shitloads of beer on Khao San Road. I pitched some game at her and she received it well. Back in the room I jumped in her bed and we made out a bit, but she didn’t want to bang on the first night. Ironically, she said she’d many one-night stands before but stopped doing that. I was thinking
Nice timing
.

The
next day neither of us was not feeling too well, due to all the drinking and the Thai food, and not much happened between us after that. I don’t even remember us saying goodbye. I just missed her when in Singapore and saw her again in Sidney a year later. I stayed a few more days and booked a flight to Yangon in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

Myanmar – Yangon

The flight there took only one hour and on arriving I was surprised at how easy it was getting through customs. I didn’t notice the fact I’d entered a military dictatorship at all. The only thing I did notice was that the taxi was super old and crappy. I haven’t seen that in other South East Asian countries. In Thailand most taxis are brand new and a lot cheaper than tuk tuks if you have to drive far.

The
hotel was old but at least the owner was a jolly guy and spoke reasonable English. My room had no windows and only one electricity socket, so I had the choice of using either the fan or my laptop. When I used my laptop inside the room it was boiling hot in there and I was afraid my laptop would just burst into flames. The street the hotel was on was really old and broken up. The pavement was terrible and you really had to watch out where you walked, a lesson I would learn, painfully, a week later when I totally busted my toes open on the pavement and left a small trail of blood to my hotel. There was plastic crap and paper all over the streets. In so many words, it was filthy.

The
first day I stayed in and met the other people staying in this hostel/hotel. We were all sitting of the rooftop and talking a bit. I didn’t seem to like anyone there. One Swiss guy was really weird, he was talking with something like five different accents and tried to be interesting but in my opinion he made a fool of himself. I think he was trying to impress the two American girls who were true hippie tree-huggers and talked about living in tree huts and growing their own food. Clearly they’d never heard of razor blades, since they had really hairy legs and armpits. I was clearly not amused.

I
won’t go into the whole political/moral debate of visiting the country or not. Yes, it’s a military dictatorship, but people still earn money from tourists and infrastructure is developed for it. I was there in 2010 and I think it’s getting better there now.

Yangon
, formerly known as Rangoon, is a massive city with a population of five million.  I had miscalculated the distance on the map and I walked for almost two hours in a heat of thirty-eight degrees to see the Shwedagon Pagoda. It was tiring but fun to walk around. I was a big attraction in a city that doesn’t see too many western foreigners, especially around the part I walked. The pagoda was breathtaking: it consisted of one big stupa (temple) and many other smaller stupas and Buddha statues. It is all made of gold and almost blinding to look at. Because it’s a temple you have to walk barefoot and the floor outside was sizzling hot – some parts I had bite my teeth and keep a straight face while getting my feet scorched. Some locals were just standing on the floor and were taking pictures, they must have asbestos feet.

After
this I hung around for a few days seeing other parts of the city. One funny thing about the hotel I was staying at was its giant breakfast. Apparently the hotel was mentioned in a Lonely Planet magazine once as the one with the best breakfast in Asia and the owner had build his formula around this. There were posters and plaques everywhere referring to his breakfast and the owner mentioned it several times a day. He wasn’t lying about it. The breakfast buffet was the biggest I had ever seen and you had choice of some twenty-five different dishes in the morning. Every time I ate until my belly resembled a balloon.