Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (21 page)

Myanmar – Bagan

I wanted to visit the 4000 temples in Bagan, a site matching Angkor Wat in sheer size and beauty. I hopped in a taxi and told the driver to take me to the bus station. “Where are you going?” he asked me and I told him “Bagan”. Twenty minutes later I found out why he asked me this. It wasn’t so much a bus station as a bus village. There must have been a thousand buses there and at least fifteen streets with bus companies and restaurants. He dropped me off at “Bagan Street” and I bought a ticket there. In the bus a Portuguese tourist (the only other white guy) sat next to me and we talked a lot. His name was Alehandro and like me he was travelling for an unknown period of time in South East Asia.

The
bus ride took only ten hours and was comfortable at first – well, as comfortable as a chicken bus can get. Of course it was a loud, stinking bus, but I always like to travel like this and immerse in the local customs. We arrived in the middle of the night in Bagan, took a bicycle taxi to a hotel and were surprised to not get ripped off at all. People are friendly and as soon as they find out you’re not a dumb naive tourist, they will drop the price and treat you nice. I think they don’t like the gullible money-throwing type of tourist much. They like the money but not the attitude. Alehandro and I both took a separate room with hot water bathrooms and air conditioning for only five dollars a night.

The
following morning we went to look at all the temples. We took a horse-drawn cart with driver and he took us past all the major temples. The views were astonishing. I think the number of 4000 temples is a bit exaggerated, but there were at least hundreds of them. We saw the fifteen biggest ones. There weren’t many other tourists around, so it must have been the slow season. While looking at the temples we saw many young girls and a couple of Burmese school classes on a field trip. I had my picture taken at least twenty-five times that day, mostly with young high school girls. Myanmar is still a very conservative country without much contact with the outside world, especially not the West, so it was a big deal for these girls to get a picture with a tall blond guy like me.

I
was planning to go south after returning to Yangon, but an old German guy who married a Burmese woman and lived there told me it was impossible due to guerilla warfare in the south. Tourists were not allowed to travel by land. Too bad, because it would have been great to (boldly) go where no-one has gone before.

Myanmar
is also one of the friendliest countries I have been. Tourists are well protected and even the military and police personnel doing the many road-checks were very polite.

Alehandro
went to another place to do some more sightseeing. I should have gone with him to the Inle lake, but I was in hurry to leave the country. I still had so many other places to visit and had already stayed six weeks longer in Cambodia than I’d planned. I wanted to make up for lost time.

Now
I feel I should have stayed in this beautiful country a lot longer and not made chasing pussy my first priority. I’m still in contact with Alehandro, who is still travelling around South East Asia while trying to earn a buck selling pictures.

Back
in Yangon, I went to another and much better hotel, where I got everything included for only a few dollars more than at the first one I stayed. The owner confirmed it was impossible to go south. I wasn’t travelling on a schedule, so I had only booked a flight into Myanmar, which was a big mistake. There are no ATMs in the country and you have to bring brand new hundred-dollar bills to change. The official government rate is a joke and you have to resort to the black market exchange.

The
first time I changed a hundred-dollar bill, I received a hundred bills of 1000 Kyat.  Now the Kyat bills come in the following denominations: K1, K5, K10, K20, K50, K100, K200, K500 and K1000. You can imagine that having a giant wad of K1000 bills gets a lot of attention in Yangon, and a woman selling nuts on the street nearly fainted when I pulled it out. The nuts were only 200 Kyat. I soon learned to get as many small notes as possible.

Even
weirder is the 1988 decision to abolish all currency notes not divisible by the number 9 on the advice of an astrologer, who considered it to be a lucky number. The move wiped out the savings of most Burmese and contributed to a partly successful uprising a year later.

Booking
an online flight out of the country was a major hassle; my credit card didn’t work at any of the airlines, even the Burmese ones. Travel agents had no tickets either, unless I was willing both to pay a fucking fortune and wait a few weeks. My plan was to fly straight to Malaysia, but I couldn’t book anything so I had to rethink things. I went to the airport but couldn’t get a ticket out of Yangon that day. Twelve dollars on taxi rides wasted.

On
Saturday night I went alone to a night club. It was very hard to find one. The entrance fee was quite steep and so were the prices of the drinks. I was still in the same mindset as in Cambodia and so just sat down and waited for girls to walk up to me. I was the only foreigner in there. I had at least expected a few NGO workers or expats showing up on a Saturday night, but there weren’t any, so I was all alone at my table. Finally some girls approached me but they were obvious hookers looking for free drinks and stupid guys. My hooker game didn’t work here because I had no pre-selection or social value in this place. My club game was still underdeveloped and I didn’t know how to proceed. I was so used to have girls fall into my lap in Cambodia that I didn’t have a clue what to do here.

It
was going to be the water festival that week, a celebration all over South East Asia where people throw water at each other in the streets. Some of the hooker girls threw some ice water on me, which wasn’t funny in a club at night. I warned one of them not to do it again while I was talking to another, but at one point that bitch did it again and poured ice water down the back of my neck and I pushed her really hard away from me and she nearly fell. And I told her to fuck off. She got all angry and bouncers had to calm things down. The whole club was looking at me but I couldn’t care less.

I
sat down again and a group of Burmese offered me a drink and we got talking. We talked about the water throwing and they said it was a normal thing around this time but not in a club. The two girls in the group were whales and the guys were the same size, it was too bad because they spoke excellent English, unlike ninety percent of the other people inside. They were very drunk however and invited me to all sort of things. They asked me to stay for the water festival and I would be their guest of honor. Foreigners still have a lot of value here since less than a million people visit Burma annually and most stay only in the tourist areas. I got their business card but never called them. I had had it with this country and wanted to get back to Bangkok. A Burmese flag was nearly impossible to capture so I figured
Why stay longer?
On the way back to the hotel a hooker asked me for thirty dollars for a night of fun and I considered it for a moment but declined. It’s not a true flag if you pay for it. Anyone can do that, even a grandpa in a wheelchair.

On
Monday I went back to the airport again with my backpack and paid dearly for a ticket to Bangkok. A few hours later I landed in Bangkok again.

Thailand – Bangkok

I arrived in Bangkok for the fifth time, directly after the giant riots that killed twenty-six people. I was advised not to go there and thought
What the hell, I’m going anyway; a bit of urban survival is always fun
. On the way from the airport to Khao San Road I saw roadblocks everywhere and some tourists on the bus who arrived straight from the USA were very scared. But on Khao San Road it was business as usual and you couldn’t even notice half the city was on lockdown. When I arrived the water festival had already started and people were throwing buckets of water at each other or using super soaker guns on each other. I was pretty much soaked by the time I arrived at a guesthouse a couple of streets away from Khao San Road. Luckily my military backpack is waterproof, and honestly, it was hot enough that the soaking wasn’t a bad thing.  I guess that’s why they invented the festival in the first place. The guesthouse was a lot better than the one I stayed the time before. I had my own room with fan and small bathroom and window for seven dollars. It was a backpackers’ place and the food was better than in parts of Khao San.

The
water festival lasted four days and I decided to try to join the fun a bit and bought a super soaker myself. But I’m not the type of person that can just walk out the door and act all crazy all of a sudden and enjoy the party, I’m just too serious for that. That was a problem I’d had in Vang Vieng in Laos too. Most people started drinking just after noon and that might explain why they were in a happier mood. If I start early I’ll be wasted by nightfall and then not feel like doing anything anymore.

Thai
kids were throwing flour at everyone or slapping some mud looking stuff made of flour in your face. The party was good but just wasn’t my kind of thing. I was still too self-conscious to go all crazy with the masses. Even after my whole trip I still feel the same. I learned to live with it and frankly I don’t give a fuck anymore. So what, I might have missed out on some lays this way. I still banged plenty of girls in all sizes, shapes and colors and brought home a skill set and inner game that will stay with me forever. The only thing I regret my last visit to Bangkok a bit is that I didn’t go out to clubs. For some reason I really didn’t like Thai girls and was too cheap to pay entrance and five dollar drinks. If only I realized how much I would spend later in South America, I would have laughed at Thai prices. I missed out on five or six notches there.

I
bought a bus and ferry ticket at the guesthouse and wanted to move on to Ko Lanta. A small group from my guesthouse assembled and waited for the bus. The bus was going south to Suran tani, where lots of people would be separating to go to different islands or cities. An Asian girl sat next to me and when we got talking she was very enthusiastic about my round-the-world trip. The bus left in the afternoon, so after a few hours it was dark and the girl, who was of Japanese/Philippine heritage, crawled up against me and fell half-asleep. I stroked her hair a bit and we cuddled and kissed in the bus. The loud English guys who overheard us meeting and talking couldn’t believe what they were seeing, I kissed an Asian girl in a bus two hours after meeting her.

I
’ve changed her name to Kishiko, which means “child of the seashore”. Kishiko was headed for Ko Phi Phi and had already booked everything there. Since my ticket also included a minibus and boat ride I had to go to Ko Lanta. We agreed to meet again on Ko Phi Phi. I found a guesthouse on Ko Lanta but didn’t like the island so much; it was kind of deserted at the time and the beach was full of rocks. The guesthouse was only half-occupied and there wasn’t a damn thing to do at night. At daytime I was talking to some Swedish girls but they were not interested in me in a romantic way. At night I ate dinner and drank some beer with a half-Swedish, half-Philippine girl. I didn’t get far with her either.

Thailand – Ko Phi Phi

I left Ko Lanta after two nights and took a boat to Ko Phi Phi. I found a nice room with Wi-Fi and a balcony in a guesthouse and I went to the address that Kishiko had given me and waited there for her. It took a while for her to show up and when I asked the lady working there she couldn’t remember a Japanese girl checking in. I thought I’d been stood up, but then she arrived. Her room was kind of shitty compared to mine and she didn’t like it either. That night we went for dinner and later to the beach where some beach parties were going on. I kissed her there on the beach and we walked back to her place and kissed on her bed and were probably about to have sex. I was cock-blocked by, of all things, her shower that wouldn’t work. She said something like, “Okay, I go to sleep then”, so I had to charm her up again and we walked to my room. Back home I always used to be nervous when going to my room with a girl and even on this trip I was a bit nervous with the Russian girls and the ones in China. Now I didn’t feel nervous at all and figured it must have been because of all the banging I did in Cambodia. When we walked, I literally thought
OK, going to my room now and fucking this Japanese girl
. I’d never been calmer than that moment. I’d struck out in Japan and didn’t get my flag there mainly because my game/pick up skills were non-existent and everything was so fucking expensive in Japan that I didn’t even bother to go to a club. I’d been more focused on true travelling and having fun with other backpackers than on the local girls.

Anyway,
we went to my room, took a shower and had great sex together. She was shy at first but became wilder the longer it lasted. I think we had sex at least three times a day for four days straight. She went crazy every time I went down on her. I loved her high-pitched voice. On one of our last days together she got a bit sick and had a bladder infection, so of course we stopped having sex, and I wondered if she fell ill because she walked around naked all the time in my room. It was by this time I had some plans for a book and learned about the concept of flagging. I captured my Japanese flag in Thailand.

In
those four days we stayed on the beach, although like most Asians she was scared of getting tanned. At night we went to play pool or hang out at some beach party. The beach parties were wild with people jumping through burning hoops, me included, and drinking buckets of Vodka Red Bull. One day we walked across the island, which was quite a steep climb up and down the hill; it was not that high but the terrain was very rough with some proper jungle climbing. The beach on the other side was nearly deserted and amazing. We stayed there a few hours and snorkeled a bit.