Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (28 page)

When
arriving to a new city you have no knowledge of, you always have to be careful when negotiating a (taxi) fare. Some guys will say your destination is many kilometers away and then drive a few blocks around and drop you off just two kilometers from the point you started. In this case, the guy on the bike hadn’t been lying, and also directed me to an ATM and some other places. I gave him a tip on top of the negotiated fare and he left with a big smile.

The
bus station was in fact just the office of a bus company that offered trips to Medan, where I wanted to go. It was around noon and the bus left at six at night, so I had nothing to do for the next six hours. I came up with the idea of learning some Indonesian words on top of the ones I already learned in Malaysia, which has a very similar language. I asked the two young girls behind the counter to translate a few words for me and they laughed when I asked words like crazy, ugly and bossy.

The
night bus to Medan was one of those typical hellish rides I’d gotten to know so well. The roads were terrible, mostly dirt roads in the mountains. We stopped at a restaurant along the way and I had a giant meal. The Sumatran custom is to fill your table with lots of dishes and only charge you for what you ate. Eating a lot and pointing at only a few dishes will save you money but in a way that’s kind of shameful. I hate to admit it, but I did it a few times. Skywalker needs to save some money for beer too. I stopped doing it after someone showed and lectured me on turning to the dark force too much. I can’t say she wasn’t right.

I
met Darren in a guesthouse in Medan. He was an overly polite guy from the Channel Island of Guernsey, part of the United Kingdom. Darren had been backpacking for only a month and had just arrived there. Since we were planning to visit the same places in Sumatra we decided to hang out together for a while.

At
night we tried to find a place to go out and the hotel owner next door, who was a nice guy (but had a shitty hotel), advised us to go to a party. One of the hotel workers knew where it was and we jumped on a becak (kind of a motorized rickshaw). It was a long ride and we were starting to worry a bit. We were already outside the city and in the countryside and it was getting dark. I’m not easily scared and try to stay rational and calm, but this looked suspicious even to me. We had been driving for nearly forty minutes in the middle of nowhere. Was he planning to rob us with a bunch of his friends? It couldn’t be – he worked at the hotel next door where we stayed. Darren, who was only twenty years old and not a very experienced traveler, was getting worried as well. He’s a tall strong guy but that doesn’t help much when a group of guys pulls a knife on you.

After a while, w
e started to hear music in the distance, and as it got louder we saw the outline of something that looked like a barn. I said to Darren that we were probably OK, but it was going to be a weird night.

Dropped off at the barn, we went in. T
he music was extremely loud. Lots of guys were drinking beers at big tables, there was a small stage and some people were sitting on couches close to the dance floor. We had some beers and soon the waitresses were sitting down very close to us. We tried to talk to them but they barely spoke English. They gladly helped empty our 1-liter bottles of beer. The guy who took us there had no money, of course, and we gave him a beer too. We danced a bit to the loud Indonesian music with the girls and drank some more beer.

A
few more guys came over to meet us and have some beers as well. One of them was a muscular soldier in uniform, who has to be one of the craziest dancers I’ve ever seen. I’m guessing he thought he had some suave moves, but he didn’t. I remember him looking over from the dance floor and I bet he was thinking he was doing some pimpish dance with the girls there while showing off to the foreigners. We had seen him at the hotel too; it all looked OK so far.

Then a
t the end of the night, they presented us a big fat bill. I told the waitress the amount was way too high – she’d counted everything everyone had drunk when they were at our table. A bouncer was coming over to have a look and the other one was also looking our way. The guy from the hotel said we’d better pay. Darren was nearly shitting his pants and I started worrying. Was this a bar scam like they used in Estonia? The bill was a lot, but not hundreds of dollars, so it wasn’t a scam like that. They’d just charged us all the drinks of all the people around our table, including four waitresses.

I
talked to Darren and we agreed we’d pay for our own drinks and the few beers the waitresses had had, but not for the guys we didn’t know who came to sit at our table. When I told the waitress this those guys started yelling, but I stuck to what I said. I got some of Darren’s money from him, and just put it down on the table along with my share.

And then
we walked away. We paid something like thirteen dollars each, which is quite a lot for just a few Indonesian beers in an out-of-town barn bar, but at least we didn’t have to deal with a machete-wielding gang of thugs and buy our way out. We rode back to Medan on another rickshaw and were glad it ended this well.

The next day
Darren and I took the local coach bus to Bukit Lawang, a small mountain village on a river famous for its jungle tours. There were only a handful of tourists and the village was quite empty. It must have been off season, or else tourism is dying out the way it is in the rest of Sumatra. I took an enormous room with bathroom and balcony for fifty thousand rupiah, which is roughly five dollars. We had spoken to a guide on the bus who “by coincidence” sat on the bus with his photo book and promotion flyers.

The
next morning he came to our hotel and we agreed on a price after a series of brutal negotiations. One of the details we hashed out was that the guide had to bring me a pair of hiking shoes. I hadn’t worn shoes in months. I send my hiking shoes back to Holland when I was in Bangkok and had thrown away my Nike trainers on the Perhentian islands in Malaysia; I’d been in flip-flops ever since. That’s five months on flip-flops; I even went to clubs in the Philippines wearing flip-flops. I admit that the sound can get pretty annoying, but they’re generally fine – except that you don’t want to either climb a mountain or walk a jungle in them.

We
left early that morning with two guides and two German girls. The “guide” who sold us the trip said he didn’t actually go with us himself and I got really angry with him. That wasn’t part of the deal and maybe I overreacted a bit. The two German girls and the guides were unusually quiet for the first half-hour, so it must have made an impression.

This
was real rainforest, the kind you see on television sometimes. An ocean of green with paths in-between barely wide enough to walk on. After an hour of walking we saw our first orangutan in the wild. It was a mother with child, high up in the trees. This was already a hundred times better than the trip I made in Sepilok/Borneo and we were just starting. Another hour later we saw the second one, and then we had lunch at a place where rampant with small, cheeky monkeys. They were trying to steal our food and drinks and weren’t scared at all. We ate a lunch of rice and vegetables out of a banana leaf and honestly I was glad to be sitting down.

Darren
and I had downed quite a few beers the night before, and walking in a rainforest isn’t easy even if you aren’t mildly hungover. Everything is wet and slippery, there’s lots of climbing, and I wasn’t really used to doing physical things anymore. The last time I’d really done something mildly intensive was visiting the Niah Caves in Borneo. The exercise before that was probably banging Jenna in Cebu, which was almost five weeks before. At least Darren, who claimed he’d never done any sports in his life and is a fairly big drinker, also needed to catch his breath.

It
was only the start of this jungle tour and there were some challenges to face. We saw more and more wild orangutans along the way, and then we came across a famous one named Mina, who is only half-wild. We had run into another jungle group who had shown us the way to her. One of the women in the tour group came close to Mina, and the orangutan wanted to cuddle a bit with her. The woman allowed it and Mina grabbed her – and wouldn’t let go anymore.

O
rangutans have crazy long arms, are super strong and can break your neck like a twig with one hand. If one goes crazy, you need a whole group of guys to hold it down. The situation was getting a bit dangerous for the woman, and she started to look frightened. Her husband just stood there, and he was looking scared too. He didn’t even try anything, and just let the guides deal with the situation. What a fucking wimp that guy was.

The
three guides had trouble breaking the woman loose from Mina without angering her, but in the end they succeeded. The mountain was almost forty-five degrees steep and I had the two German girls standing between me and the situation. The path was only half a meter wide and Darren and I couldn’t do anything to help. I hope the guides think twice the next time they allow cuddling with wild animals.

A
few hours and many sightings of monkeys and orangutans later, we arrived at base camp. We were exhausted. The humidity in the jungle is murderous and we were out of breath all the time. Eight hours of climbing in a wet, slippery environment.

B
ase camp consisted of a few canvas cloths on the floor and a small bamboo roof one meter above the ground. As night fell we ate some food the guides had cooked up and I even smoked some weed with them. The weed was of terrible quality and I didn’t feel anything.

We
played some cards and one of the guides told a few bullshit stories about how he had some million-dollar business plans with some environmental company. He was trying to pick up the girls and I didn’t object to that. The way they looked in jungle gear, the girls were about 5.5, maybe a 6 if they got dressed up.

Apparently the environment and the food didn’t agree with
Darren, because he got sick and barfed his guts out only five meters away from our sleeping places. His stomach really hurt and he kept saying “I’m in agony”. A few days later I told him that I probably was the only one there knowing the meaning of the word agony. The Indonesian guys and the German girls just nodded every time he said it. We laughed pretty hard about that.

The
next morning we woke up early and my back felt shattered from sleeping on the ground. The guides took us along the river and told us that we didn’t need shoes. We walked barefoot on razor-sharp rocks and I’m the worst climber in the world even in boots. I would have done it with shoes but now my feet hurt so much that I went back early. I really didn’t give a shit what the others thought of me: I was too insecure to climb those rocks barefoot next to an ice-cold wild river, and could already see myself falling down and breaking and busting both my legs open in the middle of the jungle. Darren later told me that they saw a waterfall which wasn’t even that impressive and his feet hurt like hell too. His feet were in agony, so to say.

The next morning as w
e had breakfast a giant lizard came close to us. He was at least two meters long with his tail. The girls were a bit scared but the guides just carried on eating their food, not paying any more attention than we would in the West if a squirrel came by. The lizard started chomping down on something close by and we were all taking pictures. Then I realized that the lizard was eating at the place where Darren had thrown up and saw that the lizard was just scarfing down Darren’s barf.  Luckily I’d finished eating once I realized this. I have a small video of this and just looking at it still makes me nauseous.

The
guides packed up the camp and burned all the trash, including the plastic bottles. In the jungle they didn’t even allow us to throw away a banana skin, and the night before, that one guide had had such a big mouth about his big environmental plans, and here he was, burning plastic.  That’s one way not to litter, I guess, but how much good it’s going to do I can’t imagine. 

Afterwards
, they made a raft out of the inner tubes of truck tires, tying them all together, and packed up the whole camp onto it. Then we got on. It’s a bit hard to explain but it was a sort of caravan downriver resembling wild-river rafting, which was really fun to do. Some parts of the river were very fast-flowing and we all got totally soaked. Who needs Disneyland? It took us forty-five minutes of rafting to return to the village of Bukit Lawang, where we had a few beers before saying goodbye to the guides and the German girls.

Darren
and I stayed two more nights there to recover from the muscle pain and to look around the area a bit. Darren said he had girlfriends back home but he was still a beginner in the art of gaming. I gave myself the challenge to turn him into a player. First I had to get rid of his overly polite behavior and Alpha him up a bit.

I
flirted with the girls working at the guesthouse and tried to kiss the receptionist there, Nazir; she had big luscious lips and all I wanted was to kiss them. I knew a lay was almost out of the question so I set my goal low. I did my best but didn’t get further than going for a walk with her, and even than her girlfriend accompanied us. Her girlfriend looked interested in me and didn’t mind me hitting her on the bum a few times.

The
village of Bukit Lawang probably has no more than two thousand people living there. The whole village had been destroyed in 2003 when a flood came down the mountains and nearly washed the whole town away. Everyone knows each other since it’s fairly far away from any big city, so it’s a not a place to hunt for girls. She did teach Darren and me a lot of Indonesian words and I wrote everything down in my phone. This was later used as an outline for one of my tips and tricks articles, which will help you enormously in having fun with local girls. I strongly advise to have a look at the article and make your own list of words for whatever country you go. Memorize the words and use them in conversation with local girls. They will be shocked that you know those words and laugh about it. I have used this technique in multiple countries and it always made me stick out from the rest.