Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (37 page)

When
I got to writing about Australia, though, I had just received some angry comments from ashamed family members about my Cambodia stories, so I only wrote down a ten-sentence story about what happened in Australia. That’s why you are reading a short version of a nearly a month there. I had not written everything down about Australia at the time and the Goon was eating my brain cells away, so my memory fails me here just a bit.

From
Kings Cross I moved to Bondi Beach, a beach famous all over the world. I was staying in a hostel close to the beach and met some people there. I went out with them a few times and watched the rugby games. I even attempted to get myself out of my rut by trying to pick up some local girls, but the thoughts of not having a place to stay and no money for a hotel unconsciously blocked my vibe, and I sucked at both the approach and the following chitchat.

On
one of the last nights I went out with the Canadian girl I’d met at the Cambodian border, who happened to be in Sydney too. Back then I had spent a few days with her but didn’t get further than some making-out and sleeping in the same bed together. She made it clear that it was not going to happen again and said I was a kind of a man-whore for sleeping with so many girls everywhere. Facebook’s a bitch sometimes. I laughed it away, remembering that Jenna sometimes called me a man-whore too. We had a crazy but fun night out anyway, together with a Filipino guy and a drunken annoying Irish guy who we managed to ditch later on.

New Zealand – Auckland & Pahia

Moment of Dutch pride to set the record straight: just like Australia, New Zealand was discovered by a Dutch captain and not by the English, who didn’t arrive until nearly two hundred years later. His name was Abel Tasman and both the island Tasmania and the Abel Tasman Sea are named after him. For those who have been curious has to how an English colony caught a weird, un-English name like New Zealand, well, it’s not English.  Tasman named it after the Dutch province Zeeland. 

Australia, in the meantime, was originally New Holland, but the Dutch didn’t see much use for a huge country bereft of spices, unlike Indo
nesia, and left it alone.

I
decided to only visit the North Island because I arrived just after Christchurch, in the south, was hit by a major earthquake. Many people died, and others were left homeless.  Not exactly a tourist attraction.

Auckland
was just another big capital to me and didn’t have much in the way of special attractions, other than the Sky Tower and the beautiful skyline in the harbor. The first hostel I stayed in pretty much sucked; the eight-bed dorm was occupied by foreigners working in town and everybody went to bed early every day. One funny thing worth mentioning was this giant guy who asked me how long I was staying in the dorm. “A few days,” I said – and he gave me a new pair of earplugs. The guy snored like a fucking chainsaw – but at least he was aware of it.

One
of the girls staying in the dorm was quite fat and had massive boobs. She was friendly but way below my standards for even thinking about having sex with her. I think she mistake my looking at her big boobs for interest because she came on to me a bit. When that didn’t work she changed her bra right in front of me and a few others, possibly in a last attempt to get my interest. It didn’t work. A similar situation had happened in Hong Kong when I shared a small dorm with a Finnish girl.

There
were quite a few Argentineans around since New Zealand is a popular place for the middle-class tourists to go. What I should have done was practice my barely-existent Spanish with them a bit.

I
booked a package tour from one of the famous bus lines there. They were supposed to be party buses, but the vibe wasn’t really there. The bus went up north and we first stopped in Pahia, the Bay of Islands as it’s also called. I stayed in another hostel and it was fun there. I was playing cards/drinking games with a small group of people. A day later I went for a skydive. It was time to man up again and face some fears, so I thought I’d give it a try. The American instructor named Dean was a really cool guy. He looked a bit like James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica.

We
got into the small airplane and it was a bumpy ride to gain height. It was quite windy that day and the small propeller plane was shaking from side to side. It was a tandem skydive, and I wasn’t scared at all until Dean opened the door and we shuffled towards the exit. I looked down and at that moment I got a bit nervous. It was too late: we jumped.

T
he first thing that surprised me was the enormous air pressure. It was like getting hit in the face by air. The freefall lasted about a minute, since it was a 12,000-foot jump. The view was amazing: you could see all the little islands, the forests and the fields. Still, one minute of freefall was more than enough for me and I was a bit worried that I was going to be sick. I have a weak stomach for everything that involves spinning around quickly. The parachute opened and Dean started doing tricks while yelling some woohooos and wahaaaas. It was fun but I was glad when we landed and took a few more pictures. The adrenaline was still pumping through my veins when we got back to Pahia. I was proud to have ticked another thing of my list. Skydive… Check!

The
tour I’d booked consisted of open tickets where you could hop on and off a daily bus whenever you pleased. I was short on time so I took the bus even further up north and we stopped for several interesting things along the way. We exited the bus at the most northern point of New Zealand and went to try something called Dune riding. How it works is that you take half a surfboard and slide down the enormous sand dunes with your belly on the board, using your legs to brake a bit. After a quick instruction we all got our board and hurried up the dune. Running up a sand dune is not easy and about halfway there I heard something that only happens in my travelling nightmares. A sound I was scared to death off. Krk! The sound of my lower back almost breaking in half.

I
almost fell to my knees in pain and didn’t know what to do; in my mind I was even starting to panic a bit. People were shouting out “Come on Neil, let’s go!” I pulled myself together but already knew this was going to be some serious badass pain.
Come on, man up!
I told myself.
Maybe it isn’t so bad
. I stood there like a statue for half a minute while the others had already started going down the dune and having fun. I pulled myself together and painfully walked to the top. Sometimes you know when you’re being a stupid idiot and go along with it anyway. This was one of those moments. I “surfed” down the dune and hit a few bumps, which just made it worse. When I was down I could barely get back on my feet, but a few people were watching me and I gathered some strength. I got back on the bus and sat down. Others were still having fun but I was cramping up.

We
still had to ride back, which took four hours with a lot of photographing stops. I was in some serious pain during this ride and the ibroprufen I got from others didn’t help anything. Once I got back to the hostel, I limped over to the convenience store, bought four bags of chips and some bottles of water. I lay down on my bed, took two 10mg valium pills I’d bought in Cambodia without a prescription, and slept for hours. Every time I woke up, I ate something, took another valium and dozed off. I had always had back problems when I was younger and even had a small hernia when I was working in construction. Back then, I had to walk around in a corset for two months and could barely take a dump without being in pain. I’d had back problems in the Philippines too and at one point needed a massage to loosen up before I could even think of sex. I laughed it off as luxury problems since it was caused by the banging of young girls.

Surprisingly
, this time my back problems weren’t as bad as in my younger years, but it scared the hell out of me all the same.

What
would have happened if my back had gone the same way as before? Barely being able to walk, in a country where nobody cares for you and your homeland is a twenty-four hour flight away? Especially since I already had a non-refundable ticket to Argentina.

The
pain eased a bit after a while and I went out with some Irish girls to a local disco, but I still had to be really careful and didn’t even try to pick up some local girls there who definitely looked interested in me. Anyway to make a long story short, nothing happened that night except for lots of drinking and valium-taking afterwards. I went back to Auckland the day after.

New Zealand – Back to Auckland

I went to the Nomads hostel, which turned out to be a lot more fun than the first one I’d been to. It had its own bar and I even met up with Greg, the American guy I’d met in the guesthouse in Puerto Princessa a whole seven months earlier. He’s a fanatic skydiver and had done hundreds of jumps. We had a beer and talked about our trips and laughed about the crazy sandman in Puerto Princessa.

Later
that week I hung out with two Swedish girls in the hostel. We were getting drunk off the cans of beer we smuggled into the hostels and playing cards in the dorm. The next day I went with them to an island nearby and the three of us spent a day on the beach together. Neither was a stunner and I had a hard time choosing one. At night we went out together and I decided to focus on the short one, but she wasn’t interested in me. Drunk as I was, I took aim at the other girl, but though she was interested at first she told me she didn’t want to be second choice or even third choice. I remember her saying something about being third choice, and I think there must have been yet another Scandinavian girl who I went after first, before the short one.

There was
a lot of drinking that night, so my memory fails. I do remember that I still convinced the Swedish girl about something because we ended up in bed together, but she was still a bit pissed with me so we didn’t have sex. It was in her dorm bed anyway. She had some ugly tattoos, and I don’t even feel bad about not scoring a flag with her. It was surprising I got that far considering the lousy state I was in and my depressing moods about picking up girls. I needed a change of scenery, and quick.

I
had posted a message about a meet up on a pick-up artist forum, and one guy replied to me. We met up a few times and we went out together. We were both having major bouts of approach anxiety. Australia had ruined all my build-up confidence and it wasn’t much better in New Zealand either. We had a couple of small successes with talking to a few “sets”, as it’s called in pick-up terms, but got nowhere with “escalating towards the lay”. I slept in a dorm and security was too strict to smuggle in any girls. I approached some girls in the clubs and I saw him run after a girl in the streets and approach her there.

Though we didn’t score any successes w
e did have some fun, and sided with a wingman I even felt a spark of the dark force coming back to me. But it wasn’t enough to get me out of my depressing state.

Once
a year, usually around Christmastime, I watch all three extended editions of the
Lord of the Rings
saga. I love movies like that and used to watch them all in one day, locking myself up in my home cinema room with some bottles of water and five bags of chips. A lot of the movies was shot in New Zealand and I wanted to see the real locations. There are some tours but I didn’t want to see fake stuff at a really high price.

I
planned a trip from Auckland to Turangi, a small place in the middle of the northern island next to a massive nature park. I booked a hostel online and got on the bus.

You’ll
meet the most interesting people of walks of life when taking buses around the world, although you need a thick skin if you’re a realist and skeptic like me. I’ve met too many naïve tree huggers who were all for the environment but apparently didn’t mind that their iPhone was built by 15-year-old Chinese girls in horrible near-slavery conditions. Follow your principles all the way through or accept the fact that the world revolves on greed and other basic principles imbedded in our genes during caveman times that will stay in our genes forever. People want green energy but seem to forget that an island like Sumatra with beautiful rainforests full of irreplaceable wildlife was 2/3 deforested because of the high demand for “green” palm oil.

The
hostel in Turangi looked more like a campsite, with lots of rooms and bungalows. I was the only resident at the time and the friendly and helpful lady working there gave me a room for myself instead of an eight-bed dorm room. I asked about the Tongariro Alpine crossing and she arranged for me to get picked up the next morning. At a quarter to five in the morning a minivan picked me up along with some other people. Around seven o’clock we arrived at the start and it was still dark.

The
Tongariro Alpine crossing is 19.4 kilometers long, and I can’t remember a day in my life before then when I’d walked anything even close to that distance, let alone in the mountains and in the horrible shape I was in. I knew it was going to be hell that day, but I was motivated to push myself.

My
back was still sensitive but not painful anymore. The first six kilometers I walked with a Swiss girl whose name I’ve forgotten. The sunrise amongst the misty mountains was amazing. We arrived at the spot where the climb to Mount Ngauruhoe started, the volcanic mountain used as a model of Mount Doom, the mountain where our little hobbit friend had to toss the ring in to destroy the evil powers of Sauron. The Swiss girl looked at the mountain and said she was already too tired to climb it. I tried to convince her but she chickened out. Now I had to climb it myself. There weren’t many other climbers around, just a few small groups of friends and some couples climbing together. I literally told the Swiss girl that I would climb Mount Doom or die trying.