Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (56 page)

I
could see that the German girls were grumpy because of the attention Boat Slut was getting and started badmouthing her a lot. A typical jealousy thing. Of course Boat Slut was no dating material but she did have a damn sexy body.

The
whole bunch of tourists got off the boat in Santarem to do some jungle exploring there. Me and the Japanese woman were the only ones that stayed on the boat till Manaus. Those last two nights were quite boring and I hardly left “the fridge”, as we nicknamed our cabin. The air conditioning in there was freezing since the space was very small inside. I was glad I had taken the cabin for those five days and not a sweaty old hammock.

Boat
Slut had also left the boat in Santarem, and there were no other bangable girls on the boat. Maybe it was better that Boat Slut left, she looked like a girl with STDs.

The
Japanese woman barely spoke any English and just a little Spanish. I admired her for travelling around South America without knowing the language. Then I realized that I had been doing the same in dozens of countries myself where I didn’t speak the local language and just used my hands and feet to make myself understood.

It
was strange to get off the boat and realize that you’d been disconnected from the outside world for five whole days. I don’t think I’d been without Internet for longer than two days since I first started using it early in the year 2000. Luckily there had been no zombie apocalypse or, even worse, a hostile takeover by feminists.

Brazil – Manaus

I
found a hostel together with the Japanese woman (I think her name was Manami) and checked in there. It was a bit of a dump but I didn’t care. As long as they had Wi-Fi I was fine with it.

I
went to a big mall that day and after visiting every electronics shop at least three times and bargaining everywhere I bought a Sony Cybershot camera. The camera was really expensive and I knew it would be almost half the price in Holland, or that I could get a ten times better model for the same money there. $250 lost on a camera with almost the same quality as my old one. Almost doubling the megapixels hardly changed the photo quality and in my opinion is mostly marketing crap. I just really needed a camera to finish my trip.  I couldn’t carry on taking crappy pictures with my phone.

The
Japanese woman and I left on a jungle tour the next day. It was raining very heavily and we weren’t sure if we could go but according to the guide the weather was pretty changeable and should be fine later. It took about two hours to drive to a lake, which was a pretty nice ride through some small villages and on jungle dirt roads. We packed our stuff plus lots of provision and a bag of ice on a small wooden canoe and were brought to a large guesthouse built above the water. There was a nice-looking girl living in the lake house. She didn’t speak much English, so I quickly changed my mind from my immediate thought and decided to enjoy this jungle experience. A couple of other guests arrived; they were dorky but nice. One Indian/English couple and some Danish people. We were supposed to go piranha fishing on the lake, but because of the rain that part was canceled. We had to fish from the lake house.

I
was the only one who caught a piranha that day and it was scary to take him off the hook, those teeth were razor-sharp.

Apparently t
he piranhas weren’t aggressive in this lake and you could even swim between them, but I didn’t like that idea. There were also some pink and grey dolphins in the lake, and every once in while you could spot one.

In
the evening it stopped raining and we went on an “alligator hunt”. The guide, the Brazilian girl, the Japanese woman and I went in a small canoe and found some baby alligators and could hold them before we released them again. This was interesting but not very spectacular.

I
shared a room with the Japanese woman and the next morning it was time for the jungle tour, which was a three-hour jungle walk where the guide explained everything about the plants and the trees, but we saw no animals whatsoever except for a couple of big blue butterflies and some killer ants who could paralyze or even kill you. An old Amazon Indian rite to manhood was making a boy stick his hands in a nest of already angry ants and suffer the bites. He would be paralyzed and in terrible pain for a few hours, and very sick. Once the pain was over he had to do the same thing again and once more in the evening. After this he was considered a man and he could marry if he wanted. After marriage the real suffering would start, I thought.

We
were offered to stay for a night in the jungle, but we both declined. It was probably not worth the money. We had already paid about $125 for this short and boring trip. The lunches and dinner were great, with a lot of fish and tasty vegetables, but the rest of the jungle tour was overrated. We went back to Manaus and checked into a different hostel. I think it was a HI hostel and it had all the luxuries.

As
soon as I walked into the hostel I saw all the people I’d met on the Amazon boat again. The German/Russian sisters were still distant and a too lame to go out that night, so it was just me, Manu the crazy Frenchie and David the giant Canadian guy. I was aiming for a nightclub but they said they knew something better. We ended up in a strip club.

For
me it was paradise. It was one of those strip clubs you see in the movies with a couple of stages with guys around it, a few poles the girls danced on, a couple of muscular bouncers and a big bar. I had never been to a place like that anywhere in the world. The strip clubs in South East Asia are pathetic, with lots of bored-looking girls, but these girls had big ole asses to die for.

There
were of course lots of hookers around trying to score a guy. They were walking around in sexy dresses, or even just a G-string. A couple of girls were dancing buck-naked on small round tables and were getting touched by drunken horny guys all the time. The girl would crouch down and a guy would put his head face up on the table and the girl would ride his face without any underwear on. That’s just disgusting. No matter how beautiful the girl is, she probably has been touched by many guys that night. I wondered if the guy thought about that. He was dead drunk and his friends were slapping him on the back like he was some sort of hero.

I
downed lots of beers and tried to hook up with the girls there. My plan was to shore a pro, of course, but those girls were too battle-hardened already and kept asking me for drinks and money. I went pretty far with one of them but in the end she started talking about money again and I dumped her straight away.

At
one point I was standing around with David, the big shy guy, and I told him that I was about to leave Brazil the next day and I would make it a point to slap as many Brazilian asses as possible before I left. And I did. I slapped at least fifteen girls before one started making trouble. I just shrugged my shoulders, but then I noticed the bouncer looking over and thought it was time to quit. Manu had disappeared somewhere and David and I went back. I slapped a few more of those big round jiggling asses on the way to the taxi. Man, I was having some drunken fun there. I use the slow slap which means that your hand rests for a second on her butt after the slap and you feel the butt jiggling. It’s the king of slaps.

Waking
up with a massive hangover the next morning was less fun. I had decided to go to Boa Vista and then Venezuela. I quickly bought a ticket and hurried back to the hostel to get my backpack before getting back on the bus to the station and then on the one to Boa Vista.

The buying of the ticket is a whole story itself involving getting lost on the bus and ending up in some dead end small town a
nd a beautiful blue-eyed girl selling bus tickets but this book is already long enough.

Guyana – Georgetown

I sat on the bus and thought about my travel schedule and my already-booked flights back to Holland that I couldn’t alter as easily as a boat-ride from Morro to Salvador. I decided not to go to Venezuela. I’d heard from several people it’s not safe there and though I wanted to see the world’s highest waterfall you have to take planes to get there. It seemed like I’d only manage a few days there and I decided it wasn’t worth the bother. I was quite disappointed about wasting all that time in cities and now needing to skip one country and not complete my plan of setting foot in every South American country. Venezuela was only a six-hour bus ride away but I refused to go there to just hop over the border and be able to say I’d been there without any chance of seeing something of the country and its girls.

I
met a Guyanese man on the bus; Guyana is an English-speaking country so we had no trouble communicating. Paul was a school teacher in Brazil and a very nice guy, but a bit too nice so I didn’t know if I could trust him too much at first. It could be some scam. When we reached Boa Vista, Paul and I were approached by a young hot girl who arranged trips for us to Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. It was a lot of hassle to get across the border and I soon realized this was some serious third world country we’d ended up in. Paul and I got on a minivan and our epic trip through the jungle started.

The
driver was a maniac, not braking for anything. The minivan was packed and I was the only white guy. At night the driver almost lost control of the van when we drove through a massive pothole in the dirt road. We went off the road and nearly smashed into a tree. My head hit the ceiling and my knee the side of the door. It hurt like hell but I pretended not much happened. For the next few days I had a bump on my head the size of a bowling ball but luckily not visible with my long hair. Around midnight we stopped at some overnight stop and slept in rental hammocks for about four hours. We drove on early in the morning and in the afternoon we arrived in Georgetown.

I
don’t have to explain that my body was broken after sitting cramped up in a minivan for that long. It was the first time I’d ever slept in a hammock and my back didn’t agree with it at all. I was so happy I hadn’t opted for the five-day hammock ordeal on the Amazon boat.

The
minivan stopped next to a Brazilian sports bar/hotel where there was only one room available. Paul said that I could have it and went to a guesthouse down the street. I was stupid enough to assume that I could sit inside the “sports” bar at night and have a beer and chat with some girls. Ha. The room cost fifteen dollars a night and it was an absolute dump.
Welcome to the third world,
I thought when I opened the door.

The
first thing I did when I entered the room was test if the water in the small fountain was running and next I took a dump after holding it in for nearly 24 hours. Of course (!) the toilet didn’t flush and I had to take the plastic garbage bag out of the waste bin and fill the waste bin with water to flush the toilet. Every time I took a shower I filled up the waste bin for flushing water. Those who are poor need to be creative. There were a few water shortages and brown-outs that week. A reasonable room cost at least thirty-five dollars a night and a good room of western standards would be fifty dollars. No way in hell was I going to pay that kind of money in an old beat-up city like Georgetown.

The
bar downstairs, meanwhile, wasn’t a sports bar at all but a hooker bar frequented solely by Brazilian miners and prostitutes. The hookers were straight up asking me for money. Of course dem bitches got nothing out of me. The music started playing around four in the afternoon and it was fucking loud. I could feel the bass when lying in bed, and the only way to sleep was to go to bed late or use earplugs. I did both. As I mentioned, the hookers here had no shame, they straight up asked me for food or drinks without even bothering to at least introduce themselves or have a two-minute conversation first. There were three dark–skinned Colombian hookers, all chubby with huge boobs and ugly faces. They only spoke Spanish and I was figuring out if I should try to bang one of them to get my Colombian flag. I guess I was still pissed about breaking my flagging streak in Colombia. I decided against it to keep my pride. Any normal person would change hotels the next day but I wasn’t planning on staying long anyway.

Guyana
used to be a Dutch colony in the old days and still had some Dutch street and market names. It became an English colony after the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s. It’s one of the least visited countries in South America and I now knew why. It was very dangerous there.

I
went for a walk to the local market, which was definitely not a part of town where tourists go. People seemed to be surprised to see a white guy in shorts and flips-flops taking pictures and buying a can of Bob Marley energy drink. They tried to make conversation all the time but I had problems understanding the local English, which is similar to Patois, the Rasta English spoken in Jamaica. Guyanans see themselves as more like part of the Caribbean than of South America. There were bums harassing me a bit but I never felt unsafe, though I’m sure if a white boy like me walked there at night I would be shanked and robbed within minutes.

If
you are looking for hot girls, don’t go to Guyana. You will have trouble finding anything above a six on the streets, and I’m not a picky guy. Day game is a waste of time because there’s not much to game in Georgetown. The three-storey mall is very small and you can walk through it in less than ten minutes. I saw only one nice looking girl in the four times I went there.

One
other time I walked past three Brazilian girls and heard them talking about me. I walked back up to them, opening in English with some question. The hot one dressed in a Brazilian Football shirt and with a banging round ass didn’t speak any English, and the short one who was quite cute too kept silent. Just my luck, the only one who spoke English was the ugly fat one. I asked what they were doing in Georgetown and they said they were working at some office. The ugly one was too ugly to be a hooker but I was not sure about the other two. The hot one kept smiling at me and I heard her say “lindo” (handsom) to her friends.

I
asked them out and they agreed to meet me at nine in the evening at the Brazil bar where I was staying. I kept talking with the fat one and even smoked a cigarette with her outside to make sure she wouldn’t cock-block me afterwards. They never showed up. The hot one had given me her phone number but when I looked at my phone I couldn’t find it and I probably didn’t save it correctly. Too bad, I could have given it another shot even though they didn’t show that night. It’s not like there was much else to do.

On
Friday night I went to Palm Lounge, a club downtown. It was fifteen dollars to get in but at least the place was packed. There were quite a few hot girls around, but they had bitch shields the size of the Berlin wall. I approached eight girls without any conversation lasting longer than two minutes before I had to bail out. It didn’t help that there were a few loud, drunk and annoying American tourists around; they were making horrendous attempts at picking up girls.

At
one point I had my eye on four girls standing next to the bar. I walked up to a tall black girl but then noticed that she had horse teeth.

A
nother one in the group was a light-skinned Guyanese girl, and she wanted to dance with me. By dancing, I mean “daggering”, which is basically dry-humping to music. She bent over and I banged her from behind for a few minutes. Till that moment I had only seen dancing like this on music videos or YouTube. Another girl in the group just grabbed me and grinded on me. A short and skinny black girl danced like crazy and at one point she stood on her hands, wrapped her legs around my waist and bounced her ass on my crotch for a few minutes like a wheelbarrow. WTF!!

Lots
of people were now watching the show and I felt like a big pimp bumping and grinding with all four girls. I kissed the light-skinned girl a lot and she looked to be into me. Only problem was that there was a guy in their group, trying to do what I was. He looked really pissed off at me and tried to talk the girls out of hanging with me.

Every
time I was with the light-skinned girl, the other girls grabbed me and danced with me. I couldn’t isolate her and moments later the group left. I did an attempt to get a date with her the next night but that didn’t work out.

After
they left I approached some other girls but my mojo was gone. I missed my only chance at a Guyanese flag.

The
next day I went to another club, but arrived already drunk as fuck because I tried the local rum, named High Wine. It’s 69% alcohol and after one strong mixed coke and four bottles of Guinness I couldn’t walk straight anymore. I arrived at the other big club in Georgetown with a Rasta guy I met in the Brazilian hooker bar below my hotel room. He bought me a few beers there and I returned the favor. At the door of the club he waited for me to pay his entrance and I told him to pay it himself. He said he didn’t have any money but an hour before he’d been flashing his cash around, which was at least twenty-five dollars. He paid to get in and we had a beer there. The club was very posh and full of Indian guys. Like many other Caribbean countries Guyana has a large Indian population, most of whom are well-off and run a business. The guys were smashing their money buying girls expensive drinks and looking with my player eyes I could see none of them was going to get laid that night (or any other club night).

I
was way too drunk to continue the night and jumped in a taxi. The Rasta guy had suddenly disappeared twenty minutes before. I don’t know what kind of scam he was trying to pull on me, but he was obviously a poor guy because I saw him walking around trying to sell sugarcane sticks a few days later. When I entered my room I sat down on the bed for a few minutes, quickly got up and puked into the sink. The Chinese food that I had been eating all week came out. I kind of blacked out and fell asleep.

When I woke up in the morning with a legendary hangover I had to clean up a huge mess because the sink drainpipe just ended in the shower. I decided then and there never to drink that rum again, though I still have a small plastic bottle at home for when I’m going to pull a joke on one my friends. I suppose I’d better do that before they read this book…

On
Sunday night I went out again, this time with Paul. I drank a beer with him most nights. We visited the water wall, an old three-kilometer-long Dutch dike where people sat in the evening drinking, talking and listening to music. We walked around a bit and although there were some cute girls around I didn’t dare to talk to them with large groups of guys keeping an eye on the white guy. Even though I was there with a Guyanese guy I didn’t want to risk getting beat up over a girl.

The
Colombian hookers lived across my room and always had their door open. I talked to them a bit every once in a while. At one point there were four of them drinking Johnny Walker Black label, and they were already drunk. As they emptied the bottle they told me that if I got another bottle I could fuck the four of them without paying the ho fee. Well, indirectly it would still be paying a ho, and yes, I did even think about it at one point and decide to check how much a bottle cost at the liquor store. It was eighty-five US dollars, so I said “fuck that”. And boy, was I glad I didn’t get involved with those hos.

When
I returned to the hotel after checking the liquor store and an Internet café, one of the girls was in a fist fight with some guy (pimp?). All four of the girls were ganging up on the guy and one even lifted up a wooden chair and tried to hit him with it. They were screaming on the top of their lungs and acting batshit crazy. I sat outside watching the whole thing and waited for them to calm down before I went back upstairs. Upstairs they were smiling and calling me over.
Eh, no thanks, I had my share of bat crazy shit in Cambodia already.

Georgetown
in Guyana is not for the inexperienced traveler. Do not go there if you’ve only ever been to resort-type vacations or only a beaten path backpacker trail.

I
had to be there to get a visa for neighboring Suriname and stayed a week in total, but to anyone who does go there, I would strongly advise you to stay in a decent hotel and bring at least fifty dollars a day and only take yellow radio taxis.

In one week
I saw two car accidents, three fist fights, one giant bar brawl with chairs flying around and even a few gunshots fired, as well as the whores going bananas. On the other hand, while the city is poor and dirty except for beggars people won’t bother you and are generally friendly. Lots of guys will shake your hand and make small talk with you. I didn’t go into the jungle but had a sixteen-hour drive through it and it’s similar to the Brazilian Amazon jungle. Tours are very expensive.

On
Wednesday morning I left at 4:00 AM after saying a drinking goodbye to my buddy Paul.

Surinam
e: Paramaribo

It
was time to leave Guyana and move on to a special destination: Suriname, a former Dutch colony that stayed one until well in the 1970s. Getting there was not that easy, though I had already picked up a visa at the Suriname embassy in Georgetown. It is probably the only country in South America where 99% of people need to get a visa first. Although a few days after I arrived, the rules were slightly changed on Independence Day.