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

by Neil Skywalker

  Did I kiss Johanna? No, I got the LJBF (let’s just be friends) speech from her when we sat in a bus and curled up together to keep warm. I tried to kiss her there but she said she’d just arrived in Seoul and didn’t want a relationship now. Most of the time that means “I don’t want a relationship with YOU”. But then again, she had got there just a day before and had a lot on her mind, starting with a new study program and looking for a place to stay.

  This marked the beginning of a lot of struggling with Scandinavian girls.

  Back in the hostel I met a few people in the dorm. There was a Mexican/American guy we nicknamed him El Mariachi, a black guy we nicknamed Young Obama and an American/Puerto Rican girl we nicknamed Dirty Jersey. Her nickname came from the fact she was from New Jersey and used the foulest language ever. My nickname was Holland because I had hung up a small Dutch flag in the dorm. It was a two-level room and I had the top level for myself. I hung up the small plastic flag I had and joked about how I colonized that spot.

  Dirty Jersey was blond and fat but had the biggest pair of boobs I’d ever seen in life. And I’ve had some big ones since I was a teenager, not to mention on this trip. Remember the girls of Khabarovsk? Jersey must have had the same diet. When we walked out the dorm, I stood with my back to her and purposely grazed her boobs twice with my elbow. She said, “Hey that’s the second time you touched my boobs”. I turned around and said: “O, I’m sorry, did I touch your boobs?” while poking them with my finger. This was a very ballsy move and she could’ve slapped me in the face. But she didn’t and just laughed and said “O, stop it!” “Stop what?” I said, “doing this?” and poked her boobs again. The tone was set for that night.

  We all went for dinner and Dirty Jersey was wearing a black dress with cleavage was so deep that you could lose a whole Korean in there. El Mariachi and I were joking about it. We went to a club and I was dancing with Dirty Jersey, grabbing her boobs all the time in front of everyone. All the Koreans were looking at us, especially the girls, who are mostly flat-chested; some even took pictures of her. Her boobs were that big.

  When we were leaving the club some Korean guys pushed her and she slapped one of them. The dude got angry and wanted to fight her, but I stepped in and pushed one of them really hard back into the crowd. They backed off after that. Being about a foot taller than anyone around and a lot stronger does help push sixty-kilogram guys around. It happened so fast that the others with us didn’t even notice the five-second scramble.

  I went to a love hotel with Dirty Jersey but she was drunk and just wanted to sleep. I tried a lot but she didn’t give in to me. When I say that I tried a lot it doesn’t mean I was saying stuff like “Oh baby please let me touch you, baby baby please”. Have some pride, I always say. She said she was only into Asian guys and I wondered how she had sex with them. As I said before she was fat and I don’t think Asian guys have enough “reach” down there to satisfy her. Hell, I was wondering about my own reach with her. Still, in the morning I got to play with her giant hooters. I didn’t even want to have sex with her anymore, just play around a bit with those basketball-sized knockers. When we returned to the hostel she kept embarrassing me in front of the others, saying I‘d been begging her.

  Although I pushed really hard with her (also because I paid twenty–five dollars for the room, my half), begging is not in my vocabulary, and her saying that started to annoy me. Then at three o’clock in the morning she made a really loud Skype call to America, just to piss me off. I told her to “shut the fuck up” and she got all crazy, started throwing stuff at me and ripping up my Dutch flag.

  The following days there was a lot of tension in the dorm room. I told the hostel owner to hurry up with my application for the Chinese visa. I was so fucking angry with Dirty Jersey that I even deleted all the pictures of that night out, including the ones of me holding her big boobs. We wanted to kill each other and there was verbal jousting all the time.

  At night I went out with the guys. No one ever scored with a Korean girl although we tried. One German/Irish guy claimed to have had sex with a Korean girl but that was highly doubtful because he said he went to her place and she was twenty years old. In South Korea and all over Asia in general all girls live with a (large) family. So it’s nearly impossible to bone a girl at their homes. He told some other highly doubtful stories too. I went to the other hostel a few times and heard the story of the drunken French guy who got a blowjob from a girl with a busted-up wooden leg. Afterwards he threw up in her bed. I knew the girl with the wooden leg: the leg was painted pink to look real but the paint was coming off and it looked like zombie leg. Her face wasn’t anything to look at either.

  Although I really liked South Korea I had to move on, and agreed to see El Mariachi and his girl again in China where they worked as English teachers.

  China – Beijing

  I had printed out the hostel’s address in Chinese characters, and just as well, because otherwise I would still be standing in Beijing airport. You’d expect that at such an enormous airport someone would speak English, but you’d be wrong. Thanks to my print-out I managed to find where I was meant to go, though calling it a hostel might not be the right word: it was more of a hotel that had some dorm/family rooms. Although I had booked, they had no bed for me in the dorm, and they gave me a normal room at reduced price but still double the price of a dorm room.

  The room had a giant heart-shaped bed and lots of mirrors on the walls. Clearly it wasn’t normally used by backpackers. Or perhaps it was.

  There were no other travelers around and I decided to look for another hostel for the next day. I found one which looked very nice, with many backpackers around, but the rooms were dirty and damp and the toilets were disgusting. I decided to stay in my clean hotel.

  The next day I went to the Peace Square, the largest square in the world. Then I visited Mao’s mausoleum, where you can look at Mao in a glass casket. He looks like a wax statue. I had to stand in line for over an hour for half-a-minute of Mao. The lines were crazy and everyone had to hurry up. Everyone was frisked and scanned upon entry because it was strictly forbidden to take pictures.

  I didn’t manage to visit the Forbidden City because it was closed that day for the celebration of sixty years of “democracy”. On the street a good-looking Chinese girl approached me and started asking me all kinds of questions in perfect English. I’d been warned to watch out for this scam, where they invite you to drink tea at their house and then present a five-hundred dollar bill afterwards, and decided to have some fun with her. I gave her bogus answers and when she asked me my age and acted very surprised when I told her, she asked me how I kept looking young. I said that my secret was fucking lots of different girls (which I wasn’t even doing at this point). She was very shocked but still invited me for tea. I said no and went on my way. Go scam some dumb idiot, not me.

  I decided to go to the Olympic stadium, and when I got on the bus it was already full and I had to stand. At every stop a new horde of people pushed themselves on the bus, and every time I thought it couldn’t get any more crowded, the bus stopped and more people came in. At one point I was almost sitting on the driver’s lap, the stick shift almost up my ass.

  When I saw the stadium I had a hard time managing to get off the bus. The Olympic stadium is located in an Olympic park with several other stadiums, the famous Birds’ Nest being by far the most impressive.

  On the way back when trying to enter the bus there was lots of pushing and shoving, and I felt a hand sneak into my back pocket. My camera was almost outside my pocket and I felt some fingers on the camera cord.

  Without looking I grabbed the hand and started crushing the fingers. I did several years of Jiu Jitsu before I started my trip and had trained myself to perfect a death grip. I squeezed the life out that hand. I couldn’t see who it was, I was pushed inside the bus and had to let go, but I’m sure he or she will remember me.

  I already changed to a dorm room in the hotel and in the evenin
g a girl walked in. She had a beautiful face but was quite chubby and I didn’t pay much attention to her. After she came out of the shower in only a towel, though, I noticed that she had quite a pair of knockers. She started talking to me and asking me questions about my trip. Pretty much standard backpacker talk. I told her that I was going to eat Beijing/ Peking duck and invited her to join me. We went to a restaurant and ate some duck. I didn’t like it so much, it tasted like greasy chicken and the skin was way too thick, but I could cross eating Beijing duck in Beijing off my list of things to do. We had a few beers and back in the dorm we sat next to each other and started making out. We were the only ones there and that was great because we had sex that night. Let’s call her Lisa. She was super horny and as said before had a great pair of knockers. They felt a bit weird, though, and in the end I asked her if they were real. She was shocked that I asked, but admitted they were fake boobs. She even said: “Real? Yeah, real expensive”. We banged a lot that night. Canadian flag captured.

  We switched to the room with the mirrors and the heart-shaped bed. She was crazy horny, wanted to bang all day and asked me to use all holes. To which I did not say no.

  A day later Lisa and I went to the Forbidden City, which had now re-opened. It’s a huge and impressive complex, a must-see if you’re in Beijing. On the way back we booked a tour to the Great Wall of China. We booked it with a guy who approached us on the street. You have to be very careful with this because many tours will take you first to all kinds of shops and jewelry stores or sometimes to “traditional Chinese doctors” who diagnose you with all kinds of horrible deceases but fortunately they also have the medicine you need, at an extreme price of course. At the end they take you to see the Great Wall for just half an hour. This guy had a book of handwritten recommendations, though, and I read good stories about him in five different languages. It looked solid and we took the gamble.

  The guide was not lying. In the morning he took us to a forbidden part of the Great Wall with about twelve others, and had to give some money to villagers to let us pass through their villages. Normal tours to the Great Wall include thousands of other tourists and there’s no way to take a picture without anyone in it, but we got a deserted spot. The guide was very friendly and not pushy at all, so we had all the time in the world to see this wonder. The views were stunning and spectacular. This part of the Wall wasn’t restored, though, and it was a hell of a climb sometimes. Lisa was tough and only wore flip flops.

  At one point Lisa and I fell very far behind, after first shaking off two German guys who were trying to secretly take pictures of Lisa’s boobs. I gave them an angry look and they stopped. Lisa and I started making out on the Wall and as soon as no one was around off came my pants. Lisa was giving me a blowjob on the Great Wall of China, how awesome was that? I was enjoying myself until I saw two Chinese guys on a nearby tower. One was looking in our direction with a pair of binoculars glued to his face. Just our luck to get caught by two lost guys on a trek. Lisa was very embarrassed when I told her and we hurried to another tower on the wall. She finished the job there.

  After catching up with the group and finishing the tour, we all sat down in a small village open restaurant. We were all drinking a well-deserved beer and I saw the German guys looking and laughing at us. I took a look at Lisa and saw that she had some of my leftover man yoghurt on her breast; all dried up but it was clearly visible what it was. I whispered it in Lisa’s ear and she ran off to the toilets with a flaming red face. Hahaha, I will never forget that day.

  We went to a local market later that week where they sold the strangest street food. We ate fried spider, some sort of super spicy fish, silk worms (mushy liquid inside, yuk!), sheep penis and balls which did not taste bad, a snake and then we ate some fried scorpions which actually tasted very good, a bit like walnuts. I even tried to eat fried starfish: you eat the inside of the legs, but it was disgusting and almost made me vomit. I know what my limit for weird food is now. The next morning I had to say goodbye to Lisa. She had nearly killed me in the bedroom the night before. Up till that moment I had not met many girls with a higher sex drive than her. Her hand was still down my pants when I had one foot in the taxi. I promised to visit her whenever I made it to Canada

  Lisa is now married to the guy who was her boyfriend back home then and they have a son together now in a medium sized city in Canada.

  China – Suifenhe

  Suifenhe is a small border city and almost solely survives on the clothes business with Russia. Every day busloads of Russians arrive and buy as much clothing as possible. In fact there are so many that Russia’s now got a 35-kilogram per person limit since Russia is not happy with their local markets being flooded with cheap knockoff clothes. Russians do not need a visa to visit this town, so Julia from Vladivostok could join a group to go to Suifenhe – on condition she brought back a 35 kg bag with her.

  I arrived in Suifenhe at six in the morning after taking two 24-hour trains with a short stop in Harbin. I didn’t sleep much because the Chinese people on the train went to bed at 9:00 at night and woke up at 4:00 in the morning grabbing their mobile phones and making loud phone calls next to you. There’s nothing bad about the Chinese trains though; the ones I took were very modern, people were friendly and very curious and tried to make conversation with you.

  Fifteen minutes after arriving, I’d made it to the point where Julia and I had agreed to meet. The only thing was that she wasn’t going to arrive till 1:00 in the afternoon, so I had a lot of time to kill. I walked around a bit, ate some weird-looking street food and talked to some people. Chinese people are used to the white Russian faces but almost never see a whitie from another country, especially with a giant backpack.

  I discovered a KFC in a side street of the square; strangely enough they sold a lot of food made of shrimp. I sat down, ordered some food and found out there was free Wi-Fi there so I just used the Internet till one o’clock rolled round. Julia was extremely happy to see me and started crying as soon as she ran towards me.

  We had been emailing almost twice a week ever since I left Vladivostok some two months before. I didn’t feel bad for having sex for five days with the Canadian girl; in fact I had tried to pick up a South African girl when I was in Harbin the day before. It’s not that I didn’t care a lot for Julia or that I hadn’t missed her, but it wasn’t enough to keep faithful to her – especially because I was never ever really sure I’d ever see her.

  We took a nice hotel room and I figured Julia wanted to walk around town a bit or eat but no, she just jumped on me. After our shower I didn’t even get the chance to put my clothes back on. The sex was amazing; she’s so good in bed.

  We ate after; Julia had brought imported Dutch cheese and candy with her from Russia. That night we went to a restaurant where we met up with her mom, who had joined Julia on her trip to Suifenhe. After the restaurant we locked ourselves in our room and banged like wild animals. When I put it in the “wrong” hole, it looked like Julia was going to pass out from ecstasy and I will never forget the look on her face.

  The next day we bought another pair of jeans for me because the one I bought in Vladivostok just two months before was already falling apart. Chinese quality. The rest of the day we shopped a bit and spent a lot of time between the sheets. In the evening we ate something at a restaurant and I was so hungry that I kept ordering. I ate a four-egg omelet, two boiled eggs, a quarter chicken, rice and salad and drank a big coffee and half a liter of beer. I loaded up on proteins as much as possible. It all tasted great but when I stood up, my stomach was instantly fucked. I almost had to run back to the hotel. Julia wanted to go up to the room with me but I told her not to because I wanted some privacy. She was upset about it but I didn’t care. She even wanted to be near to me when I was taking a crap, but I sent her away to do something else. I went up to the room and almost exploded in the bathroom.

  Since then Julia and I have had the agreement that she’ll leave the room when I need to use the
“office”. I’ve used this expression with other girls too. I’m always fucking embarrassed to take a dump when someone is near. One of the reasons I don’t couchsurf.

  The next morning she had to leave at 7:00 in the morning and we hugged goodbye. It was not the last time I saw her.

  I went back to Harbin as a stopover to Dalian where I would see El Mariachi again. I’d been hoping to go to North Korea as well, but by now that was definitely off. I’d bought a double-entry visa for China, but all the tours to North Korea from Beijing were insanely expensive. I’d asked Julia if she could book me into a Russian tour I could join after they crossed the border. I didn’t care how legal it was, I just really wanted to be able to say I’d been there. But that would have been crazily expensive too. It costs about 300 dollars a day to visit North Korea, no matter what country you book a tour from, and going with a tour is the only way to even get in. Even if you go alone you’re stuck with a guide and a driver 24 hours a day and you can only stay in a government-owned 5-star hotel with the price to match. In hindsight I just should have done it. It would have been an once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  China – Dalian

  After arriving by night train I took a taxi to the apartment of the friend I’d met in Seoul. El Mariachi (a young war veteran)was living in Dalian with a girl/fuck buddy named Sheila, and I had a great time with them. They were both English teachers. I had to sleep on the couch but I didn’t mind because it was free and I was looking forward to hanging out with El Mariachi.

  It was a typical student house and the toilet was so dirty that I couldn’t believe there was also a woman living there. Dalian is a very young city, it’s only a hundred years old or so. It’s a harbor city and there’s a fresh breeze wherever you go. It’s a great contrast to most Chinese cities which are all smogged up. During the day El Mariachi and his girl showed me around the city a bit.