I could see Tina having fun playing pool and laughing with some people, and thought to myself that if she could have fun with others, there was no reason for me to be down, and invited Nhu to sit on my lap. Of course, when I tried to get in contact with Nina or Dara I couldn’t reach them by phone. Just my luck again. All I wanted was to stay with one of them, preferably Dara. Ary and Jorani were trying to get with me too, but I told them both to get away from me.
In the afternoon I went with Nhu to her room inside the water village on Lakeside. I have never seen a poorer place than the water houses there. I had to walk over several dangerous planks just to get at her place, which she shared with another girl. Afterwards I took her to my room and had sex with her again. I couldn’t resist her big lips and sexy little breasts with nipples that were always hard and poking through her shirt.
In the evening, I was sitting with Nhu on my lap when I saw someone I didn’t expect in Phnom Penh. It was Sophon, Tina’s girlfriend, whom I’d met in Sihanoukville. Sophon was happy to see me. I told her I broke up with Tina and she said she’d broken up with the American. I told her I was going to Battambang to get close to the Thai border and leave from there to Bangkok. She looked up and said her mother lived there. Without hesitating I asked her to join me there. She happily said yes. I told her there was a bus in the morning and asked where she slept that night. She said “At my girlfriend’s house”. I told her to get her stuff and move in with me in Nr 9. She declined because Tina was there too during the day and night. “I can stay with you, but then we go to a hotel in a different part of town,” she said. I thought about it a bit, looked at her beautiful face and tight body and said “OK, let’s go”. I packed my backpack, paid the bill and said goodbye to the people in the guesthouse.
When I walked out with Sophon by my side, Tina walked in and looked furious. At the time I thought I’d had my revenge on her, but now as I’m typing this, two years later, I feel stupid for treating her like an object. But on the other hand, I promised her I wouldn’t stay with other girls and still she flipped out every time I talked or looked at one. She is a beautiful girl but trouble all the way.
Sophon and I checked into a room and I tried to bang her that night but she wouldn’t put out, except for some kissing. It was the first time I met some resistance from a Cambodian girl.
We left in the morning and after a long ride we arrived in Battambang, where we found a nice luxurious hotel for only six dollars a night. After taking a shower and some lunch we went to see her family who lived in a forest outside Battambang.
The house was made of bricks with a sheet metal roof; there was only one big room inside. There were chickens around the house and a dog that looked very old and miserable but was only a year old. Sophon was only twenty years old and her mother only a couple of years older than me. She breastfed the youngest son all the time and took out her big breast with giant nipples right in front of me.
Sophon had two younger sisters around the age of seven and ten. There was also an uncle around who slept in a hammock most of the day. Sophon’s mother invited me to stay at her place but I declined. The house had only one room and one bed. Although I didn’t mind sleeping next to the mother for a bit, I decided to stay with Sophon in the hotel.
I had sex with her that night. Although gorgeous looking she wasn’t very adventurous in bed and she said she had only had the American as a boyfriend. A blatant lie, of course. I saw her with quite a few foreigners on her Facebook in the years after.
The next four days I stayed in Battambang, hanging out with the family during the day and most of the evening. I must say I enjoyed staying in a rural area, and laughed when the mother was drunk at night because she was not used to drinking. Every night she cooked a nice meal with ingredients I bought at the market with Sophon. Her two little sisters were cleaning my pockets out of small change with a Cambodian card game.
In the morning I called Julia on Skype and we had a long talk and she was crying all the time. I felt bad because I just had sex with Sophon that morning, but forgot all about it as soon as I hung up.
I didn’t mind buying food at the local markets and some extra soda for the kids every day but at times I thought they were taking advantage of me a bit too much. It bothered me a bit that her neighbor asked three and a half dollars every time we drove back to the hotel on his motor bike. Going back and forth twice a day it added up to fourteen dollars a day. I think I spend close to $120 for just four days on the hotel, food and drinks and motor rides. Sophon was clearly looking for a money provider/sender and didn’t really care that much for me on the inside. She was begging me to stay and extend my visa just like Tina had the week before, plus she wanted to get married and have kids. She is really very beautiful but I’m not falling for that trick and I left Battambang the next day, Sophon was nagging my ears off about having a baby and I was glad to be on the bus.
She wanted to keep in touch but for the next two weeks I kept silent about my whereabouts. Now I have no contact with any girls in Cambodia anymore. I’ve unfriended them all. It may seem odd, but there’s a reason. Some guys aren’t very happy with me over there, and have started sending me more than a few threats. Point is, Cambodia’s still a dangerous place, and it’s worth taking threats there seriously. It wouldn’t be too difficult to find someone willing to kill someone for you, especially if you told them he’d been “dishonoring” local girls, and some of those threats have been death threats. I can probably never return to Cambodia, however much I’d like to.
I came back for Dara or Nina but instead I had made another mess.
Short visit to Bangkok
I was fed up with all the drama and fighting in Cambodia and wanted to do some proper travelling again. I took a bus to the Thai border, where I met a Canadian girl named Kate while we were waiting for our passport stamps. Kate was on her way to Bangkok too and we talked the whole four-hour ride. Kate would be a seven in most guys’ opinions, and her blond hair and sometimes bitchy face made her attractive to me too.
I tricked Kate into sharing a double room with me. We had walked down Khao San Road a few times already and I told her it would be better to share an air-conditioned room than to each get a cheap single one with a fan. It’s a trick I came up with in Laos, though the German girl I shared the room with there wasn’t up for romance, and it has the advantage of being true.
That day we went to the MBK mall to hang out and eat. At night we drank shitloads of beer on Khao San Road. I pitched some game at her and she received it well. Back in the room I jumped in her bed and we made out a bit, but she didn’t want to bang on the first night. Ironically, she said she’d many one-night stands before but stopped doing that. I was thinking Nice timing.
The next day neither of us was not feeling too well, due to all the drinking and the Thai food, and not much happened between us after that. I don’t even remember us saying goodbye. I just missed her when in Singapore and saw her again in Sidney a year later. I stayed a few more days and booked a flight to Yangon in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
Myanmar – Yangon
The flight there took only one hour and on arriving I was surprised at how easy it was getting through customs. I didn’t notice the fact I’d entered a military dictatorship at all. The only thing I did notice was that the taxi was super old and crappy. I haven’t seen that in other South East Asian countries. In Thailand most taxis are brand new and a lot cheaper than tuk tuks if you have to drive far.
The hotel was old but at least the owner was a jolly guy and spoke reasonable English. My room had no windows and only one electricity socket, so I had the choice of using either the fan or my laptop. When I used my laptop inside the room it was boiling hot in there and I was afraid my laptop would just burst into flames. The street the hotel was on was really old and broken up. The pavement was terrible and you really had to watch out where you walked, a lesson I would learn, painfully, a week later when I totally busted my toes open on the pavement and
left a small trail of blood to my hotel. There was plastic crap and paper all over the streets. In so many words, it was filthy.
The first day I stayed in and met the other people staying in this hostel/hotel. We were all sitting of the rooftop and talking a bit. I didn’t seem to like anyone there. One Swiss guy was really weird, he was talking with something like five different accents and tried to be interesting but in my opinion he made a fool of himself. I think he was trying to impress the two American girls who were true hippie tree-huggers and talked about living in tree huts and growing their own food. Clearly they’d never heard of razor blades, since they had really hairy legs and armpits. I was clearly not amused.
I won’t go into the whole political/moral debate of visiting the country or not. Yes, it’s a military dictatorship, but people still earn money from tourists and infrastructure is developed for it. I was there in 2010 and I think it’s getting better there now.
Yangon, formerly known as Rangoon, is a massive city with a population of five million. I had miscalculated the distance on the map and I walked for almost two hours in a heat of thirty-eight degrees to see the Shwedagon Pagoda. It was tiring but fun to walk around. I was a big attraction in a city that doesn’t see too many western foreigners, especially around the part I walked. The pagoda was breathtaking: it consisted of one big stupa (temple) and many other smaller stupas and Buddha statues. It is all made of gold and almost blinding to look at. Because it’s a temple you have to walk barefoot and the floor outside was sizzling hot – some parts I had bite my teeth and keep a straight face while getting my feet scorched. Some locals were just standing on the floor and were taking pictures, they must have asbestos feet.
After this I hung around for a few days seeing other parts of the city. One funny thing about the hotel I was staying at was its giant breakfast. Apparently the hotel was mentioned in a Lonely Planet magazine once as the one with the best breakfast in Asia and the owner had build his formula around this. There were posters and plaques everywhere referring to his breakfast and the owner mentioned it several times a day. He wasn’t lying about it. The breakfast buffet was the biggest I had ever seen and you had choice of some twenty-five different dishes in the morning. Every time I ate until my belly resembled a balloon.
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 reall
y 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.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 17