Indonesia – Medan
We stayed in the same guesthouse as last time. I flirted a bit with the girls working there. Sometimes I practice just a bit on less hot girls just to see their reactions to my game. I advise anyone to do the same – it gives you a really good sense of how you’re doing.
At night Darren and I tried to find a place to go out. We had a becak driver take us to some bars, but they were either fucking expensive hotel bars or dumps. After we’d tried a few the driver said he knew a place for us and drove to a bar that looked like some sort of tourist bar. I looked around and saw the big Medan mosque. The same mosque that was waking us up every day at five in the morning when they start yelling their prayers over the enormous loud speakers attached to the tower. The bar was only a hundred meters around the corner from our guesthouse and we had never seen it before.
We had a few beers there and an expat told us about a street named Merdaka Walk, a street with a lot of bars. Darren and I decided to go there and walked back to the main street to get a becak. On the way there I saw two young girls walking by and called them over. After some talking they agreed to go with us to Merdaka Walk. They barely spoke English and some dude who was walking past came along to help translate. He said he was a neighbor of the girls, but he looked like he was lying.
We all sat down and ordered some drinks, though since they were Muslim, Bayian and Cinta (the Indonesian word for love) didn’t drink alcohol. That saved us money on expensive drinks but also meant that they weren’t “loosening up” with some booze in them. The guy translated for us and we bought him a beer too. I had already enough of the situation, since it turned out that the girl I liked at first was only seventeen and barely spoke a word of English. Darren, on the other hand, was heavily impressed by Bayian, who seemed to like him.
As we left later we had an argument with the translator guy over a few dollars. He was demanding a pack of cigarettes for the girls, who didn’t actually smoke, and some money for him. The girls were very confused and didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I’m sure he badmouthed us a lot; we couldn’t understand what he was saying anyway. We got rid of him but not of the girls. Darren was going crazy for cute little Bayian, but I suspected she was a gold digger looking for a money-sender. Darren was still a gullible small-town guy, and in my opinion a bit naïve to think a hot 19-year-old girl would fall for him overnight. He changed a lot over time but at moments like that I felt I had to protect him from himself.
The next morning I texted Cinta to tell her I didn’t think it would work out between us. She was very disappointed, but later when I was sitting in the guesthouse bar having some breakfast she came by with Bayian to see Darren. And she had brought her older sister with her. Putri was only two years older than Cinta, and smoking hot. She looked like a model but also like a true gold-digger. Too much golden jewelry, and an expensive dress and designer shoes. I talked to her a bit but no way was she getting to spend my cash. I sat there and started eye-flirting with an older girl sitting on another table. She smiled back at me and it went back and forth a few times. Darren and the girls saw what was happening and the girls weren’t too happy with it.
When the older girl stood up to leave I said to her “Hey, you forgot to give me your phone number”, and just handed my phone to her. She smiled and put her number in my phone. Darren gave me an admiring look. The two sisters were not pleased.
That night I met up with Renny, the girl who gave me her phone number, and we talked a bit. Darren went out with Bayian to the cinema and had kissed her there. Renny had brought a girlfriend with big tits and they were both acting flirty.
We decided to go out together the next night to a club. That night Darren took Bayian to his room, but nothing happened there. He said she wanted to but her mom called and she left. I said he was lucky she didn’t cry rape. He didn’t really know anything about her and got really nervous about it. I admit, I might have misjudged the situation a bit.
We both really needed to gear up with some new accessories, so we went to the shopping mall. I finally bought a pair of dress shoes for the clubs and only paid thirty dollars for them. I wore them for nearly one-and-a-half years and went out in eighteen countries with them. One of the advantages of always being on the road is that you don’t need many clothes. By the time people have seen you wearing a few different shirts you’re gone again. I bought a rock-star-looking leather bracelet for four dollars which I’m still wearing today. The metal parts are rusty now but it makes it look better.
Before we went out I went over to Renny’s place on the back of her motorbike. She let me touch her boobs while driving the bike but she wouldn’t kiss me when she stopped. It should have been a big warning but I was blinded by a six-week dry spell and the hunt for a new and important flag. I could never return home without an Indonesian flag. One of my friends back home is half-Indonesian and used to be quite the player himself. I needed that flag no matter what happened.
Renny called up another friend and the five of us went out in one of their cars to the first club. We drove straight to a place that Darren and I had visited on our first night out but left because the drinks were too expensive. We had told the girls we didn’t have much money and they answered that we would only spend 200K, which was like twenty dollars. Of course those twenty bucks was gone by the time we bought the first round. To make a long story short, we had a nice night out and went to a couple of places. We posed a lot for funny pictures. I could touch the boobs of the girls all the time but couldn’t get them to kiss me. How weird is that?
Clubs close early in Indonesia and on the way back we went to the Mc Drive. We talked and joked around in the car a bit while we were waiting for the food. Renny, Darren and I were sitting in the back seat and suddenly the hottest girl of the bunch leaned back from the driver’s seat and had a make-out session with Darren. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Me, Le Grand Skywalker, outplayed by a rookie. Renny saw that I was not happy with it and I didn’t say a word to her.
Back in the guesthouse I went straight to my room while they sat down with all the McDonalds food. I’m a huge fan of that greasy stuff but had to take a shit upstairs. The Indonesian food had already been fucking with my insides for days and drinking a lot that night made me explode in the bathroom. Of course the toilets have to be flushed with buckets of water and it all took a while. When I came down they were all silent because they thought I had been angry and left. I made up an excuse that I had to take off my new shoes because they hurt and that I brushed my teeth. What else could I say? “Oh hi girls, I just took a major crap upstairs, pass the French fries please?”
The girl with the big tits wanted to have sex with me, but only if we went to a fancy four-star hotel nearby which had a bubble bath and costs forty dollars a night. Since the girls had already lied to us about club prices, it might have really been sixty dollars. I told her I had a room upstairs where we could go directly but she declined. I wanted to fuck her bad but had the feeling it wouldn’t count as a notch or a flag if it was only possible in an expensive room. It felt like prostitution to me. Now, many of you readers will think that forty bucks for a hotel room isn’t much to get laid, and I agree. It’s not much if you’re on a two-week holiday. But when you’re on a three-year trip you have to be a bit of a penny-pincher.
The girls left and I went to bed. I wanted to move on to another place but Darren wanted to stay behind with Bayian a bit longer. We agree to meet again at Lake Toba, one of the most beautiful places in Indonesia.
Indonesia – Lake Toba
The ride to Lake Toba, also called Samosir Island, was another classic. For five hours I was trapped inside a small minivan full of locals with suitcases and plastic bags. An Indonesian woman was sleeping on my shoulder for hours. A short ferry ride later I was on Samosir Island, in the middle of Lake Toba. The lake was formed by the biggest super-volcano ever: the Toba Caldera, Yellowstone’s bigger sister. The last time this volcano blew up it resulted in a mass e
xtinction of the human population. Only five to ten thousand breeding pairs remained and it affected the genetic inheritance of all humans today. At least, that’s what happened according to the Toba catastrophe theory. It’s hard to find out if it’s true, since it happened millions of years ago.
What the eruptions did definitely do over the years was leave a stunningly beautiful volcanic lake with an island in the middle. Samosir’s main town, Tuktuk, used to be a hippie destination, and later turned into a major party place where the early backpackers came to go crazy at spring parties. All that has changed and people have moved on to Thailand for the full moon parties. Tourism in Tuktuk is nearly dead, and it’s considered an off-the-beaten–track destination nowadays. Accommodation is cheap and many guesthouses are empty or barely occupied. Locals still reminisce about the days when the guesthouses were packed and business was good. I still recommend it to anyone on Sumatra or an Indonesia tour, especially if you want a few days rest. Go for three or four days. It’s cheap, it’s quiet and it’s beautiful. I met a few guys who went here for the sole purpose of relaxing or being lazy all day. You can live here on a budget of less than ten dollars a day if you want.
I found a room with bathroom in traditional Batak style for only six dollars. The first night I hung out with a small group of tourists, including the Charlotte I had met in Bukit Lawang a few days before. I was on fire that night, entertaining the whole group with travel stories, being the group leader and the only alpha guy there. One of the girls was a smoking hot Norwegian girl, Maria, and she was hanging on every word I said. She was clearly admiring me and only mentioned that she was engaged hours later. That’s always a good sign and I remembered how I’d heavily made out with Sheila, the English girl in Malaysia, with her not mentioning her marriage till the next day. Maria was a 7.5 in my opinion, probably an 8.5 when dressed up for a night out. The stunning blonde had been motor-riding around the island with a mixed group, and one of the guys was passively cock-blocking me by keeping me from getting some time alone with her. Whenever there’s a hot girl around there are always guys who are too afraid to do any flirting whatsoever with this girl and secretly hate the guy who has the balls to do so.
Guys like this always orbit around the girl and never give you a moment alone with her, because they know that they’re going to feel even more a failure if they see anyone else succeed. I know exactly what I’m talking about because I was that guy myself for years before. I would go out, see other guys have fun with girls and think every guy who was talking to a girl was getting laid. I would go home very angry with myself and sometimes in an aggressive mood. It seems to me the world would be a better place if guys learned to pick up girls early in their lives. I suspect that lots of insecure guys get into trouble or do crazy stuff because they are so socially incapable of getting girls. The world would have a lot less crime and way fewer weirdoes if they were happily in a relationship. Now that I have more knowledge of social dynamics, I know that not every guy talking and laughing with a girl is getting laid and it’s only a small percentage of guys that will pick up that night. I was too blind to see it and now feel sorry for guys in the same situation I was in before.
Did something happen with the Norwegian girl? The answer is no. Her Norwegian girlfriend, who was sick the day before, joined her and guarded her 24/7. It’s always funny how the one guarding or protecting her friend from the “bad” men are always girls that are a six or lower on the scale of hotness. All that time Maria was giving me signs of liking me, but some girls do that and still put you in the friend zone. I have never figured it out and Darren, who came to the island a day later, said the same. She liked me a lot but not enough to cheat. I kept in touch with Maria for a while and saw her again five weeks later on Bali. I tried to set up a time to meet again but we always seemed to be in different places. I ran into her on the street when her boyfriend had come to join her. Actually, I was just looking at her and she was the one who recognized me. Her boyfriend was a big, strong, handsome guy, and somehow that made me feel a lot better. They got married a year later.
Darren had said goodbye to Bayian and came along a day later. We went out to the mid-weekly disco night. There was a small bar/club with a live band a few times a week. We met a couple of other tourists and most of the local girls there were working girls. I had conversations with a few of them, did some test flirting to find out if they were hookers and concluded that most of them were. Not to be overly politically correct, but by local girls I mean Indonesian girls. I don’t mean local Batak tribe people – though who knows, maybe some of them were.
Darren and I sat down with a Dutch guy who was there to blow all his money on his Indonesian girlfriend, who wasn’t even that hot. There were a few other girls around and I talked and danced with one of them, named Henny. She gave me her phone number and the next morning we texted a bit. At one point I mixed up Henny’s name with Renny from Medan: I texted her something naughty about Renny’s boobs and meant to send it to her, but Henny got it instead. Oops. Renny was still texting me, as were the teenage sisters Cinta and Putri, along with Nazir from Bukit Lawang. I was getting forty to fifty texts a day from all these ladies, which sounds like a lot but was nothing compared to my later visit to the Philippines. After fixing the mistake about the boobs message by just saying it was for another girl (a cold-hearted win or lose pre-selection move), we agreed on meeting. She said she would pick me up for a ride around Samosir Island by car.
This all sounded great, but when she arrived with the Dutch guy and his girlfriend I realized that Henny was a lot older than I had seen through my giant beer goggles the night before. I guess she was close to forty. Darren looked at me and laughed. I got into the car and we drove off to a viewing point.
The Dutch guy is best described as a raving lunatic. He talked at high speed and it was all nonsense. He kept rambling on about the weirdest things and I was left looking to Henny for answers a few times. She would just smile. Then I’d turn my head away because I didn’t want to make her think I liked her too much. With a ton of beer in my system I would have captured the flag with her, but no way in hell was I going for it sober.
All and all they were nice people, but clearly not my kind. The Dutch guy’s girlfriend was the only person I could have something resembling an actual conversation with. After a few hours driving we returned, and I never had much contact with Henny after. I had some beers with them on another day but that was it. The Dutch guy was just too much of a nutcase to hang with when sober.
The guesthouse where Darren and I stayed rented out motor scooters and after hearing good things from the other group we decided to go for a trip around the island. Since there’s basically only one road, we figured it shouldn’t be too hard. We left early in the morning and after an hour arrived at the same viewpoint I’d been the day before. It was starting to get hot and we were only wearing shorts and t-shirts. Just an hour later our arms were totally sunburned and we still had to do six hours of riding.
Sunburns or not, Samosir Island is an amazing place to visit. It almost has more churches than houses, all Christian since the Dutch colonizers introduced that religion to local tribes on Sumatra. The Batak tribe was completely Christian and that meant I could eat pork again. It had been quite a while and it was delicious. We saw traditional Batak houses with the steep roofs and beautiful woodcarvings; the views on the blue lake and surrounding mountains were stunning and the green rice fields looked amazing with the sun reflecting on them. As always in Asia, you had a crowd of children following you everywhere you stopped. We drove through small Batak villages with names like Loembanboentoe.
For a Dutch guy Indonesian is actually very easy to pronounce: just read the word out as if it were Dutch and most people understand you. If you hang out in a country for a while you learn how people pronounce certain syllables and that makes it even easier.
We had to stop at least every twenty minutes to get into the shade. Our arms and legs were already red as boiled
lobster and it started to hurt. We both started worrying now since we weren’t even halfway there. The roads were in terrible condition, it’s mainly dirt roads full of potholes. Our scooters were quite fast but it took a long time to drive just fifteen or twenty kilometers. The sights were beautiful and we saw coffee plantations and endless rice fields.
At one point we stopped for some lunch at a roadside restaurant and people gathered around us to look at the red lobster guys eating rice and pork. As always people were friendly and smiling at us. I asked for an apotek, which is almost the same as the Dutch word apotheek, which means pharmacy. After driving around a bit we found a few places that resembled a pharmacy. Of course they didn’t sell sun-block, since they’d never even heard of it. I had to describe the situation by pointing at my arms and saying “auw, auw” and making a painful face. It wasn’t very hard to do because my skin was already screaming at that point. We were desperate to find something to lessen the damage and bought body lotion and put that on our faces and arms. I still don’t know if it helped, or in because lotion has oil in it it just made it worse. At least it had a cooling effect for a few minutes. I figured it was best to keep our arms hydrated.
When we thought we were about halfway round the island we stopped again to eat. The owner of the shop and restaurant was very friendly and even spoke some English. He told us about the glory days at the end of the 1990s, when he still was a younger guy himself chasing tourist girls. Darren opted to stop there and wait for it to get dark. We still had four hours of driving to do and I convinced him to keep on driving despite our severe sunburn. If we had to wait for sundown then we had to wait for hours since it was only two o’clock and the roads would be dangerous to drive in the dark. The shop owner also advised to keep on going because it turned out we weren’t even halfway there. We had been driving for five hours now but the roads were so bad that it looked like nothing on the map. We lotioned up and went off again after buying a shitload of water and cookies.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 24