Since the ticket offices were closed, I decided to buy a ticket from these guys anyway; a lot of people were. I bargained hard and got a good price. A hammock space would cost 180 reals and a little shared cabin 340 reals (starting price 600rs), food not included. I feared that my back wouldn’t survive five days bent like a banana in a hammock and chose the cabin. The ticket man showed me around and I saw it had reasonable beds, air–conditioning and a wall socket for power. That last one was just what I needed for my laptop so I wouldn’t get bored and could do some writing.
I texted the Colombian girl, who was also going to take a riverboat to get back to Colombia, but she texted that she was leaving on Monday. I sure as hell wasn’t waiting for her, but I still wanted to “rock the boat”. That song was on my mind a lot.
The departure time for the boat was 6:00 PM but I was already there at 3:00 to see all the things happening on and around the boat. The lower deck got packed with two truckloads of tomatoes. This was all manual labor and five guys packed for hours while one giant fat guy sat on a chair and counted every box that was put inside. He was sitting on his ass in the shade and still sweating like a dog.
The middle deck had about a hundred hammock spaces and people were busy hanging their hammocks and fighting over space. In the back of the boat were eight cabins for two. I shared my cabin with Manu, a short but insanely ripped French guy. He was a bit crazy but a very nice guy to hang out with. I saw a couple of young girls and approached them. There were two German/Russian sisters. One of them was too skinny and the other one was a lot hotter but grumpy and quiet all the time. Then there were David, a giant Canadian guy and the biggest vegetarian I ever saw, and Kathleen, a Canadian girl. There was an older English guy whose name I forgot and the Japanese woman I’d met in Rio, Salvador and Belem. None of them are people I’d look up normally, but once on a boat you tend to stick together.
The top deck of the ship was a sundeck with a bar and some more cabins. Life on a riverboat is very boring and our small group of tourists sat on the top deck drinking beer and having some fun every night. I got really sunburned in just one hour and had to stay below decks during the day. Most people on the boat were just hanging around or sleeping all day. I did quite a lot of writing for my blogs those days and watched some movies and Simpsons episodes.
The first few days the riverside views were very beautiful and I tried to take some pictures with my phone but results were weak. At some points the river was narrow: still a couple of hundred meters wide but close enough to see the river houses and the people who lived in them.
On the second day we saw lots of children in canoes around our fast-moving boat. They used ropes with hooks to clamp their wooden canoes to our boat and pull themselves in. They sold shrimps and other food. I bought a bag and they tasted salty but good. The ideal beer snack at night.
At other times I saw lots of children in small boats begging for food. Some Brazilians would throw plastic bags with food towards them, which is good, or give them candy, which is bad because those kids rarely see a dentist or keep good dental hygiene.
It was meal time three times a day but I always skipped the first one since it was at six in the morning when everyone outside was already up. The meals were simple, just some rice and chicken, but they were quite large. I had trouble with chewing at the time because I had a problem with the nerve endings in my teeth or something. It was the second time I had severe pain in my teeth. The first time was in Bolivia, where Sierra had advised me to go to a dentist but no way in hell was I going to a Bolivian dentist. After Bolivia the pain gradually went away and I thought I’d left the worst behind me. By the way my eyes teared up in pain now, I was wrong. A few days later the pain stopped again and didn’t come back on my trip.
There were no hot Brazilian girls on the boat, but there was “Boat Slut”, as Manu and I named her. A Brazilian girl with a very sexy body but the manners of a pig. She ate like one and drank like one. She started drinking early and was completely drunk all the time. I saw her go into the cabin of some ugly guy who wasn’t her boyfriend, and Manu and I wondered if they actually had sex since she wasn’t in there very long. The ugly guy had been giving her beer for two days and maybe he got his reward now.
Manu was one crazy guy; he was on a strict diet back home and exercised a lot. He was very ripped even though he was forty-two years old. At night he would take some drugs and never stop talking. It was annoying sometimes but I liked the guy. We decided that one of us should fuck Boat Slut. I tried to talk with her but it was no use, she didn’t speak English and made no attempt to try and understand my horrible Portuguese. When I spoke to her I saw that she had very bad skin and her teeth weren’t that great either. I had my doubts about her, but like Manu said, “Just look at the body and pump and dump, don’t even kiss her.”
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.
&n
bsp; Apparently the 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 and a beautiful blue-eyed girl selling bus tickets but this book is already long enough.
Chapter Six – The Guyanas
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.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 44