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.
Another 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.
Suriname: 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.
I had arranged transportation from Georgetown to Paramaribo by minibus. I was picked up at four in the morning by the giant jolly guy who sold me the ticket. Since I lived right above the “sports” bar there were still drunk and obnoxious people around, and I was glad to leave. The ride to the border was quite comfortable – but once we were there, trouble started.
We took a ferry across the river that functioned as a border and had to wait quite a while at Surinamese customs. There was only one cust
oms officer, but a few hundred people in line. I was one of the last to be “helped”.
The custom officer didn’t trust the picture in my passport, where I look a bit younger and had short, businessman hair, unlike the shoulder-length mane I sported now. He asked me for another ID to check, but the only thing I had on me was my Philippine immigration card. Showing him that really set him off. The bastard started asking all kinds of questions like I was some suspicious terrorist or something. He asked me how long I had worked in the Philippines and what I did there. I explained that I hadn’t been working, that an immigration card is needed to stay there longer than two months and that foreigners aren’t even allowed to work in the Philippines unless they have a job a Filipino can’t do, but the border guard didn’t believe me. “How can you prove this is you?” he said, pointing at my picture. I told him to look at the picture carefully and see all my twenty-eight pages of visa stamps. I was speaking Dutch since that’s Suriname’s official language. What more proof did the guy want? The moron even asked me if I was Filipino: me, a tall blond white guy who speaks Dutch. What an idiot!
He let me go after searching through my bag, when the bus driver started complaining because I was holding up his ride this way. The people in the bus had waited an extra half-hour just because of me.
Since I was the last to get on the minibus I had the worst seat, and for four hours I sat with my knees nearly touching my chin. There I was thinking I was used to uncomfortable rides. Can’t win, I guess, but that’s what you get when you do some real travelling instead of a sanitized traipse to gather photos you can use Photoshop on later. When we finally arrived, I found a good guest house close to the center of town and had a decent room for twenty-two dollars a night. The bathrooms were shared but spic-and-span, clean and with hot water. This was a great improvement over my room in the whore-bar. It had been a while since I had a hot shower.
The people in the guesthouse were all Dutch, since Suriname is a quite popular destination for Dutch people of Surinamese heritage and older Dutch people. It was nice to get a bit reacquainted with my native language, which I hadn’t exactly used much in the past two to three years.
The center of Paramaribo is an official World Heritage site because most houses and churches are made of wood, not unlike Georgetown in Guyana. But I was quite broken from the bus ride, which had lasted ten hours instead of eight, and sightseeing was not on my mind.
I didn’t go out on that Wednesday night but was ready for battle the next. I couldn’t find anyone to go out with on that Thursday night, but by now I didn’t care as much as I used to. Nowadays I even prefer to roll solo, and I’m not desperately looking for a guy to hang out with in a bar. It’s better to man up and go alone than to have a (passive) cock-block standing next to you fucking it all up for you.
Something really weird happened that night. I’d been told Club Touche was the place to be on a Thursday night. I arrived a bit too early and sat down at the bar, ordered a beer and opened the girl sitting next to me; she was in a group of three. It didn’t go so well and they walked off and suddenly it hit me.
I can’t game for shit when it’s not in English.
Suriname is a former Dutch colony and Dutch is the official language there. It should be easy to express myself in my own language but I froze up, and quite frankly I panicked a bit. The last two-and-a-half years I had only spoken and gamed girls in English. I could count on one hand the times I spoke to Dutch girls. Before I left Holland I couldn’t game for shit and had trouble getting a decent girlfriend. I had taught myself lots of things but I learned how to game in English, not in Dutch. This changed everything.
Normally I would walk up to a girl and say something like: “Hey, how are you? Are you enjoying yourself?” and continue to talk from there. I didn’t know what to say in Dutch. I wasn’t used to Dutch anymore, talking with people at the guesthouse hadn’t brought me back to being day-to-day fluent in it. Trying a one-on-one translation from English to Dutch would make it sound insanely stupid, especially since I was clearly Dutch. I had to think this over a bit.
I gave it another try in Dutch but wasn’t in the right headspace anymore. Talking Dutch was just like all those years ago in Holland, it brought my inability to game right back. I approached two black girls in English and got somewhere but conversation died after a few minutes. There were loads of Dutch people around and the local people automatically assume you’re Dutch if you’re white-skinned and speak Dutch to you. This meant the gringo factor was reduced to zero. It even worked against you in a club, because there are always lots of Dutch students there for a three- or six-month internship. Most of the guys were dorky and this rubbed off on the rest of us. My mood been ruined and the drinks went down quick and I left the club a bit disillusioned.
The day after was Suriname Independence Day, and I went to see the military parade. The streets were filled with small stalls and I ate all kinds of quite tasty local foods. All the people were gathered around a big field and soldiers were parading around a bit. It started raining and it all took very long. There were a few regiments from neighboring Brazil and French Guyana along with the local ones. They were dressed really sharply and had ultra-modern machine guns. The French regiment was part of the infamous Foreign Legion, and was especially dressed to the nines. The Surinamese regiments, on the other hand, were poorly equipped, with old karabiner guns or machine guns from the Stone Age. Same with their tanks and some jeeps. I felt a bit sorry for them.
It started raining hard and most people looked for shelter. I got really bored by the slow progress of the whole thing and went back to the guesthouse. It was time for some rest and to get ready for the night again. I went out to a club named Zsa Zsa Zsu, but got there too early. There weren’t many people inside when I arrived, and I sat at the bar and got drunk. The bouncer told me that it was a Surinamese music night, and I was interested, but soon decided he wasn’t so much telling me as warning me. In most countries I like the local music but this time I couldn’t stand it. I made a few approaches, but without success.
The next day being Saturday, I of course went out. I went back to the same place as the day before. I had some manning-up to do. I decided to speak English only and did quite a few approaches that night while pounding a lot of beers. A glass of local Parbo beer costs seven-and-a-half Surinamese dollars, which is like two-and-a-half US dollars.
A Dutch guy walked up to me and we talked a bit. There were so many beta white guys around, the type who would probably wine and dine a girl, that I was getting the feeling that girls weren’t looking for quick romance.
Me and the guy went to another room in the club where the music was more quiet and the atmosphere more relaxed. That part of the club was a big surprise, because I hadn’t even seen it the night before. I felt a bit more confident and stepped up to some girls standing by. One of the girls seemed to like me from the get-go and I danced with her a bit. The Dutch guy just stood there drinking his beer and looking at us.
The girl, Vickie, was wearing a sexy red dress, had long hair and a light-skinned complexion. She wasn’t exactly a girl anymore, but a woman. She didn’t like to speak English with me after she found out I also spoke Dutch. The guy I’d been talking to had disappeared.
After some making-out on the dance floor and a drink, we headed back to my room. She had her own car and that saved me some money on the cab fare, because at night taxi drivers really know how to fuck a white guy over, even though they’re all very polite and like to talk a lot. Suriname people are very friendly and super-relaxed.
We arrived at my guesthouse and the night guard saw us but didn’t make any problems. He was a very nice guy I’d talked to a few times before going out. It wasn’t even forbidden to bring girls back to your room as long as you paid double the next day. If it had been against the rules I still would have sneaked her in and taken the risk of getting kicked out the next day.
We went up to my room and she went to the bathroom to freshen up
, so did I after. We kissed and talked a bit while I was taking her clothes off. I couldn’t fail anymore! My honor was saved!! That Suriname flag was mine!!!! Mwahahahahahaaaa!!!!!!!!!
Just to make sure I asked her how long she’d lived in Suriname, and then she gave me the following answer:
“I’m living for eleven years in Suriname now but I’m from Brazil.”
In my head I was cursing a lot. Why did I even ask?
I said something like “Oh, nice”. Apparently she’d lived in Suriname for a while, learned the Dutch language and had a few kids there. I was like Damn, another Brazilian notch!! I need that Suriname flag; I can’t go to a former colony and not (re)capture the flag there.
Unlike the last Brazilian girl I’d had, this girl was totally not adventurous between the sheets. Afterwards she sneaked out the same way she came in. I never saw her again.
I was disappointed and should have seen it coming. When I looked at her picture afterwards I could clearly see she was Brazilian, but the Suriname population is so diverse that it’s hard to tell in a club. Over a third of the population is of South-East Indian heritage, another third are Creoles and the rest are a mix of Maroons (escaped black slaves who started their own tribes in the jungle, also officially named “bush negroes”), Javanese from Indonesia, Chinese and Brazilians.
Day gaming was pretty much pointless since I didn’t really see many hot girls around and it was very hot outside during the day, with high humidity. All that smoking and drinking made me slow during the day.
But there were some consolations. One of the greatest things about Suriname was that they sold imported Dutch food. I didn’t realize that until I saw Dutch cookies at a supermarket. I bought everything Dutch I could find and came back to the guesthouse with two grocery bags full of Dutch candy and cookies. It is very hard to find the Dutch candy named “drop” outside of Holland. I knew I was going to destroy my bowels and libido (drop is bad for that), but ate it anyway. The only warm meals I ate in those four days were grilled-cheese sandwiches or some roti, an Indian dish.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 45