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

  St Petersburg is a beautiful city with far too much in it to see in only four days, even with the almost inexistent nights and endless days where the sun comes up in the East almost while it’s still shining in the West, a city of palaces and canals and incredible history. Just as an example, I went to the Hermitage, one of the biggest museums in the world. It’s been calculated that The Hermitage has so many art objects on display that if you look at every item for just eight seconds, then it would take seven years to see everything. And the basement is filled with about fifteen times more stuff! There’s so much in storage that people with access can just walk in and carry things out – there’s no way of cataloguing it all, and no-one will ever notice that the object’s gone missing.

  Sightseeing in St Petersburg is not cheap, but luckily, I studied at the University of Driver’s License, which got me massive discounts everywhere. My Dutch driver’s license is a pink plastic card with my picture on it. It also has symbols of cars, motorcycles, and trucks, and says “Driver’s License” in five different languages. None of them, however, was Russian, or written in Cyrillic, and since the employees at the museums didn’t speak any other language than Russian or read the western alphabet, I got away with using it as a student card every time. The entrance fee for the Hermitage alone costs about sixteen dollars but is free for students, lucky me!

  Not everything’s beautiful, though. The city is full of old Ladas, the ugliest and crappiest cars ever. They look like nothing so much as the old T-34 tanks from Stalin’s days. The weirdest one I saw was parked and had a giant dildo for a shift stick. I asked no questions.

  But to make up for the cars, there were three Russian girls at the hostel, and one was very good looking. I asked her if she spoke English and she said no. Sometime later, I ran into the second one, and I asked the same question. Again the answer was no. I had almost given up on them, but the third one turned out to speak very good English and the four of us talked all evening while she translated everything. They were from Yakutsk, a city in the northeast of Russia where in winter time, it drops to seventy degrees Celsius below zero, unbelievable temperatures. When I told them that I had wanted to go dancing with them a few days before but didn’t ask because I thought they didn’t speak English, they were disappointed, because they loved to dance. Soon after that, the English-speaking girl left for a day, and the two others moved to my dorm. I used my Russian language pocket book and had fun with the naughty sentences in there. The hot blond girl already had a boyfriend; the second girl, Anna, was definitely interested in me but wasn’t that good-looking.

  The day after, the four of us walked around the city and visited some places together. That evening, I had to take the train to Moscow, and the three of them showed up at the train station, bringing an extra girl with them. She spoke a little bit of English and said she wanted a picture with me because she wanted a picture with a handsome guy. I looked around, but she actually was talking about me. Naturally I let her take it. The girls even went on the train to make sure that everything was alright and that I got the right sleeping bunk in the overnight train. We said goodbye, and that’s the last I saw of them – but I noticed I was sharing the compartment with a hot MILF in her early thirties and her young daughter. The woman slept in the bed next to me and was barely covered by the blanket, wearing only a thong and bra. So I’d say I had a good start in Russia. It would only get better from there.

  Russia – Moscow

  The train ride to Moscow took about nine hours and all the time I could enjoy the view of this half-naked woman sleeping in front of me, so I was in a pretty good mood when we arrived. It didn’t last. The metro system in Moscow, with its ten lines and almost two hundred stations, is huge. And of course everything was spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet and I couldn’t understand a word. It took a while before I found some people who spoke a bit of English and could help me out.

  Arriving at the hostel I got a new surprise – it was another rathole! There was one toilet for a whole hostel with about twenty-five people. The toilet seat was just lying loose on the toilet – I nearly fell off the first time I used it. The door had a little hook to lock it, but the hook didn’t fit in the little metal ring so you needed to leave a little crack to lock it. So one time I was taking a big dump, the door didn’t close well, the couch was one meter away from the toilet door and there was no radio or television in the hostel to cancel out the noise I was are making. This was one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. I ended up going to the McDonalds every time I needed to crap.

  The whole hostel was a dump and the grumpy young girl working there wasn’t any fun either. I had booked this hostel because the two guys from Chile I’d met in Lithuania and later in Estonia had told me they’d be staying there. So in St Petersburg I told the Australian guy and the two Finnish guys I was hanging out with to go there too. Well, let’s say they thanked me for booking this dump.

  I in turn thanked the Chilean guys for it. Still, when I arrived already knew five people there, no need to make new friends. That night I went to the famous Red Square with Gustavo and Nico from Chile.

  It was amazing; Red Square is huge, just below the Kremlin, and the wildly-colored St Basil’s Cathedral looks spectacular when it’s lit up at night. Of course seeing shitloads of hot Russian girls adds to the fun.

  On the way back to the hostel, the three of us got stopped by a policeman. He stopped in front of us and when he got out of his car, he first looked around to check if anyone was watching us. Then he asked for our passports. Gustavo and Nico’s passports were in order, but mine had no visa registration. It turns out you have to register if you’re going to stay in the city longer than seventy hours after arriving. Though I’d only just arrived, we didn’t understand the rules. The policeman became very serious and told me I had to come with him to the police station. Gustavo spoke a bit of Russian and translated what he could for me, while the copper just stood there playing with his whistle. He kept repeating “Gustavo, nje problemi, Nico nje problemi, Neil PROBLEMI!” He looked quite relaxed but also rather serious. I asked Gustavo to ask him if he wanted a bribe but Gustavo, a law student, was a bit anxious about asking him directly. In the end I took my Dutch/Russian travel book from my pocket and showed the cop a line which said “can I pay the fine on the spot?” He smiled and agreed. I asked him how much the fine would be, and he said “I don't know”. I flipped to the section on numbers and pointed to the number five hundred. His smile got even broader as he agreed with it. So I paid five hundred rubles (about fifteen dollars in 2009) and we went on our way. Gustavo told me that before we left, the cop said that the money was for his family. At a guess his children’s names are Vodka and Bottle. When we got back to the hostel we woke up the girl who was working there. She was now even grumpier than before and explained to us that I didn’t have to pay a fine at all. I had already kind of figured that.

  The next day the hostel girl, Julia, was in a way better mood, and told me she’d had a major hangover the day before. Me and the two guys from Chile couldn’t stop joking around with her about the night before, and kept pointing out things about the hostel and bellowing PROBLEMI! This pretty much covered the whole hostel.

  After our shameless adventure in bribing a public official, the Chileans and I visited numerous sites throughout the city. On our second trip to Red Square we saw one of the hottest girls ever. Soon they were using the time during our long walks to teach me a bit of Latin Spanish – but only the words to describe a woman. As a test of how well I was learning, with every smoking hot girl that walked by I had to give them a full description in Spanish.

  One day we had an unexpected city tour when an eighty-four year old guide just walked up to us in the street and started talking. He spoke excellent English and had lived through the Second World War and Stalin’s days. After he had showed us around the city we gave him a generous tip. He was doing tours because his retirement fund had almost completely disappeared in the 1
998 Ruble crash. That old geezer was definitely in better shape than us: we’d walked many miles and were dead tired afterwards, while he was probably going to do the same again. He was probably snickering at the wimpy young tourists that we were as he left us. I couldn’t blame him.

  Meanwhile, back home, my family received a new bank card for me and sent it by FedEx to the hostel in Moscow. An ATM in Estonia had eaten my ING bank card and since then I’d been paying in cash only. The card arrived the day after my family sent it, but customs kept the card for a whole five days. Great fun, what with my funds running out.

  The Chilean guys had to move on, and I promised I’d visit them once and if I reached Chile. Meanwhile I stayed in the hostel and practiced my Russian with Julia. During the day most backpackers went sightseeing, so I was alone with her most of the time, which gave me enough time to game her. She taught me the Cyrillic alphabet by letting me read the newspaper out loud. We were sitting closer and closer together and started touching and flirting a bit.

  Later that day we went out together with a group from the hostel and visited a small club called Papa’s Place. That Monday was Happy Hour night, and at one point we were getting four drinks for the price of one. No need to say we all ended up shitfaced. I walked back to the hostel with Julia but stopped at a small park close to it. We started kissing and things got pretty steamy pretty quick. When I put my hand under her short dress I felt she was really wet and ready to go. She wanted me then and there but it was already daylight, so I asked where she lived. We took a one-hour ride on the metro to the suburbs. To me it looked like a Russian ghetto, with countless grey concrete buildings straight out of Soviet times. I made a fool of myself by asking her about it and she looked surprised and said that the really bad neighborhoods were further outside the city. Coming from a western country, I had never seen a neighborhood like this and had no interest in seeing the “really” bad neighborhoods.

  I had to pay a bribe to the guard to let me inside the building. Her apartment was small and old, but she had a bed and that was the most important thing. We both took a quick cold shower and jumped in bed to warm each other. She was the first lay on my trip. One down, many more to follow. Julia was smart, twenty-three years old, a working student and nice girl who had a beautiful slim body and a butter face. This means nice body, BUT HER FACE. Still, for four days we shagged like there was no tomorrow, but then my bank card finally arrived. I only had a 25-day visa, so after one last romantic get-together I had to move on to the next destination.

  When I told them I was banging a twenty–three year old Russian girl, my friends back home went crazy. Especially since I was already in my early thirties.

  Russia – Kazan

  Kazan is a medium-sized city, which in Russia means it only has well over a million people. I arrived late at night and luckily the owner of the hostel was waiting for me. She was a young woman, about twenty-seven years old, and she lived in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. The hostel itself was basically just an apartment with one room that served as a dorm. I was the only one there. The next day was a Friday and I went to the city center by bus. The buses were dirt cheap, only thirty rubles a ride. Every bus has a girl collecting the money and I pissed mine off because I only had a thousand-ruble note with me. It didn’t help that I couldn’t speak back to her and just kept shrugging my shoulders as she tried to find 970 rubles change. That’s one girl I did not manage to add to my shagging diary.

  That day and the next day I walked all over the city centre and was taking pictures of everything. The Kazan Kremlin is very beautiful, and since it was the weekend there were a lot of weddings going on, with all the bridesmaid-eye candy that implies. Kazan is one of Russia’s Islamic provinces, with a lot of Turkish-descended people around. That can mean only one thing: Döner kebab places. There’s nothing better than burying your face into a giant kebab after a long day of walking around. There was also a big McDonald’s, so I knew I wouldn’t starve.

  In the main shopping street I sat down next to some cute girls who didn’t pay attention to me until I pulled out my street map and it became obvious I was a tourist. Their attitude changed immediately and they started talking to me. Of course they didn’t speak English and I tried to talk some extremely bad Russian but that didn’t help either. I bailed out the moment it became awkward to try to talk to them any longer, and later I went to the train station and bought a ticket to Yekaterinburg for the next day.

  Back in the hostel some boring backpackers had arrived but they didn’t want to go out at night. I had a look in the Russian Lonely planet and read there was a small salsa bar named Cuba Libre not too far away. I thought, What the hell, and went there. It was a small place indeed, with just one bar and a small dance floor. I talked to a platinum blonde girl with big boobs at the bar who looked interested at first. She spoke a little bit of English, but she lost interest after she found out I was not going to stay long. So I walked up to two girls on the dance floor and started dancing with them. The cuter of the two was a skinny girl from Moscow. She was nice and spoke reasonable English, but she also had absolutely no interest in flirting.

  At the table next to us there were three girls who were drinking and dancing a lot. One of them had massive knockers that were almost falling out of her dress. One of the others was skinny and had a cute sexy face; the third girl was skinny but not that good-looking. I danced a bit with them, but that was it: I couldn’t get the conversation going and the one with the big knockers danced with some other guy. At least I tried, I thought to myself, and decided to go back to the hostel. Things weren’t going anywhere, and I didn’t expect anything to happen. I was wrong.

  I was waiting for the toilet to be free when the three girls pulled me out of the line and outside the bar to smoke a cigarette. We all lit one up and one of the first things they asked me was: “Do you want to go home with us?” Now, I don’t get asked home by three young hot Russian girls often but I was surprisingly relaxed about it. I thought that I was either getting mugged or in for great night. If you want to have fun you have to take risks, and since the whole point of the trip was to have fun, I jumped in a taxicab with them and we drove off. We went to the apartment of the big-boobed and very drunk blonde girl. She lives there with her father but he wasn’t in. They cooked me a midnight meal (try to find a girl in the west who will do that) and we had some more beers. After an hour the two skinny girls went to bed and I was alone with the girl with the big rack. Her name was Julia, just like the girl back in Moscow. She was twenty-two and worked as an English teacher. We talked all night and I tried to make a move on her but she wasn’t that easy. I left at nine in the morning; it took me two hours and a lot of buses to find my way back to the hostel.

  After sleeping for a few hours, I went to meet her in a park. We walked around a bit, and sat down at a bench. We kissed and later we talked about the fact I was leaving that same evening. I asked her if she wanted me to stay. Julia told me that she actually had a boyfriend and wasn’t sure about the whole thing. But then she said that she wouldn’t be seeing her boyfriend until next weekend, and I jumped on that, pointing out that we could have the whole week together. Since it wasn’t vacation-time (except for me), she had to work during the week, and I told her that if she wanted to see me, she’d have to make some time for me in the evenings. She agreed but said, “But how, you already have a train ticket”. I took the ticket I had paid twenty-five dollars for out of my jacket and I ripped it up in front of her. She looked me in the eyes to see if I was serious, and then we kissed again.

  Julia asked me to meet her at work the next day. She taught English at a building in the city center. When I got there, she asked me if I would make an appearance in the class to talk with the students a bit. She didn’t tell me that it was a surprise visit for the students, so I was a bit shocked when I walked in and she said something like “Tadaaa, a real foreigner who is travelling around the world!” I had no idea what kind of students she had – I did
n’t even know if I should be expecting kindergarteners or geriatrics – but I saw they were all in their twenties. Out of fifteen persons, there was only one guy and about seven or eight good looking girls. At first they were shy about speaking English in front of a foreigner, but they loosened up after a while. Julia introduced me as just a friend and I noticed the girls in the class were quite interested in me. One girl named Svetlana, who was a ballet dancer and stunningly hot – a 9 on the scale of 10 – asked all kinds of questions about travelling. I told her to come with me and flirted a bit with her. Julia kicked me under the table.

  I started to tease her more and more and it drove her nuts. Clearly, though, it worked, because she couldn’t stop kissing after the class ended, and started asking me sexual questions.

  She invited me to stay with her in a dacha, the Russian version of a summerhouse. That Wednesday I met up with her and some of her friends, two guys and two girls who were both named Irina. The wooden dacha was near the river Volga and looked quite nice; one of the guys owned it and had built it himself. To make a long story short, we had a barbeque, lots of vodka – this was Russia, after all – and then went for a swim in the river. Julia took off her bra and went in the water while covering her boobs with her hands. By now she had been cock-teasing me for four days, and she was good at it, always talking about sex and asking me all kinds of sex-related questions – how many girls had I been with? Did I masturbate? Did I like to eat pussy? Did I do anal? How big was I?