Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (44 page)

During
the day I went out to walk around a bit and rode a lot of local minibuses, which is quite an experience. My health was at an all-time low and I quit smoking to improve my breathing a bit. It took a long time for me to get used to the altitude, but at least I didn’t get really sick from it like some others. I was thinking about Brazilian Charlize who I was going to visit again a few months later. I needed to get my health back to be able to have a few wild nights with her.

After
two-and-a-half weeks of La Paz I needed to move on to Peru. I had gone out almost every night in six or seven different places all over town, including the infamous Route 36 bar where you can buy overpriced cocaine from the barkeep. The French guy tried some but said the quality was bad. I’m not interested in drugs besides weed anyway.

La
Paz was almost the last place I could relax a bit. The rest of South America would be on a strict time schedule, a way of travelling I really hated, but I had already booked flights to get me back to Holland just before Christmas. Money was running out, and though I wasn’t exactly homesick, I was starting to long just a bit for some stability and First World easy living. Backpacking takes a toll on you. And I had now set myself up to really let it hit me as I rushed around getting in as much as I could. I was going to earn that First World rest, and it was going to be great.

I stayed over at Sierra’s before leaving for Lake Titicaca. Let’s just say she wasn’t happy about me leaving.

Bolivia – Lake Titicaca

Lake
Titicaca was a short stopover where I stayed for four days to relax before I started the rushed part of my trip. I had a nice room for three and half dollars, including a big bed, a desk, a television with cable and a bathroom. The one-day boat tour, also three and half dollars, took us to the island that according to Incan culture was the birthplace of the sun. It was great – I even ran in to the Panamanian girl I had met in Mendoza, the one who seemed interested in me but got cock-blocked by Jewel. I went in full-on pick-up mode but she didn’t respond much to it. She was probably getting banged by one of the guys who were with her on the boat. Over the next days I saw quite a few football matches of the Copa America and did some writing for my websites.

Lake
Titicaca is a very small beach town with loads of regular tourists and backpacking couples. I lived on eight dollars a day there, just eating a trout with rice for breakfast at the local fish market, one tourists had barely discovered, since they’d rather eat overprized spaghetti or pizza in one of the many rip-off tourist restaurants than sit between local Bolivians guys and cholitas with their bowlers hats and heavy one-meter pigtails. The fish was delicious and was freshly caught every morning. A big plate of food for only $2.20. I’d eat a can of Pringles for lunch and street food consisting of potatoes and some pieces of cow’s heart at night. After 4 days I was totally refreshed and moved on to Peru.

Peru –
Cuzco

The
bus ride from Lake Titicaca to Cuzco was really something else. The bus was full of Bolivian cholitas, all carrying loads of blankets with them. They use one blanket to fold some kind of backpack and put like twenty-five other blankets in there. The number of blankets in the bus was ridiculous and the women were fighting over headspaces with other women and tourists, me included. I’m still not sure why they brought so many. Perhaps they sold them somewhere.

Cuzco
is famous for being one of the first cities in Peru and has a rich history. The discovery of Machu Picchu, the ancient lost city high in the mountains, had turbo-boosted the town into a tourist Mecca.

I
checked into a Loki hostel where I met Judith again, the German girl who worked in the Loki in La Paz. When you stay in a Loki hostel you can be sure you’ll have good beds and showers, but also that you’ll have to put up with lots of loud music. I really started to dislike drunkenly backpackers at this point and couldn’t wait to have my own room again.

I
had read on the internet that Peru would be a piece of cake and girls would nearly jump on your dick once you entered a club. This put some pressure in my mind because when I looked on the street I hadn’t noticed any extra attention from girls. How could I? The city was totally packed with hundreds of tourists.

The
first time I went out I had a few drinks at the Loki first and then went to a KFC at the Plaza des Armas afterwards to get some food. Next up was Mama Africas, a place recommended to me by many. I walked in and ordered a beer. After just two sips of the beer I felt a weird feeling in my stomach.
What the hell? Is this what I think it is?
I felt my bowels jumping around in my body. It was time to get the hell out of there and into a bathroom. I paid the cab driver double to step on it back to the hostel and released hell into that poor toilet bowl. This night was ruined and I had to wait it out.

The
next night I went back to Mama Africas and walked into the lounge bar on the first floor. There weren’t many people around but I was advised to get there early and pick up the early gringo–hunters. A few backpackers and some Peruvian couples were the only ones there. I turned around and saw two girls at a table. I went straight in and started talking. They gave me the “who the hell are you?” look but I usually don’t give in to shit tests and just keep talking. My inner game was strong that night. I locked myself in by standing between the small space between the wall and table so it looked the girls were standing around me instead of me trying to pick them up. They ate up my gaming like candy, but not much later I found out that they were sisters. I called bullshit for a while, but they were actually two sisters from Lima on a short holiday. This put me in a difficult situation. They didn’t seem like the type for a mystical sister threesome (if such a thing even exists) and if I gamed one I was sure that the other would cock-block me.

We
went to the clubbing area on the top floor and sat down and drank some beers. I sat in between the girls and had fun with them and looked like a total pimp. They weren’t superhot but OK-looking for their age, late twenties.

I
was making constant eye contact with a black girl who looked like she came from some Caribbean island. Her skin was light brown, she had big curly hair and the biggest, juiciest round ass I had ever seen in my life. Her eyes were big and looked very sensual; her lips were massive and seductive. I wanted her so bad. She was very drunk and with some guy with Rasta hair but I’m sure it wasn’t her boyfriend. Even the two sisters started asking me if I liked her and said I should maybe talk to her. I wasn’t sure if they were shit-testing me again or already decided not to do anything with me anyway.

The
decision to stay with the two sisters and try something with them is one of the dumbest decisions I made on my entire trip. Deep down I knew that nothing was going to happen with them, but I didn’t want to walk out on them since we were having a good time together anyway and it was the pre-selection I got from them that got me the hot Caribbean girl’s attention in the first place. I should have tested the waters with the drunken Caribbean girl a bit. She had an ass to die for, the kind you normally only see in rap or reggeaton videos. I could have gone to the toilet and walk passed her and said a few words to test her out. I might have missed out on one hell of a good lay with this big-assed girl, and I never saw her again in Cuzco. It gave me the feeling that I was getting soft. Back in places like Cambodia and the Philippines I had no troubling walking out on girls and being a total asshole. Over there it’s: “easy come, easy go”, but in South America it’s “hard to get and easy to lose”.

Although
I had a good night with the two sisters and got lots of looks from everyone, I felt I had failed that night. But then, what would I have done if I’d scored one of those girls? I stayed in a fucking hostel with a strict no-guest policy at the door. The night guard wouldn’t let you in if you were not wearing a colorful Loki bracelet.

After
looking around for a few hours the next day I found a cheap hotel very close to Plaza des Armas, where all the nightly action was. I got a two-bed room for only a little bit more than the dorm bed price, just like in La Paz. The room was OK but had shared showers which were horribly cold. From then on I stayed in that hotel but took my laptop and some bathing stuff to the Loki and showered and used the Wi-Fi there. They didn’t take the bracelet when I checked out and I could walk in whenever I wanted. I had some lunch and drinks there so they actually made some money off me.

Judith
told me a story about a guy who checked out of the Loki after one night but left his backpack lying in some dorm. Every night he went looking for an empty bed and slept there. That’s another way to save money.

I
went out again and felt better and more self-assured knowing I had a place to take a girl in the middle of the night. Having to worry about a place is really bad for your inner game and can really make you fuck things up.

During
the day I took some private Salsa lessons from a Dutch girl living in Cuzco, who having her own salsa school there. She was a very cute girl. I’m not the greatest dancer and it took me a while to learn the basics. Dancing in a high altitude and hot city isn’t really easy and I was out of breath a lot. She taught me well and in my mind I could see myself dancing with some Colombian hotties in Cali, the Salsa capital of South America.

Well,
I hadn’t come to Cuzco to go out or take salsa lessons. I came there for the same reason everyone goes there: the world-famous Macchu Picchu temples. Judith and I decided to go together and looked for tours. The tours cost a minimum of $190, and we were both careful with our cash. We wanted to go as cheaply as possible and decided to do the do-it-yourself route. We went to buy tickets at the ticket office outside the center.

Judith
didn’t get out of bed till two in the afternoon and was slow and had to eat first. I told her to hurry up because I had salsa lessons at four o’clock. When we finally arrived at the office it was already past three and there was a massive lineup. I was really grumpy at that moment and the girl right in front of me in the line noticed and gave me a strange look while I was ranting away to Judith. I could hear that she was American. She was even taller than I am and had a big ass but everything was in proportion. She was built and that kind of attracted me at that moment. I thought about what it would be like to have sex with her. This girl might even be stronger than me. Only once before had I been with a girl taller than me, and that was the German girl with massive tits I had a one night stand with in Manila.

The
line started moving and I bought a ticket and took a taxi and rushed to my salsa lesson.

The
next morning Judith and I left early and took a local bus to a small village named Santa Maria. The bus ride took five-and–a-half hours and was a real local experience, including me getting a suitcase dropped on my stomach while sleeping in a reclined seat. The moron on the right side of the bus hadn’t properly stored his suitcase so it came down from the overhead space and smashed hard onto my stomach.

In
Santa Maria we shared a taxi to the hydro station and it was an insane ride. Think high speeds in an old station car next to 200-meter deep cliffs with no railings on the sides. I knew the driver probably drove here every day and knew the road like the back of his hand but it still felt dangerous. Judith was really scared and asked the guy to slow down, which he did for about two minutes before putting the pedal to the metal again.

When
we arrived we still had to walk on the train tracks for over two hours before reaching Aqua Calientes, the small tourist town next to Machu Picchu. We were totally beat after finally arriving and still had to find a room. We found one that wasn’t too overpriced and shared a two-bed room.

We
woke up at five and tried to get tickets for the bus up the mountain to Machu Picchu. The tickets were about eighteen dollars for a return trip and the line was massive. I opted to walk up there to save that money, and our long journey up the steps began. It took us exactly one hour to walk up the old Inca steps and my legs burned from taking the two thousand steps, some of which were knee-high. We only met two other people up the stairs who didn’t take the lazy bus ride up there. I felt strong for yet another accomplishment at high altitudes. This old mountain goat was stronger than I’d thought. We went through the ticket gates and finally stood eye-to-eye with the most famous attraction in South America.

Machu
Picchu is very impressive but not really detailed; it’s all big pieces of rocks but there aren’t any carvings or small bits of work. We also went up Waynu Picchu, a very steep mountain that’s very difficult to climb, especially if you’ve just walked up a couple of thousand steps. Here you had to use both hands and feet. I was proud when I stood on the highest top possible and looked down on a very small Machu Picchu.

We
climbed back down the mountain and the steps to Aqua Calientes. After staying one more night we walked back the train tracks for three hours the next day to the hydro station. There we found a minivan going straight back to Cuzco. We bargained a cheap price and sat in the minivan with a group of annoying Spaniards for seven hours. Then Juditth and I celebrated our exhausting trip with some giant kebabs. We had only paid $110 each, including all transport, the $50 entrance tickets, two nights in a hotel room, and all our food and drink; but more importantly we did it all by ourselves. It required some giant struggles, but those things always leave me feeling proud and make me mock those wimpy regular tourists with their guided tours and train and bus rides straight to the complex.