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

give form to my escapism needs.
    For years I thought that if I saved enough money or became rich the hot girls and successful life would come to me. This dream was now gone and then one day I saw some poor-looking guy with a really hot girl on the back of his bicycle. They were laughing and having fun and suddenly reality hit me in the face. It wasn’t money that was keeping me from success; it was me and my social behavior. I wasn’t an easy-talking or popular guy – I’ve always been very self-conscious and reacted way too much to other people’s opinions about me, arguing every time I disagreed with someone, taking comments about me far too seriously, virtually unable to take a joke. Although I was able to get a girl from time to time, the periods in between girlfriends were full of depression and low self esteem. I was way too hung up on following “the rules” and my happiness depended on having a girlfriend and living happily ever after.
    A colleague told me about the trips he had made to India and some other countries and I was briefly introduced to an intern who had just traveled for six months in Australia. I remember seeing him only once or twice. I didn’t to talk to him much but his cool and laid back appearance intrigued me. Dare I say, I was fucking jealous of this young and confident surfer dude type of guy. Jealousy is a very rare emotion for me so it hit me hard.
    Suddenly I became interested in traveling and remembered that in the ten previous years my only vacations were one weekend in Paris in 2002 with a girlfriend and two weeks in Greece in 2007 with my long term girlfriend. Every other time my summer holidays rolled around I was either single or my lousy friends backed out of our plans to go somewhere. Two trips in ten years: that sounds really pathetic and it was. I spent my vacation days at home surfing the internet or watching movies. Did I already mention that for years I was a major pussy by not even wanting to listen to people telling me to travel by myself? The thought of traveling alone had horrified me for nearly a decade but now I decided to do something about it.
    In the summer of 2008 I signed up for a group tour to India and Nepal and went there with about twenty other Dutch people for twenty-four days. At least I wouldn’t be totally alone. The trip was amazing and disastrous at the same time. I got so sick that I lost 25 pounds and by the end looked like a concentration camp survivor. But despite my terrible attempts of getting with a few girls in my group and all the horror of being sick for weeks and being forced to keep travelling in stinking hot buses and disgusting trains in the most unhygienic country in the world, I still got a taste of travelling and I liked it a lot. I discovered that other cultures fascinated me.
    After spending a month recovering, I was back working at the office. Well, working is an overstatement; most of the time I had a pretty easy life there. The company was doing poorly because of the financial crisis, though in my opinion it was mostly due to bad management. In the two and a half years I worked there we had six re-organizations and I survived them all. I had five different bosses and I managed to get a lot of stuff out of them, something most colleagues didn’t appreciate, especially the ones who’d been working there for years but were too dumb or timid to profit from their job. I was getting paid a great salary, got a suitcase, a laptop, and company phone, bought myself a good car and a quality suit – but most importantly, for the first time in my life I felt like a somebody instead of a nobody.
    My social skills were improving fast but not with girls; I didn’t have a girlfriend for a one and a half year. Although I was dating a lot via dating sites, I was getting no results, except for a few fuglies and one attractive girl who lived in another city and broke my heart after a few weeks. I highly pedistalized her.
    One day I went out with