I have recently learned of a phenomenon amongst male travelers that, while in no way new or surprising, involved a level of detail I was not prepared for. In what can only be described as one of the more surreal conversations I’ve had in recent memory, two Canadian travelers explained their real motivation for traveling the world: collecting flags.
Let me preface this with a little background, set the mood so to speak. I was in a small fishing town in Colombia with my then current travel buddy Keefe. This town of Taganga was completely run over with gringo backpackers, something we weren’t exactly prepared for. Venezuela may have prepared me for a number of things, but because of its lack of foreign tourists, it certainly did not hint at the hordes of backpackers following the gringo route through South America. Colombia was my first stop outside of Venezuela and its Caribbean coast was quite a surprise. I went from studying Spanish, trying to stay afloat in Venezuela to translating and negotiating boat prices for clueless backpackers in a mere 24 hours. Thus, three days after crossing the border from Venezuela to Colombia, Keefe and I found ourselves eating dinner with two Canadian travelers, Rob and Mike. Rob was 31 and was actually living in London, about to start business school. Mike (26) had been traveling the world for the last 4 years and was now working as a travel guide writer in Central and South America. The conversation turned to flagging when Mike casually mentioned he’d gotten his Colombian flag a long time ago. It was like he’d given Rob their fraternity handshake. Rob’s eyes lit up and he explained in graphic detail how he’d gotten his Colombian flag the week before. It was only then I understood that collecting flags had nothing to do with traveling but with sleeping with women from as many countries as possible. It turns out the rules are simple. The goal is to get as many flags as possible by sleeping with women before (one presumes) old age or death. They both agreed that you can’t pay and can’t sleep with men. A small debate ensued about the question of quantity versus quality but it was agreed that quality was important. This set Mike off. He eagerly told us about a friend of his known in their social circle as “The Legend”. “The Legend” is from New Zealand but Mike met him living in Thailand. While only in his late twenties, Mike told us “The Legend” had collected 43 flags up to the last time he had talked to him. As Mike started to explain the number is most certainly higher now, Rob interrupted to say he had 37 flags. “Wow, really?”, Mike said. You could see the admiration in his eyes. “I only have 17 but you’ve got 5 years on me”, Mike defended himself, visibly embarrassed. Keefe and I kept quiet. I remembered a different flag game I had played with friends in 5th grade where we compared all the states we had been to in the U.S. and competed to see who had the most. There were some disturbing similarities between the two “games”.
Mike continued with stories about “The Legend” who he also described as a “prolific shagger”. You can’t make this stuff up. Mike told us of a night in Thailand where “The Legend” went home with a lady-boy from a club because “you don’t have to work for it and you get way better blow-jobs”. Another night “The Legend” spent the evening with a hideous girl because he found out she was from Turkmenistan. Although “The Legend” was seeming more desperate and persistent than legendary from these stories, the tales helped segway the two travelers into various discussions about which flags are most difficult to obtain, which countries have the ugliest and prettiest girls, gringo hunters, and of course, craziest places to have sex. Mike thought he had the story of the meal when he bragged he had had sex in a Buddhist temple in Thailand, but Rob topped him again with a boast that he had taken a girl’s anal virginity in a Polish convent. Rob had a thing for Eastern Europeans while Mike preferred the Colombians. They both agreed that North Americans were the ugliest women.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Mike said. “You can always find beautiful women in any city. The question is how many.” According to these two world travelers the numbers are not good in North America. Rob postulated that it all came back to how ugly English women are. The Vikings stole all the beautiful women from England (explaining why Northern Europeans and Scandinavians are so good looking), leaving a country full of plain-janes. These beastly Brits brought ugliness with them to North America and it stuck. Mike started to say something about racial mixing, caught himself, and thought better of it. While at first the promise of a discussion about the purity of race made me cringe, I eventually found Rob’s historical explanation amusing.
When the two flaggers inevitably found themselves debating whether Mongolians are hot, I couldn´t help but imagine a pair of Mongolian women debating the ugliness of Canadians. For the record, Mike looks like a poor man´s Adam Sandler, and Rob could easily be a sit-in for an anonymous frat guy at Michigan State. The guys traded a few more stories about gringo hunters (local women who deliberately go after gringo travelers- apparently very common in Colombia) before Mike got so excited he laid it all out.
“Travel writing just pays for my real passion, which is sleeping with women.” Rob clearly had the same passion. And they certainly didn’t lack conviction or foresight. They took their passions seriously.
There are probably numerous conclusions one could draw from this conversation, societal flaws it highlights, but I will save my judgements for the inevitable venereal diseases that will draw their own conclusions of these guys. Really the conversation highlights the numerous single male travelers we met in Colombia in particular, but really all over South America, who have made it painfully clear in the first two minutes of conversation that they are not traveling so much as looking for women. This may be the lighter side of sex tourism in south America, steering away from child prostitution and instead focusing on consensual flag collecting. Could be worse, but it also could be much, much better.
-Jake
