Thai travel writing:

⛔️ ✋

(Language or scenes may offend)

Introduction

What you need is a good massage’, said the Dutch nurse. We were sharing a beer, in an open fronted restaurant along Chang Khlan Street– a meandering sprawl that dissects the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. It was late evening and a matter of feet away was the night market with all its cacophony.  I had flaked out beneath a fan that gently whirled away above our table; not that this was able to stem the seeping of sweat down my brow. My bones ached from a day’s minor exertions. The humidity was taking its toll on me.

‘Good massage?’ I asked. ‘Why, are you offering?’

She laughed, ‘No, I’m sorry. Don’t think I can help you there.’

Well, I hadn’t really expected her to oblige, not least because her boyfriend was sat at the same table.

She continued, ‘I’m just telling you that there is a really good respectable massage parlour – no hanky panky – at the top of this road, where they will pound, tone and hone up every muscle in your body. They’ll take away all those aches and pains, and freshen you up – you look like you could do with it. It won’t cost the earth.’ 

Bangkok, Phra Borom Maha Ratchawang Subdistrict, Phra Nakhon District, Bangkok, 10200, Thailand

Chang Mai, Rotfai Road, Nong Pa Khrang, Saraphi District, Chiang Mai Province, 5000, Thailand

Act one

At the end of the next day, still perspiring and with a pair of legs that were as weary as hell, l tottered over to the recommended establishment.

As I opened the front door, the chilled air conditioning took my breath away. Not a bad introduction to heaven, I thought.

Heaven definitely featured in the course of my sojourn here, although it was interspersed with quite a bit of hell and a fair amount of purgatory.

One- or two-hour massage sessions were on offer. Being the cautious type I opted for the shorter stint; paid my money; was given a one-hour ticket and then escorted up a staircase to the first floor. The member of staff who escorted me up these steps was not bad looking, to say the least. Was this in trim employee to be my masseur? Get a grip Rainford, I told myself; you are not here for that. It’s not that kind of place; think clean now.

At the top of the stairs, my escort pointed down a corridor and said, ‘Sir, go to the end, then right please.’ And with that she was gone.

Oh well dream on.

The end of the corridor opened into a large changing area. Another member of staff stood in front of a reception desk. I handed over my receipt to her and she tore off one corner before handing it back. Again, she was definitely above average on the old points scale. Come on make my day, I wanted to say.

She handed over a two-piece suit, similar to a very thin, lightweight judo outfit, and then pointed in the direction of the changing cubicles.

Two minutes later, kitted out in my massage attire, I emerged from the cubicle. Alas the receptionist stayed put, merely pointing down another corridor. At the end of this stretch I came to a pair of drawn curtains, which obscured the entrance into the room beyond. I pulled the curtains apart and found myself in a large hall lined with mattresses. Those that were occupied were hidden from view by curtains drawn around metal rails, which were suspended from the ceiling. This giant hanger of a room resembled a hospital ward.

The place had an eerie silence to it, with not a grunt or a groan to be heard.

So what the hell was I meant to do now? ‘Will the real masseur please stand up,’ I wanted to shout.

A chair scraped nearby. ‘Hi, how are you? Your ticket please.’

I fumbled in my pocket for this apparent passport to pleasure and handed it over to the latest female to make my acquaintance.

‘Are you the masseur?’ I stammered

‘Sure.’

She wore a name tag, but my understanding of the Thai alphabet is not up to much, so I’ll just have to refer to her as Mindi.

I doubt if I could have done better if I had gone on a year’s worth of Blind Date shows with Cilla Black. This twenty-something-shapely lady, with her stunning features was certainly the pick of the bunch that I had seen since stepping in off the street.

‘So what do you think?’ asked Cilla from the depths of my subconsciousness.

‘Looks like I definitely made the right choice Cilla.’

‘Well let’s see where you are both going on your date.’

‘This way please,’ said Mindi bringing me back into the real world. ‘Please come behind me.’

‘But of course; whatever you wish.’

With a fair wiggle of her hips, she sauntered over to a vacant mattress.

I lay down, not sure what to expect.’

For the first twenty minutes, either on my back or front, I had my arms, legs and neck stretched and pushed intro positions I did not know existed.

This did not feel much of a passport to pleasure, more like a taste of Thai torture. If pain is your game, you should have taken up dentistry, I wanted to quip. 

‘Please,’ I said, ‘there must have been some kind of mistake with my ticket – I was only meant to be having fifteen minutes worth.’ But the sadistic masseur had me pinned me down on the mattress. She was in full flow with her excruciating manoeuvres and remonstrating seemed pointless, not least because her English repertoire was limited to those initial exchanges of ‘ticket please’ and ’this way.’

‘I’ll teach you a lesson young man’, she was maybe thinking, ‘How dare you come in here with your carnal thoughts.’

‘I’m really very sorry,’ I wanted to grovel, ‘I promise never to have another carnal thought again in my life. Can’t you just let me go home?’

As Act One drew to a close, I sat up thinking I was about to be released, but rather than undoing my chains, the masseur forced me onto my back again. I flopped down into horizontal position for some temporary respite.

Mindi swung herself off the mattress, muttering something in Thai, which might have been along the lines of ‘I’m very sorry about all that, but you see things have to get worse, before they can get better.’

Act two

After the hell I had just experienced, my expectations for ACT TWO were as flat as the mattress, but as it turned out, things did start to get better. She peeled off the top half of my attire and followed this up with a prolonged period of sublime pummelling, kneading, and random probing of various bodily zones, although strictly above the nether- nether regions you understand.

Silky fingers were slip sliding around the upper part of my anatomy – a kind of physical heaven, without sex.

‘Please,‘ I wanted to interrupt, ‘there appears to have been some kind of mistake with my ticket – I asked for the two hour session.’

I started to emit a few sounds of appreciation. ‘Ooh yes,’ I groaned. ‘Hmmm, please don’t stop.  Oh excellent.’  All right Damian, I told myself, pull yourself together man – It’s not that good.

And indeed, I must admit, there were parts of ACT TWO which were more like purgatory than heaven. These would occur when the masseur’s hands slid down my frame and started pummelling the spots where I was ticklish to say the least.

I‘d look with horror as Mindi’s hands came to rest on one of these locations. Please move on – keep going, I wanted to instruct her. But her fingers would start to twinge and poke the offending region. I’d let out a loud yell or giggle, followed by, ‘Please no, not there!’

She’d look up with a demur smile, which seemed to say something like, ‘Strange English boy. Not many people say no to this part of my Act.’

I’d breathe a sigh of relief, as her hands moved on, but then, oh no, two minutes later she’d find another Achille’s heel.

‘No please,’ I’d plead. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

Death by tickling, or ACT ONE’s earlier version of death by stretched limbs? I would have been hard pressed to chose.

Act three

Time for Mindi’s finale.

Her hands started with a caressing and tweaking of my shoulder blades, before commencing their slow journey down south. A couple of minutes later her fingers arrived at my chest and continued their needling – not a protest or giggle from me to be heard.

I thought back to the torture of ACT ONE and wanted to say, ‘See you can be kind and gentle when you want to be.’

Her hands slithered their way down to my abdomen. ‘Ooh, that’s nice,’ I started to say, but then realised that there was some kind of trend taking place. Her hands had moved, from my shoulders to my chest, and now onto my belly. It seemed like one way traffic – when was she going to turn off or do a U-turn?

Mindi’s hands had originally been spread out, resting near both sides of my body, but now they had moved inwards, with the fingers from one hand only being a couple of inches away from those on the other.

I envisaged her sliding hands tracing a route map of Thailand on my front. Maybe my shoulder blades represented Chiang Mai, our current northern location; my chest could have been more central Bang Kok; and my tummy the southern border town of Hatyai.

Wasn’t it about time she broke her journey for the night? Or was her final objective some sensuous city mid-way between the belly and the knees?

‘Please Madam,’ I wanted to urgently suggest, ‘perhaps you should consider turning sharp right and heading for the coastal resort of Hua-Hin, where it is much more of a family affair.’

Her journey to the Deep South had not slowed down. The ribbing and poking of my flesh just beneath the abdomen continued.

And now I really did start to worry; you see I have to admit I was not alone with the masseur. I had brought along my inseparable lifetime companion, Tommy the Todger – well I could hardly have left him back in the hotel. Like myself, for a large part of the proceedings, he had laid flat on his back; although unlike me he had been well and truly asleep; out for the count you might say. However as the masseur snaked her way bit by bit to those nether- nether regions, Tommy started to wake up, not with a cough and a splutter, more with a slight twinge and a twinkle.

Up to this point, I did have a modicum of confidence left in me, that this was a respectable parlour – no really naughty stuff, at least not by Thai standards. However, I was starting to wonder whether her latest exploits were an extra, to be added onto the final bill. 

By now I was getting quite agitated, with Tommy’s tingling being on the increase – it was becoming difficult to hide my embarrassment.

I tried to communicate with him through my own brand of transcendental meditation, ‘Don’t you dare rise to the occasion,’ was the thought I tried to pass on. But either he could not pick my mental signal up through those thin trousers, or if he could, he was determined after his latest prolonged period of slumber, not to miss out on a slice of the action.

The masseur continued to edge ever closer to the chap. He might not have been able to see what was going on, but he could sense it all right. Her fingers were now a couple of millimetres away from his sides and, no doubt about it, he was getting out of control, putting on weight, and not just around his mid rift, but along the length of his modest column. To make matters worse, Mindi might have been a couple of feet away from the base of the mattress, but she had prostrated herself over my body, with her head a matter of inches away from my genitals. With her hands stationary, she stared straight at Tommy for a minute, as though she was having a rest, or was it a laugh. Her pummelling continued to within half a fingernail of his sides.

I could be a real puritan and say that by now Mindi was all too close for comfort. However,  it wasn’t as though this part of her act was proving to be unpleasurable – far from it. But, the last thing I wanted –  if this apparently pleasant down to earth woman was a respectable lady, merely following the company’s established method of dishing out a kosher massage – the last thing I wanted was for Tommy to stand up with a full blooded salute and shock this poor lass. But what could I possibly do to stop it. I was in the hands of Mother Nature.

And so, as Mindi proceeded with her pummelling, the old blighter continued his meteoric rise to fame. ‘Careful,’ I wanted to boast to her, ‘He might take your eye out.’

Throughout this escapade, my trousers, unlike my jacket had not been removed. However so thin and transparent was the material, that a full-blown reaction would have been impossible to disguise, especially with the masseur’s eyes, nose and mouth, but a ‘length’ away from Tommy.

Surely, she must have noticed his presence by now; although to be fair to him, he had managed to exercise a bit of restraint – he did not look so much like the Eiffel tower, more like the leaning tower of Pisa. It was a relative calm before the storm.

A good telling off and a slap around the face from the masseur could only be a few seconds away.

‘You dirty pervert I was waiting for her to shout. How dare you lie down in front of me, and get such a stonker on. Get out of here, before I have you thrown out!’

As a matter of urgency, I resorted instead to a more effective course of action, flooding my mind with a series of not exactly pleasurable thoughts, along the following lines: 

‘Damian, you prat, you did not weed the garden before you came away. What kind of state is it going to be in now?’

‘Damian you idiot, you forgot to set up that direct debit for the TV licence before you left home. How could you forget?’;

‘And the dusting, when did you last do that you twat. Mind you that alcove under the stairs is always a bit of a difficult one to get around.’

‘And as for that pile of washing you’ll have to do when you get back….. Now, which detergent are you going to use? Can you remember which brands you have left in that cupboard under the sink, and how many loads will it take?’

Finally, I went for the ultimate antidote to erotic thought:

‘Yes, that Audit Commission performance indicator is quite something. You know the one: the number of days major council roadworks were in place per mile of principal road. Now think hard Damian about the essential systems needed to monitor that one – but hang about, wasn’t it kilometres, rather than miles. Think back to the ‘97/98 direction now. Which code was it? ACPI J3a  small ‘ii’, or maybe it was small ‘i’. Come on now, pay attention; this is important.’

Yes, performance indicators – the very stuff of erections. I don’t think so.

Was Council roadworks the straw that broke Tommy’s back? I’ll never know, for shortly after these mundane thoughts seeped through my mind, the masseur drew matters to a close, stood up with her demur smile – or was it a smirk – and offered a slight bow.

The rise and fall of Pisa’s most famous edifice was complete.

Seen it, done it, bought the T-shirt, once is enough I thought as I stepped back onto the street.

REPRISE

At the end of the next afternoon, following a long hike to the post office to weigh a letter, my legs were buckling again.

‘What you need,’ something inside of me said, ‘is a refreshing rubdown – something to soothe your muscles. How about another massage?’

‘No, I don’t want to go through all that again,’ I told my conscience.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Mmmm, I better not really. I don’t think my guardian angel would forgive me.’

‘You don’t have to decide straight away. You could always phone a friend.’

‘Alright, well perhaps it would be interesting to go to that other parlour, just around the corner from yesterdays gaff – but strictly for research purposes you understand? – to compare and contrast.’

‘But of course.’

And so for a bit of variety, I went to this other parlour.

I entered through the front door, alas no air-conditioning.

I paid my money and was escorted into a claustrophobic room of about fourteen-foot square. A fan whirled away slowly above my head, but the air it wafted was clammy and humid.

‘Hello, please change into these sir.’ The woman who offered me the massage attire was, I thought, if anything a notch up on yesterday’s masseur – if that was possible.

I changed and the same lady said, ‘Over to this mattress please.’

Given the standard of my latest masseur, who cared about the dingy surroundings? ‘Cilla, you’ve done me proud once again,’ I thought.

I laid down, but instead of toying around with my front the masseur disappeared through a draped doorway. Moments later she came back with the real masseur – a woman who was at least a quarter of a century older than me.

Again it was a massage in three Acts. Each of these more or less mirrored yesterday’s performances. However, none of this was in the slightest bit pleasurable.

‘Just get on with it!’ I wanted to shout.

Forty minutes later, we arrived at the grand finale, with the ageing masseur’s hands gliding their way towards Tommy. But he wasn’t playing ball this time – for a moment I even thought that I had left him back at the hotel.

‘Tommy, where the hell are you?’  I did my best to galvanise him – ‘Tits! Arses! A quick shag around the back’  – I tried to convey this lurid dream to him, but it was no use; my psychic powers failed me. He wasn’t going to make a centre stage appearance; certainly not for this old bat; not at any time.

Photographs?

Why aren’t there any? Are you being serious?

Damian Rainford

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