When in Bangkok... Get Massaged by Anthony Sattin
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I am lying naked on a white mattress, surrounded by plenty of teak and polished stone, while a Thai woman kneels to anoint me with herbal slop. I can smell the camphor and there's lemongrass, tamarind and things she won't divulge. Head to toe, front and back. When she has finished, I have an inkling of how it must feel to be one of Nigella Lawson's chickens, buttered and prepared for the oven.
Suitably marinated, I am covered by an electrically-heated wrap and slow-cooked for an hour, while the woman - Khun Pai - robs the last of my reserve by giving me a head massage. Later she takes me to the shower and then returns me to the mattress where, now stern as a dominatrix, she asks if I want it soft or hard. “Hard,” I tell her.
That was where the fantasy ended. I was in the Oriental Spa, not some back-street parlour, and the massage was as chaste and as proper as Bangkok gets. Khun Pai ordered me into a pair of cropped-leg pyjamas and gave me a traditional Thai massage which, contrary to its reputation, involved the kneading, pounding and cracking of every inch of my body except my genitals. By the time I tottered out into Bangkok's boom and dazzle, my body felt as light and supple as a temple dancer's, my mind razor sharp.
It's easy to see how Thai Massage turned into a euphemism for Easy Sex. Traditional Thai massage is more than just hands on. It is physical in the extreme. It is also therapeutic and masseurs are trained to use hands, feet, knees and elbows as part of a cure.
But when American GIs on R&R in Bangkok during the Vietnam War wanted sex, enterprising Thai businessmen provided it with a local flavour, via the Thai massage parlour. Then Emanuelle came along and gave it a Vaseline-smeared, soft-porn image. Once confirmed, the fantasy has proved hard to shift, as I discovered in a massage parlour in the coastal resort of Hua Hin. On the other side of the plastic curtain, a young German arrived with the masseuse of his choice. “Lie down and put these on,” she told him, throwing cropped pyjamas on the mattress. “I love you,” he declared. “No,” she explained, “not love. Massage.”
Traditional massage, as I knew from Khun Pai, was something else and nowhere does it come more traditional that at Wat Po, Bangkok's oldest temple. Wat Po's reputation as the pre-eminent training centre for masseurs dates back to 1832, when King Rama III had the theory of Thai massage inscribed on its walls in a series of diagrammatic images of the human body. This is where many of the city's best masseurs trained. It is also a popular place to go for a massage, so popular that there was a long queue of people in front of me.
While I waited, one of the managers, an old man, asked me to guess his age. “Eighty,” I told him, although I thought he was probably younger. “Wrong,” he laughed, “ninety-four,” and he produced his papers to prove it. So what was his secret? “Five things. I only eat vegetables and fruit, I shit straightaway, don't smoke, only have sex with my wife and exercise every day. Oh, and I come for massage.” It was, as he saw it, an integral part of a healthy life.
There is no undressing at Wat Po, no showers or oils or fancy touches and while the masseurs talk amongst themselves, you'd have to be overly blessed with imagination to launch an Emanuelle-style fantasy. With a yapping American backpacker beside me and the thermometer edging up towards the midday sun, it was all I could do to concentrate while my masseur got me into a half-Boston and wrenched my back out of joint and then back in again.
Rumour has it that the ultimate massage is to be had at the hands of a blind masseur. I tracked one down to an alley in the sex-trade quarter of Patpong. The dimly-lit room in the Marble House had some twenty mattresses, with curtains between to provide privacy. The likeness to a hospital ward was appropriate; the cries and grunts of the other clients were of pain not pleasure. My masseur, a young man in dark glasses, felt his way towards me, placed a clock on the floor and began without ceremony to work on my feet. As with yoga, swimming, raving and many other prolonged physical exertions, I became so relaxed during the massage that my mind floated off into limbo. And if it hadn't been for his speaking clock announcing time, I would have been prepared to believe I had been two minutes not two hours under his hands.
The room had emptied while I was being massaged. Out in the street the night market was packing up, restaurants emptying, trade in sex picking up. 'Massage?' my taxi driver asked. 'I told him where I had been. 'I mean real massage,' and to make his point he formed his left hand into a circle and jerked his right-hand index finger in and out of it. “No,” I replied, knowing better than to discuss, “I just had one.”