Thai massage – the only real antidote to Beer Chang and its nasty psychoactive ingredients:

Its like yoga, only without having to have any skill or rehearse. I can say this in complete confidence, as I have been to yoga classes twice and thought it was hard. I have been to about 10 Thai massages and find it quite easy. Not that it is without suffering, and I’m not talking about the painful exercise of repeating to your taxi driver that you don’t want body massage, but thai massage. No, Thai massage involves being stretched and strained every which way, often by a tiny superhuman woman. There’s lymph manipulation, and it seems the only way to get Beer Chang out of your system.

In fact, during a few massages I have experienced a feeling that something evil has been released from its lurking place in my fat canals. And I have felt light headed, dizzy, had pins and needles and even cramp in one foot, mid-massage, because of the wretched poisons that Beer Chang contains. But I digress, Thai massage is ace.

In classy places, you get air con, foot washes, clean pyjamas, and your own room with a mat. In less classy places, there may be a room full of mats, sometimes separated by curtains, sometimes not. And then the little masseuse transforms herself into a Black and Decker Workmate. She’ll use her toes, shins, knees, elbows, heels and thumbs to send you into a state of floaty bliss. Sometimes she’ll be behind you, tugging at things to make them crack. Sometimes below you, balancing your back over her knees. Other times, there’ll be a foot in some cranny in your body as she pulls with all her considerable might at a limb.

Even the elevator music, which included a Muzak Elvis soundtrack couldn’t ruin the two hours of yoga for lazy people. People who would buy one of those electrical abdominal exercisers from a shopping channel, as they couldn’t be arsed to do sit-ups. Hey, I was bored okay when I was working alone overseas.

Anyway. One such Thai massage emporium in Bangkok is adjacent to a Body Massage emporium. So you might leave one side feeling all floaty and good natured, and end up being herded into the human zoo side. Its incredible. The one I saw was like a fish tank with two halves. Rather than fishes, there were laydeeees on display. Ladies with numbers on them. One side catered for mainstream tastes – these were the 3500 Baht ‘superstars’, the little pimp informed me. The other was a bit more exotic. Or perhaps the grandma was there to make the superstars look good. I don’t know. But I gather the idea is to choose a number, and go for a ‘body massage’ upstairs…..