So its easy to feel guilty about not actually doing anything while in foreign countries, save shout and drink and whizz round in contrived vehicles. “Shouldn’t I be seeing temples?”, “What did that guidebook say about feeling sorry for the poor souls wh o sit and watch American movies in bars all day?”. Well I don’t feel too guilty, as long as one can achieve one thing per day, and that not including getting arseholed. So yesterday , we managed to get a visa for Vietnam, a cause for celebration with some lovely Thai people we met. And their brothers, and their brothers’ work colleagues. Who were actually quite scary when we happened upon them in a very dark alley, striding purposefully towards us in identical shirts like some extras from a bad gang warfare movie. The getting of a visa only really entailed being at the reception of our hotel at 6:30pm, but you’ve got to start small, right?

Today, we only managed to move to a cheaper hotel and pick up some laundry. Maybe a smidgen of guilt could start to creep in, I thought. So I had my chest waxed, for no other reasons than I’d never had it done before, and we were walking past a waxing shop. I got the impression that they’d never had a chest wax request before, as the proprietor of the waxing shop walked over to me as I proposed this idea to her outside her establishment, lifted up my shirt and poked me a bit. She came up with a price – everything can be had for a price in Bangkok, and before I could figure out if the idea was a good one, I was lying on my back being talced.

It wasn’t particularly painful, being smeared with boiling wax and then having the hair around your belly button and nipples wrenched out. Well that’s not really true, but it was an impression I was trying to cultivate with the hot spatula-ed torturer who was frantically defoliating my torso. She didn’t even ask me for my name, my rank or my serial number. But those are the only bits of information she would be able to extract between my clenched teeth. As she soon ran out of hair, and her suggestion that my armpits would make a good next target met with stiff opposition.

So no guilt today, and I’m off to go disco dancing right now, and hopefully to avoid dark alleys, bar girls and pink hotel rooms with mirrors on the ceiling.