Perhaps its because of the advertising I have been subjected to from glossy magazines, I don’t know. But there’s something about health centres that I find strangely compelling. Perhaps it’s because I’m a hypochondriac, and I drink all the time, and want a short cut way of feeling better. So the fact that there’s a dirt cheap hot spring resort in Nha Trang at Thap Ba meant I was there like a shot. Having spent 13 hours on a crap bus from Hoi An unable to sleep for the constant lurching and beeping, meant I signed up for a massage too. Buses over long distances in foreign countries are okay, don’t get me wrong, but only if they have character, and your discomfort is because of local people with live goats and chickens on their laps. When the bus is uncomfortable because there are too many seats, and your neighbours are all French, it doesn’t have the same romantic faraway appeal.

So a bath of hot mud was in order, in a wooden bath overlooking some mountains. Very nice, except when you got it in your eyes. Quite funny to see normally prudish Vietnamese people running around covered in lycra and mud. The prudishness was still present in some of the victorian bathing costumes, but the mood was light-hearted in the mineral pools and blasting wall. This was nothing more than high pressure hot water delivered horizontally between two walls about 80cm apart. There was a water fall to stand under – inexplicably hot mineral water blasting away any cobwebs, and hopefully some of those nasty toxins that make you get a bit irritable after four nights of alcohol abuse.

But the massage was the piece de resistence. This was delivered in a small cell, at the end of a corridor of similar bed-sized cells, much like a prison wing. I could hear the Irish guy next door being called handsome by his masseuse, and prompted into action, the woman walking up and down my back told me that I too was handsome. Apparently this was a health farm for only handsome men. After various knees to the neck and elbows to the spine, I felt much better. After dressing to leave, my masseuse came back to escort me out of the prison. Spotting my hideous manga shirt (all my clothes are in the wash), she started hollering, and from the closed cells I was passing, other masseuses would pop out to see it. Much pulling of my beard followed an stroking of my lovely nylon threads, as I negotiated my way down the walkway, like some new recruit being welcomed to death row, batting away clawing hands and short women.

All I can say in my defence is that I bought the shirt when I was srunk on the way to a club in KK, and the beard thing is a result of 9 weeks on an island without a mirror. I was going to have it amputated and leave it to medical science, but I think I’ll sell it now instead.