Day 267 - The massage

Now, before I go any further, can I just urge you to read the following post. Right, I'm not even sure I can do the whole situation justice in written words, but I'll do my best. But its probably worth it.

So, we've not left Ho Chi Minh City yet. We're here for another couple of days, and shacked up in the poshest hotel in town. Its a normal day - steaming hot, by the pool, ordering room service to deliver our sandwiches and cans of beer to the poolside, on the 24th floor roof-top, overlooking the swarming city of motorbikes and pollution. The hotel's pretty special - taking in a nightclub on the 3rd floor, 2 restaurants, a gym, a beauty studio and 2 massage suites. Its kinda fancy.

The guys from london decide they all fancy a massage at the hotel's 8th floor suite (the bigger of the two, covering a whole floor). Its cheap (around 7 quid) and is just an elevator ride away. So we grab out 10% discount vouchers from the room, shower off the pool water we've become so accustomed to, and make our way to the 8th floor.

Two important (yet without hindsight unnoticed) pieces of information came to light at that moment. Number (1): Gender segregation. girls are redirected to the 24th floor 'ladies' suite. Men remain on the 8th floor. Cat, sam and bonnie, begrudgingly, head upstairs, whilst ady and I hand over the vouchers and make our way into the suite. And important point number (2): The ladies suite, on the same floor as the gym and pool, can only be a quarter of the size of one floor. Its tiny. The men's suite. however, occupies an entire floor - shower cubicles, changing rooms, jacuzzis, steam rooms, saunas, water fountains, massage rooms, buffet area, lounge and cinema - stretching away behind the reception desk. These piece of information are subtle. Ady seems to have got the message. I'm oblivious though.

So Ady and I are directed into the changing rooms where we're shown a locker and invited to stash all of our clothes and take a shower. Nervous laughter. "Can we wear swimming trunks?" I ask. No. Our changing room assistant seems unimpressed. Ady and I, bessie mates for a good 3 years now, have never seen each other naked. We agree that I'll go and shower first, and he'll follow afterwards. I'm embarrassed, but its fine.

And 2 minutes later we're in some light trunks supplied by the hotel and being led off to different booths to have our massages. We're booked in for an hour, and after taking a seat on the bench to wait for my masseuse, I wait about 5 minutes until a pretty young (18-year-old?) vietnamese girl comes into the room, inviting me to lie down on my front, dimming the lights and grabbing the oil off the side.

Important piece of information number (3): The room is probably about 10 foot square - plenty big enough for a massage table. But the table is sat right in the corner of the room - with less than half a metre between the wall and the table on both sides. As soon as the girl starts getting to work on my legs, she's squeezing past my feet which are overhanging the short table. At one point she even mentions "you're so tall", which makes me splutter a bit as I try not to laugh whilst staring at the floor. Its awkward. I'm worried that I'm poking my toes into places they shouldn't be going. But she doesn't seem phased, so I'm not going to be.

Within minutes, however, she's mounted the table, straddling me from behind, pulling my shorts down to expose almost my whole bum and pounding out ever knot that my back has ever had with her entire body weight. She's good - not AMAZING - but good. I'm not so keen on the bum massage section, which was possibly a little more intimate than I had expected. But still, it was novel. And before long, I hear a faint "mister?", and look up to realise she's ordering me onto my front to continue the muscle busting onslaught.

And here's where things start to get messy. My masseuse is busy massaging my thighs, again maybe a little more intimately than I was expecting, when she stops. I'm looking at the ceiling, concentrating on relaxing, when she says to me...

- "woo you like feschial massagch"

In what had been almost 30 minutes of total silence, I manage to misjudge the volume of my voice and boom out

- "A FACIAL? OH, NO THANKS"

Immediately, she's leaning forward, gesturing me to quieten down. and clearing her throat she asks again...

- "woo you like SPECIAL massagch"

and, as if I wouldn't understand the distinction, she give me two light taps on very uninterested private parts and lets out a (somewhat offensive) giggle.

I laugh nervously, and this time in a hushed whimper, tell her "no thanks". another double tap to clarify I understood, and I repeat the "no thank you" and laugh again as if making the whole situation far less embarrassing for her, and revert to looking at the ceiling and concentrating on relaxing again. How embarassing. For her *and* me.

Or was it. Within 10 minutes of this, the massage was over (20 minutes short of its time). The remainder wasn't nearly as good as before. No effort. No care. No enjoyment. At one point she's rubbing my neck like she's stroking a dog. And then out of the blue, she's up, the lights go up, the oils put back on the shelf and she's pulled out a receipt book.

- "you tip me"

OK. right, so the whole thing was, like, 5 quid, so I lay down a quid as a tip - that's 20% guys. Nice and generous.

- "not enough. i'm pretty girl. you have dollar? you have 100."

she's turned on me. and with that, she rips up the 1-quid-tip receipt and directs me to write a bigger tip on another piece of paper. I'm stumbling over my conversion - we've only been here 2 days. Did I get the conversion wrong? perhaps I've just tipped 10p instead of 1 quid. I didn't know what to do. she's kinda angry. In a moment of passion I write down 100 dong [3quid] and explain I have nothing more. she reluctantly takes the receipt, falsely(?) smiles and directs me out of the tiny room with the table still sat awkwardly close to the wall.

I'm kinda messed up - not sure if I've been ripped off, kinda buzzing on the whole humourousness of the situation, waiting for ady to finish up so I could explain it all to him. But he's not out yet. I shower. I sit in the jacuzzi for 20 minutes. I shower again. I sit it out in the steam room for 10 minutes, then a sauna for 10 more. and another shower. Ady's a no show. So I change into my clothes, and leave to pay, where the girl at the desk tells me "your friend is waiting for you through here", directing me towards the buffet lounge. The girls don't get this - its a boys only thing - after the massage we have a whole relaxation suite we can use for as long as we like. So I go in, BUT I'm directed towards a 40-year-old american man (who is clearly not ady). I look around - ady's not here - but the american invites me to help myself to food, so I grab some fish and sit down.

- "what number did you get?", he spits in a characteristically cocky american drawl
- "i sorry?"
- "you should always remember what number you had... so you can ask for her next time. Numbers 22 and 18 are ugly. And number 14 is too rough. But if you get number 8 - whoa - she's SO pretty and if you tip her well, she'll love you long time".

I'm mortified. Not only has he actually used the phrase "she'll love you long time", but he also opened my eyes to my own blatent naivety and foolishness. Until now I thought maybe I'd encouraged her to offer the 'special massage'. Maybe I'd acted the way people do when they're interested in that sort of thing (I wasn't. and i didn't). Maybe it just happened to me, and only me. I'm an idiot. This thing happens all the time. and the 4 men sat around, american included, come here for exactly that. a cheeky hand-job for a 3-quid tip while their wives/girlfriends are on the 24th floor having a far less exciting time.

American dude went on to explain his regular visits, but I'd had enough. This place sucked, and I felt a bit rank being here. I wanted out, so made my excuses and headed downstairs to my room, where Sam was sat waiting for me. I asked where ady was, but I already knew. she shook her head and asked if the same had happened to me. and seconds later we're all in ady's bedroom laughing at how we'd both had our private parts momentarily handled by vietnamese teenagers.

Ady came off a lot worse than me. I'm doing fine - i can handle that sort of stuff pretty well, although I don't think I owned up to my completely naivety. Ady though - he's in bad shape. It seems he saw the whole thing coming, right from the start, and couldn't relax or enjoy any of it. It was his first massage too, so he was out of his depth all along. And after the 'tap, tap', he just sat the last bit out and did a runner back to his room.

Its mental. The sex trade out here is big business. I've seen almost nothing of it - practically nothing at all. But what I have seen is pretty rank. If hand-jobs are seemingly acceptable in a 5-star-hotel, what the hell else goes on in the rest of town? What kind of standard is that, and is that even as far as it goes? Later that night, cat, bonnie and myself were in the 3rd-floor nightclub where we watched vietnamese barmaids palmed off onto balding, overweight men, clearly under orders from their boss. A board member from Intel, being entertained by one such girl, even asked the boss permission for when they could 'go home'. And when cat and bonnie were being hit on by the bar manager, he arranged for a young girl to come and introduce herself to ME. This place is nuts.

Perhaps I'm overreacting. Perhaps, as one old dude said in the nightclub, as he danced almost exactly like justin timberlake with a girl half his age, this country was 'every middle-aged man's dream'. Perhaps when I'm nearly 50, perhaps single, perhaps unable to pull like I used to - perhaps then the open doors of vietnam's sex trade wouldn't seem so repulsively ubiquitous. I dunno. I don't want to judge the vietnamese people - no way. And whilst I wanna judge the visitors, i have no idea if they're solely responsible?

In Peru, (I might have mentioned this before, but anyway) you get these girls who work for bars. They're job - to seduce men, get them to spend loads of cash, and eventually go home and have sex with them. Are they paid for this by the club? NO. They get paid in drinks from the guys, and in the oportunities that arise after the club closes. The bar is just a proxy to bringing 2 eager markets together. Is it so different here? From the number of vietnamese women (teenagers?) I've seen stroking the thighs of men twice their ages (in restaurants/on motorbikes/next to me in internet cafes) you could be fooled into thinking this is a good deal for both parties. But I don't think my naivety stretches quite that far.

Anyway, casting the depressing stuff aside, I got a double 'tap tap' off a teenager, and that hasn't happened in a while. And, for entirely the wrong reason, it made my day. I just feel bad it didn't do the same for Ady. We'll stick to being held up at gunpoint next holiday mate.