Steamy Quy Nhon

The view from my room

This is the last week that I’ll have on my own (Kate arrives on Sunday) but I’ve enjoyed staying in my comfortable hotel overlooking the beach.  The beach is very inviting with golden sand, the colour of cornflakes, but unfortunately the weather has been overcast, even rainy at times, but this has meant that I’ve actually managed to get on with a bit of writing at last.  I’ve taken a couple of walks along the beach into town.  Quite a few young pre-teenagers stopped me with their Hellos and asked if I’d appear in their photos.  So then they all whip out their mobile phones, stand around me and have their photo taken.  What they then do with their photos I simply can’t imagine.  Very few tourists here so the local people are very friendly with some who spontaneously wave and smile.  It's lovely.  Why can't we be like this at home?

I turned the tables on this group and took their pic

The Seagull Hotel is the blueish one in the background

But despite having had a relatively quiet week, it all heated up a bit this afternoon when I decided to have a sauna and massage in the hotel’s facility.  It was the first sauna I have come across in Vietnam other than my entire stay in Saigon which felt like one long sauna.  Before being allowed to use the sauna (which was still heating up) I was shown into an adjoining steam room.  Here steam was being pumped through what appeared to be a huge bunch of spinach; it certainly gave the room a slight smell of rotting vegetables.   After the sauna and a shower I was shown to a room where a young woman gave me a fairly hopeless massage by Vietnamese standards – the ones I’ve had have all been different, but on the whole pretty good.  On the other hand this one was surprisingly cheap, only 110,000 dong (just over £3) for an hour.  Anyway, at the end of the massage the young woman offered to… well, how shall I put this… use her hand to finish me off.  It was the first proposition of this sort I have had (though I had read about this kind of thing).  Naturally I said “I’m sorry I am British.  We don’t do sex”, an old chestnut of a joke that came to me during one of my NZ talks where it went down a treat.  Today it fell rather flat with the poor young woman who of course didn’t understand a word.  She looked a bit crestfallen when it was clear that I was declining her kind offer, disappointed I suppose not to be getting a big tip.  Socially an unusual situation to find oneself in, but I hope it’s not put me off massages which I think are great, though I’ll admit that it’s taken me a while to overcome my silly latent feelings that to pay for a massage is all a bit sleazy (after all one is paying to be given sensual pleasure, which is not a million miles from paying for sex).  Harriet has asked me how much the young woman was charging for this extra service (perhaps seeing a market opportunity in the UK?).  Sadly in my awkwardness I failed to ask.  Maybe next time.