A new form of pain
Trip Start
Dec 28, 2010
1
45
84
Trip End
Jun 08, 2012
Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
Thursday, June 9, 2011
For the next 4 days after we fell down the mountain we were pretty much bed ridden. Our muscles were so shot that any movement to our legs had to be planned, calculated and mentally goaded into a good 30 seconds before hand. When we (I )had to go get food, I walked like verbal kimp from the usual suspects, and took stairs looking like I’d just dropped the soap in wandsworth showers. Luckily Melissa and I are a supportive and sympathetic couple, and we really pulled each other through some tough times. Oh wait no, no we didn’t we actually played the ” let’s give the other person a sneaky dead leg game”. Funny because the initiator could never get away. The thing about muscle ache from endurance (day 2 taking 15.5 hours), is the depth of the ache, sometimes it feels like your bones are crying with recrimination, at the bravado of the mind. So when we were able to sit up we began to write up our experiences for the blog.
One thing that we were really looking forward to was revisiting the massage parlor we’d been to just before the climb, where we’d both been really impressed by our masseuses. Whilst in Thailand, we’d been roughed up by the woman prisoners in Chiang Mai and beaten up by the teachers of a school in Bangkok all in the name of massage. Massage is meant to induce a state of Zen like relaxation, which brings about a warm three-way hug between the mind, body and soul. A place to reacquaint yourself after the rigors of being on holiday for a whole year and more (poor us!), but that’s not quite how the Thais see it. I’m not exactly sure what the Boston crab is, but I’m pretty sure it’s a favorite. The half nelson, arm, head and leg locks are also used with equal parts zest, vigor and gusto. Lost somewhere in translation was the words massage for wrestle. Such experts were they in the art that it wasn’t necessary to be the size of big daddy to be a heavy weight champion of the world, tiny octogenarian grannies with statures of lower case r’s could pin us and make us walk funny for a week. And not an aromatherapy oil in sight!
So when we discovered the delights of full body oil massages in Kota Kinabalu it restored our faith in the art of massage. Without a hint of funny business my future wife and I were given a sneak preview to heaven for an hour as our girls made nearly every inch of our bodies feel like a chocolate button floating on a sea of melted chocolate before eventually succumbing to a liquid state of ecstasy. So you can imagine how excited we were to go back for a truly deserved piece of pampering. Now I’m sure that this dude was just as talented as the girl I’d had last time, but man that was a very uncomfortable hour. Suddenly the much anticipated butt portion of the massage, had taken on a whole new light. I felt like the losing student in one of peter venkmans shock therapy experiments and now share a little empathy with all girls who are groped and grabbed by drunken guys at clubs, I even retire officially from boob cricket.
Needing something a little less hairy to think about , we took a drive out to an Orangutan reserve a couple of days later to watch the little bliters have a swing and play about. Borneo is an eco-tourists dream and a great end to our time in Asia (minus stop over Singapore).
