We awoke the following day (our last in Dali) to torrential rain. So it was that I spent the majority of the day on the internet. Well this stuff has to get written somehow doesn't it?

After a day of catching up with e-mail, writing this and generally pottering around I found my muscles stiffening up nicely as a result of the previous days exertions. Thus I embarked on a course of action that was to provide something of an obsession over the rest of the journey to Bangkok. I ordered a massage.

Whilst in Turkey ordering a massage in a hammam typically results in being washed, scraped, screwed up, bounced around and generally physically abused by a large, hairy, partially clad Turk, China is a different story. Nevertheless, ordering a massage here has to be done with a different, but no-less astute air of trepidation as, along with hair-dressers but perhaps more obviously, massage is often code for... ahem, well you get the idea. I was assured that this was legit, however, (which it indeed turned out to be) and so I settled in to wait for my masseur to arrive. When she did, she turned out to be one of the smallest girls I have encountered in China. At a stretch she was 5ft tall and so slight that a strong wind could probably have broken her in half. It was something of a surprise, therefore, to discover that she was in fact a direct descendant of Mao Zedong's head torcherer, had the hands of a brick-layer and fingers like carpet tacks. After an hour of exacting revenge for the entire catalogue of colonial injustices inflicted on her country by mine, she left the room 40 Yuan better off and me feeling like I had been run over by a combine-harvester.

This, I thought, cannot be the massage experience that our drivers are raving about and so began my quest for the perfect massage.