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Thanks to the perseverance of our tuk-tuk driver (a tuk-tuk is public transportation, something like a tricycle bred with a lawnmower) and despite our protestations, we ended up at the most expensive hotel in town -- color television with two channels in English, room service, air conditioning, laundry and a massage service. Perhaps the driver knew that our last bed had been a mattress two inches thick, laid over open coil springs, in a tiny cinder block room with a single naked 40-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. The pit toilet had been in a separate building across the mud.

Hot water streamed deliciously from the Western-style shower over my dusty and tense body, a definite improvement over the ladles of icy water that had rinsed us in the jungle. Fortified further with some clean clothes, I got on the telephone and called the hotel massage service. "Please send two massage ladies to room 66 for two hours, for two female clients." I promised Tatia I would treat her, as payment for having dragged her out of her cafes and into the jungle.

Before we met, Tatia had traveled only to genteel destinations -- Paris, southern Spain, Mexico City. I was more adventurous. After all, I had swum in piranha-infested waters up the Amazon, walked around with naked cannibals in the highlands of Irian Jaya, searched for tigers in remote reaches of Java and trekked in the Himalayas of Nepal. Modestly, I could say I was worldly-wise. Three months after we began dating I started testing her travel limits, and we went to the jungles in Costa Rica. It was an introductory course to adventure travel, and I was glad to be able to show her the ropes, to get her feet wet.

She had survived Costa Rica, and a year later we were in Thailand. This would be the true test of her mettle. I would introduce her to a non-Western civilization, a different cultural reality. I enjoyed the mentor role.

The masseuses arrived at our room both wearing black pants and white shirts. They doffed their thongs at the door. One woman was older and quiet, somewhat tall for a Thai, her black hair falling straight to just below her chin. The other was more chirpy, a younger and bouncier woman, whose medium-length black hair was in little curls. They instructed us to take off our sarongs and lie on the gigantic bed, actually two double beds made up as one.

They wanted to watch Thai soap operas on television while they did their massages, but we demurred, saying I couldn't take the noise because of my headache. Our initial conversations with them were brief, since they spoke only a little English, and Tatia and I weren't that proficient with our self-taught Thai.

It was my first Thai massage, and the older woman tending my head gave me the best work-over I'd ever had in my life. There is a long and honored tradition of Thai massage and a highly esteemed massage school at Wat Po, one of the most venerable temples in Bangkok. The techniques employed are different than those in Western-style massage and include massaging with the feet and applying heavy pressure on the blood vessels. At one point during our treatments my masseuse pressed her hand hard into my groin, stopping the blood flow of the femoral artery. After a bit she pulled her hand away quickly and the surge of the blood back into my leg was invigorating. Tatia, a trained nurse, was skeptical of this approach.

The massage ladies were talking to each other in Thai as they massaged us with strong but languid moves. Tatia's younger masseuse in particular was quite chatty. After a while she seemed bored with her friend, bored without the soap operas, and she started trying to talk to us. "Shampoo," she giggled. Her friend giggled along with her.

"Shampoo?" we asked. Then she started pointing to things, like her black pants and the bedspread, and telling us words we recognized as the Thai words for the colors. She compared her medium brown skin with the milk-white skin on Tatia's body. Then she pointed to Tatia's deep pink nipples and said "shampoo" and really giggled. And so we learned the word for pink.

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