Day 22 - Uzbekistan

Ok, well I suppose I'd better tell you what else happened yesterday. I was going to include it in 'Day 21' but felt I needed some reflection time.

Sooooooo. I went to a c.16th Hammam in the middle of Bukhara. I didn't know exactly what to expect and some of you might not know either so I'll give you a brief run-down. 

Enter and pay the nice man 80,000 Som. Strip down to your birthday suit and put a towel around your bits. Enter what can only be described as an oversized bread oven and stand there for fifteen minutes while the heat takes your breath and all the moisture in your body away. It's a real pore opener. Once brown and crusty (no soggy bottom on this dude), remove from oven and leave to cool on a big marble slab. Enter stage right, a young chap with nothing on but a towel similar to ones own. He has spent my baking time lathering up and appears extremely well lubricated. 

Ok. Now for the fun part. Lay stomach down on the slab while matey all but removes my flimsy towel and begins exploring areas that hitherto only my GP dared go. And he was neither shy nor gentle about it too. Aside from well greased hands in some rather unexpected places, part of the exercise included him standing on my back and jumping up and down a bit, but it was mostly bending and kneading and trying to insert elbows between vertebrae. After seemingly several days of physical abuse, he turned me over and started on my front. Very nearly all of my front. There was more but in short, it ended up being being a massive soapy wrestling match which, I am sorry to report, he won rather convincingly.

After this came the ginger scrub (I'm not making this up by the way). He gave me a liberal coating of the ginger mush over most parts and then insisted I fully remove the towel (it wasn't covering anything by this point anyway). He indicated that I should finish the job off myself - applying scrub that is - and sit in another hot chamber for ages before pouring several buckets of cold water over me. In the end, he saw I wasn't going to submit, whatever punishment he threw at me, so he gave up and handed me a towel and told me to get dressed.

I fought him like a tiger for an hour but parted like he was my bother. Or maybe husband. I'm still not really sure how it all ended up legally. Still, we promised to write and I took my leave after a simple shake of the hand. It all seemed like an oddly platonic ending to an uncomfortably personal massage. 

All in all, I felt utterly violated by the experience yet strangely smooth and refreshed at the same time. It was, at the end of the day, an experience. 

Travellers Tip - If a mostly naked and highly slippery Uzbek tells you to apply ginger scrub to your gentlemans area, DO NOT include ones Jacobs Cream Crackers, no matter how much encouragement he gives you. Ginger has some heat to it I can tell you. It got so hot down there it was as if a candle had been lit and suspended between my thighs. I began hopping and squatting and flapping to get some cool air circulating and my were eyes watering but being British, I had to stop, stand upright, striking as casual a pose as possible and agree that everything was perfectly fine when he came back to see how I was doing. 

Everything else that happened today pales by comparison to be honest.

My camera couldn't take the steam so I had to take photos of photos, but it's a fair representation of what took place.