I am one of those people for whom massage is useless. Despite going to great lengths to appear laidback and easygoing, underneath I am in a state of constant agitation. I am always stressed about work, money, the weather, my mother, the size of the gap between my thighs, being a shitty friend, and the state of my love life. On holidays, I worry about the absences: the emails I’m not receiving, the work-outs I’m not fulfilling, the people I’m not spending time with, the dollars I’m not saving. The last time I felt truly relaxed was on a weekend trip to Forster in September 2008, after I smoked so much pot that I couldn’t figure out how to climb a set of stairs.

So it was basically a waste for me to be spending 3 hours in a day spa at an island resort off Penang. But I went anyway, because I was on holidays and there was little else to do. As a young Malaysian girl rubbed exfoliating scrub into me, I thought, does she hate this? Maybe she had kids or ailing relatives, and instead of staying home taking care of them, she was stuck rubbing oil onto soft white people for $4 an hour. If she was anything like me, this would make her bitter and overly critical. She would sniff at my uneven tan and scoff at my undefined arms. She would snicker at the disposable day spa underpants cutting into my well-fed western flesh. She would shake her head at the scars on my leg (a sure symbol of poor-little-rich-white-girl syndrome.) She would hate me, and every minute she had to touch me would be torture.

I began to wish that the massage girl was older. I wished she was taller, more Asian, and spoke no English. I wished she was a large, elderly African gay man.  I wished she was anything that would make her less like me; less likely to judge everything before her down to each individual hair follicle.

I worried that the exfoliating procedure was chaffing her hands. Perhaps she had a paper cut that needed to be kept clean, and all this day spa gunk was preventing her wound from healing. Maybe she’d pulled a muscle in her back, and climbing onto the table to crawl over me was painful for her.

I was getting hot under my towel, despite being nearly naked beneath it. I could feel the beginning of a headache behind my eyes. I wanted a glass of water. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to go back to my room and sit alone under the air-conditioning and watch the cooking channel, even though I had no intention of ever cooking anything in life. I wanted to check my phone to see whether my friend Kahlee had texted me. I’ve known Kahlee for 4 years, and I am used to emailing her ten times a day to update her, in immense detail, on everything that has occured within the last hour. If I do not document my life in mundane emails to Kahlee, it has not transpired.

By then, the massage had become mentally excruciating. I should have been enjoying this luxurious treatment; basking in the extravagance of it and wishing it would never end. Instead, I was considering pushing the girl away, explaining, “I’m sorry but I’m nuts and I can’t lie here for 3 hours listening to my brain,” and leaving the spa.

But then, just as I was trying to figure out how to communicate my sentiments in Engrish, the girl interrupted my thoughts by saying, “Miss, may I scrub your breasts?”

I had 2 seconds to think about this. I needed 3 more.

“I’m sorry – what?”

“Miss, may I scrub your breasts?”

“Ohh, of course,” I said graciously, as though she had asked to borrow a light.

And then, as the impoverished Malaysian woman exfoliated my nipples, my brain magically switched off. I had landed myself in a situation so awkward, so culturally imbalanced, so close to paying an Asian girl to perform sexual favours, that my mind was simply unable to worry about anything else. I relaxed.

After a morning of intense shopping at KLCC Centre in Kuala Lumpur, my friend Niki and I retreated to a nearby park to rest our legs and eat some lunch. We had already attracted stares everywhere in KL – mostly from the Indian men – but now we really seemed to be the main focal point in the park. Every few minutes, we were approached by somebody wanting to take our picture. Others simply took sneaky shots of us when they thought we weren’t looking, or pretended to take photos of their friends while clearly pointing their camera lens at us.

“This is great!” I told Niki as I struck a pose and smiled winningly while a Chinese girl photographed me. “I’ve never been to a country where everyone thinks I’m so hot!”

“They don’t think you’re hot,” Niki explained, “They think you’re a whore. A white western whore who will spread her legs after three margaritas by a cheap motel pool.”

“Oh.” I said.

After that, I scowled whenever anyone asked to take my picture. And if I noticed somebody photographing me without my permission, I twisted my face into a snarl and raised both my middle fingers towards the camera. If I was going to be uploaded to some seedy Indian guy’s Facebook album and tagged as his girlfriend, framed and placed on somebody’s bedside table, or possibly even masturbated over, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it smiling.

I have always hated flying. Not out of fear (the statistics of fatal plane crashes puts me completely at ease) but out of my general distaste for humans. The idea of being forcibly seated amongst people not of my choosing for 9 consecutive hours gives me heart palpitations.

So my friend Niki and I were stoked when we boarded our flight to Kuala Lumpur and saw that there weren’t any other passengers seated within five rows of us. The morning had already been stressful enough – we’d gotten up at 4:30am after going to bed at midnight, and had been forced to stop several times on the drive from Brisbane to Coolangatta so that I could be violently sick in filthy service station bathrooms. The attendants all gave me dirty looks as I exited the bathrooms, pale and sweaty and looking every part the junkie.

Therefore it was a relief to get to the airport on time and know that we’d be able to spend our flight stretched out across three seats – a whole row each – and catch up on sleep. But then, 20 minutes before we were due to depart, 300 Malaysians suddenly boarded the plane and filled all the available seats around us. Worse, these people all had kids. Obnoxious, bratty, whiney kids, who took turns losing their shit and hollering like psych patients throughout the entire 9 hour flight. The worst of these children, a little Malaysian Dennis the Menace in denim overalls who looked about 2 years old, sat directly behind me. He immediately proceeded to wail, thrashing under his seatbelt and kicking the back of my seat. I allowed 10 minues of this – ample time for parental administration of corporal punishment – then I stood up and faced his grandmother, who stared back at me impassively. I looked pointedly at her horrid rat-baby and then back at her. Control your spawn, I told her with my eyes, Make it quiet, or kill it. Then I sat back down and took 3 valium.

An hour later, I awoke to the same screeching and seat-kicking. Full of buzz and lacking my usual sober inhibitions, I stood up and went to the child. “Please stop kicking my seat, sweetheart,” I said, “Or I will kick you.” And he stopped after that.

I spent the remainder of the flight drifting in and our of a valium-induced slumber and calling the flight attendants every time I woke up. It was impossible to attract their attention as they walked throughout the cabin, but if I pushed a small orange button above my seat, I was attended to within seconds. Perhaps this magical orange button was intended for medical emergencies or similar. Whatever. I would press it without hesitation whenever I needed some water, another blanket, or a hot Milo. The flight attendant would drop whatever she was doing and come running over. “What is the matter?” she would ask breathlessly, and I would hold out my Air Asia neck pillow. “I can’t blow this up,” I would explain, and she would stare for a moment before realising I was serious and demonstrating how to blow-up the pillow. “Maybe instead of showing me,”  I suggested, “You could just do it for me?”

“Oh. Ha ha. No.” Their English was limited.

When I was twenty years old, and able to ingest large amounts of alcohol, I went to Europe and participated in two Contiki tours. I thought it would be great to see some of the world, broaden my horizons, experience other cultures, meet new kinds of people, etc, etc. Instead, I wound up on a bus with 49 other Aussies who were hell-bent on getting shit-faced and exchanging bodily fluids. It was awesome.

But I digress. What I want to do here is EXPOSE the Contiki Rep. Not the Tour Guide, for she is educated, holds her liquor well, and does not sleep with anybody until the very last night when it doesn’t matter anymore. But her site-based lesser counterparts exhibit no such control.

Contiki Reps are basically over-enthusiastic twenty-somethings from New Zealand and Australia, along with some Brits, attempting to avoid angry ex-girlfriends and boring university degrees by spending 6 months washing dishes in European campsites and shagging whoever happens to stay there.

During our London to Athens tour, I spent a great deal of time observing the Contiki Reps. They were paid badly, had to clean toilets and stayed in terribly isolated areas, yet they were all so chirpy I nearly lost my breakfast on the first few mornings. I studied their eyes carefully as they dished up my spaghetti, and questioned them closely while scraping my plates into the bin. So how many hours of sleep do you usually get in a night? Uh huh.. And when did you last speak to your family? Riiiight.. How often do you get time off? Oh.

It was not unusual to have a quiet meal or a serious conversation interrupted by one of the Reps bursting into the room, bouncing up and down and shouting, “Can I get a WOOOOOO???!!!”
I tossed and turned at night, dreaming uncomfortably of childhood church camps. These people had to be on something. Anything. However, after six weeks of intense study, I was forced to conclude that their perpetual cheer was due only to an excess of free alcohol and casual sex.

In Venice, I was forced to interact closely with one of the Reps, as I was rostered on for “dishie duty” on our second day there. And so, after several rounds of a cocktail known as an “Attitude Adjustment”, kissing somebody called Giancarlo, and vomiting long strings of spaghetti into a public toilet, I grabbed a few hours sleep, woke up early and reported to the campsite kitchen. I told the Contiki Rep on charge that I was experiencing my first hangover of the tour. His eyes misted over as he handed me a tea towel. “I remember my first time,” he reminisced, “You want a shot?”

It was at that moment that I realised all Contiki staff are alcoholics. They are not worldly travellers at all, but seasoned pisskops seeking employment where they can drink on the job. I’ve got no beef with that, but I think everyone should know. Well now you have no excuse – Contiki Reps have been EXPOSED. You heard it here first.