Thailand

• Lissom with mother - Chiva Som, Thailand
• Perfect harmony - Chiva Som, Thailand
• Battle of the Beaches - Thailand
• Bliss on the beach - Koh Samui
• Freshly Squeezed - Thailand
• Kaleidascope - Bangkok
• Why Our travels with Banana - Bali
• Beautiful Bali looks back to the future - Bali
• Off the Bhutan track - Bhutan
• The Temples of Another Time - Cambodia
• Temple of Secret Smiles - Cambodia
• Celebrity check-in - Langkawi
• My Perfect Moment - Pangkor Laut
• Fantasy Island - Pangkor Laut
• Feast for all the senses - Bali
• On Honeymoon Island, strictly alone at last - Phuket
• Our Ho Chi Honeymoon - Vietnam
• Victory for Vietnam - Vietnam
• You like! You try! - Vietnam
• Why I'll always miss Saigon - Vietnam
• Hanoi's New Dawn - Hanoi
• Saigon Surprise - Ho Chi Minh
• I spy in Shanghai - China
• Shanghai Chic - China
• The Great Makeover - China
• Far East in a Flash - China & Japan
• Cherie blossom special - Japan
• Why they call Hong Kong toy town - Hong Kong
• Mysteries of the secret gardens - Kyoto
• The Geisha Game - Kyoto
• Hong Conquerer! - Hong Kong

SOMPON GLANCED UP FROM HIS wok, a glint in his eye and a wry grin on his face. ‘I like my food pretty dangerous,’ he said, ‘like my women.’ Judging by the quantity of chilli he was using, by dangerous he meant hot.

I had come to Thailand on a mission. I’d been told I was a terrible cook and I couldn’t massage. I decided there was only one way to prevent my love life from going west - I travelled east for a Thai-style makeover. I would embark on courses in cookery and Thai massage, and thus complete the transformation from Neanderthal to new man in less than a week. What more could a girl want?

Chiang Mai is the capital of Thailand’s north, but the contrast with its southern big brother could hardly be greater. The population is less than 3 per cent of Bangkok’s, and it has traffic that actually flows. The city feels less a metropolis and more a sprawling village, full of ramshackle homes, ornate temples and (ever more numerous) cookery schools.

Food is intrinsic to the meaning of life here. For the final 10 minutes of my flight in, I could see an unbroken reflection of my 777, such was the proliferation of glistening paddy fields below. In the city, satay sticks grill on every street corner.

The course I had signed up for - two days, 12 dishes - began in the market. We had been warned that we might find the smells overpowering, but it was the sights that overwhelmed me: heaving buckets of catfish, their whiskers yet to be plucked: and mounds of chillies 4ft deep. One stall sold 16 varieties of rice.

A kitchen oasis

Once at the school, a kitchen oasis four miles from town, we were introduced to Sompon, our guide. He would demonstrate each dish, then we would proceed, inspired, to our stations, and pan-fry alfresco.

Chicken with cashew nuts was first. In the demonstration kitchen, Sompon laid out his rainbow of ingredients - soy, fish and oyster sauces, palm sugar, whiskey and chillies - and got to work. A mirror on the ceiling ensured that no-one missed a trick. It reminded me of Basic Instinct, and the mirror strategically positioned over Sharon Stone’s bed. We were food voyeurs, leering at a culinary exhibitionist.

On each day we repeated the same process six times: look, taste, cook, eat. Thai curry, banana cake, papaya with prawn… this was chef school as it should be - ingredients on tap and the washing-up done by someone else. Along the way we were offered tips and western substitutes: bash chillies before slicing to enhance their potency; steam bananas to keep them yellow; cook fast, and eat food while it’s young. Most importantly, pay as much attention to implements as ingredients. I had a knife so sharp it could slice at 30 paces, and a chopping board so wide I could count it’s rings and tell the age of the tree from which it came.

By the time I’d completed my dozenth dish, I was feeling pretty good. I envisioned future dinner parties at which, on receiving a compliment, I would proudly exclaim: ‘Chiang Mai, Thailand. Best cookery schools in the world.’ My girlfriend, I was sure, would love me for ever - if only for my tom yams.

Thai reinvention

It was as a wok wunderkind then, that I set off to tackle phase two of my Thai reinvention. Before I learnt, I felt I should experience. All over Chiang Mai, signs offered massage, but I’d been told the best place of all was the school for the blind. There, I was ushered into a small room with a mattress on the floor, where an old woman with rotting teeth in a mouth the colour of soot was frantically sweeping at imaginary dust.

If that sounds harsh, it’s because she was harsh with me. Traditionally administered by monks, Thai massage involves applying 10 lines of muscles to invigorate, relax and cure. The therapy’s ancient home is Bangkok, where its manual, a set of engraved stone slabs, is set into the walls of Watt Pho temple. But you remember just one thing: Thai Massage hurts like hell.

My session lasted an hour and twenty minutes and I have never been so pummelled, prodded, pushed, pulled and poked. The old lady tugged my arms like they were stubborn root vegetables, and sank her fingers so deeply into my back that I thought she was trying to extract my heart. In short, she treated me rougher than I’d just been taught to treat chillies.

New men are supposed to show emotion - and sure enough, I was now almost crying with pain. If I tried this back home, my relationship would be dead. Time, then, for a re-evaluation. Thai massage had missed the spot, as it were, but I was told about a town - an ‘alternative centre’ - set high in the mountains.

It was called Pai: Pai in the sky. Perhaps there I might learn a gentler way.

Pai is set among deep green mountains, three winding hours north of Chiang Mai, and feels like a Wild West town in a parallel universe. It has no horses but plenty of elephants, and its wealth was founded on producing not gold, but opium. Here, the buffalo-boys are less into quick-draw reflexes than long-drawn-out reflexology; and the town’s many saloons also offer reiki, yoga and aromatherapy massage.

On a wooden veranda, to the sound of wood chimes and shuffling pigs, I was asked if I could feel ‘the Energy’. I’d signed up for a hands-on course that combined aromatherapy massage with reiki, and had reached the point of my attunement.

Channelled energy

I’d already been through the basics: I’d located and squeezed a fellow student’s muscular trapezius, made mini-circles around her shoulder blades, and applied pressure to the five crucial spots of her head’s energy meridian. We were now on to reiki. Its energy had been channelled through my teacher’s hands to me, and with attunement I would be able to perform it on others. In effect, I’d been given a reiki telephone and had taken an incoming call. Now it was time to connect the outbound line.

This was supposed to feel tingly, and I admit I felt something shimmery and warm. But how much of that was thanks to the reiki, and how much to the fumes from the pigs below, I couldn’t say.

My girlfriend would never know the difference, anyway. What mattered was that she saw the change in me. And what a change. I had left Britain as a young Bernard Manning, but was returning as a kind of oriental Jamie Oliver. I felt sure she would adore the new me. However, while impressed by the succulence of my spring rolls, my girlfriend confessed that while I’d been away she had come close to leaving me. It seemed I had forgotten to tell her I was swanning off at all - and by the time I returned, her mood was what my new guru Sompon would no doubt call dangerous.

And there is the enduring lesson of my Thai makeover. The number-one quality for a successful relationship is neither cookery nor massage, but communication.