On a jaunt to the beach – Otres near Sihanoukville –
I suffered another violent assault – this time it was called threading.
I was approached by two smiley ladies as I sat reading on the beach, and they offered their services, assuring me that afterwards I would be ‘smooth like baby bum’. How could I resist? So they got to work on me – one leg each – making scissoring movements with the twisted cotton, deftly ripping all my body hair out by the roots, and only drawing blood once or twice.
Then they turned their attention to my face – not just eyebrows, but forehead, cheeks, jawline … I’d never realised before that I was quite so hairy. They would stop, look closely at me, run their fingers across my skin, tut loudly and then go in for the kill once again. When I was bright red and stinging all over, they produced a tiny mirror so that I could admire my new hairless face, one centimetre at a time.
Then Sam decided to go for some male grooming in the eyebrow area.
For obvious reasons, I don’t have any photos of my own threading experience, but I imagine my facial expression was similar to his.
But whatever those ladies did, it certainly worked, because I met my new best friend soon afterwards. I was still in my chair on the beach and she came up to try to sell me a bracelet. She was very chatty and asked my how old I was.
‘Fifty-seven,’ I said.
‘Oh! But you so young!’ she said. ‘My mum, she fifty-three and she old, old. But you no! I think you thirty before you say me.’
So she is now officially my best friend, with the threading ladies in second and third place.
However, a serious deterrent to my new beach body readiness is the seafood down here.
This jolly lady sells delicious giant prawns
and you don’t even have to move out of your chair to buy some.
The restaurant just down the track does wonderful seafood platters with barbecued squid, prawns and barracuda.
We’ve devoured several of these since we arrived.
Oh well – I shall just have to resort to the age-old trick of muted lighting whenever I want to show off my beach body.
