Spa Stories
John Borthwick, famed travel writer and proud owner of The Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, gives you a run down of his five favourite Thai spas.
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The Oriental Spa, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok
The I Ching is always urging people to “cross the great water", to strive for the farthest bank, so I hop onto the Mandarin Oriental little shuttle boat across the turbid Chao Phraya River. It’s not really a "great" water but on its far bank waits The Oriental Spa, where I am booked for a half-day programme.
I enter a temple of teak and calm. In the treatment suite even the shower cubicle — in black marble and with six spray jets — seems like a water temple. My masseuse tells me the treatment will take three and a half hours and include body scrub, seaweed body wrap, oil massage, facial and a foot massage.
I drift into that zone of suspension that is for me is the hallmark of a good treatment — a place of surrender to the skilful stretching, pressing and flexing that soon have me losing track of time and words. It’s only after I’ve been painted head-to-toe with seaweed mud then wrapped in plastic to "cook" for 20 minutes do words come to mind.
As I head to the shower to sluice off my baked-on coating, I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I look like something from Loch Ness — even if feeling great. Next comes a long, deep massage with ylang-ylang and pachouli oils, then a face and scalp massage and finally a gentle pressure point treatment on my feet. I am "done". I return, reluctantly, across the great water.
The Oriental Spa, opened in 1993, was one of Asia's first dedicated hotel spas and has been regularly voted "Best Spa in the World". It offers numerous different options that range from a 30 minutes to six hours, including those for couples and a top-of-the-range programme spanning three days and two nights.
www.mandarinoriental.com/bangkok/spa
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Banyan Tree Bangkok Spa
If it is possible to fall in love with a pair of hands, I have done so. This brief affair lasted only three hours and was entirely proper – indeed, my partner laid just a metre away throughout my fleeting enchantment. Both of us were being massaged to within an inch of levitation.
We were in the spa at the Banyan Tree hotel Bangkok sampling its signature product, the Royal Banyan Treatment. With a dedicated therapist each — mine was a masseuse-magician named Goi — we started with a footbath followed by a gentle scrub and Thai acupressure.
The main event – 90 transcendent minutes of it – involved herbal pouches (filled with lemongrass, cloves and coriander), warm sesame oil and a skilled massage. As we later re-entered reality, soaking in a petal-strewn spa tub, my friend murmured, “My bones have dissolved. I’m intoxicated with relaxation.”
The Banyan Tree Spa has a variety of Grand Spa and Deluxe Spa rooms offering steam, jet-pool bath and shower facilities, as well as Double Spa and Single Spa rooms. We concluded our session with a Cleansing Facial, an “in-your-face” experience of the most agreeable kind. Our room had panoramic view over the City of Great Angels and after the treatment I could have as easily floated out the window as the door.
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Six Senses Earth Spa, Hua Hin
Spas are proliferating at such rate that soon we might need to re-badge Earth as Planet Spa. In the face of ever-increasing competition, the Evason and Soneva resorts have an advantage being old hands, so to speak, with their long established, in-house Six Senses Earth Spas.
At the spacious Six Senses resort at Hua Hin on the Gulf of Thailand, it's a short walk from your villa to the spa. The "laying on of hands" has long had spiritual connotations, so it's not surprising that the secular ritual of a spa massage can, at its best, take you to other, almost ineffable places. Here, the Six Senses Earth Spa enhances that possibility with its ochre-walled, domed pavilions resembling a Native American pueblo that’s floating amid lotus ponds. Once within your tranquil dome, the ritual is familiar: nominate the massage you want and the pressure (I always go for "strong"), then surrender to your masseuse's hands. Where you'll go depends on where you're at, as they say.
Among the many pluses of the so-called Earth Spa Journeys here is the skilled and sensitive treatment — at around $130 for 80 minutes, you'd expect nothing less. The various “Journeys” offered include such esoterica as Romance for Two, Tibetan Bowl, Chakra Crystal, Skin Food and Thai Herbal journeys. Slightly less exotic are the Lomi Lomi and Hot Stone offerings and the prosaic Jet Lag Recovery.
Whichever one you try, in the right hands, the experience here can be almost transcendental. No matter how long a good treatment is, for me it always ends too soon, after which my own six senses must return to Planet Earth.
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Banyan Tree Phuket Spa
I’m at Massage Heartland, the font of spa wisdom, Banyan Tree’s Phuket Spa Academy. Established here in 2001, the academy trains masseuses in traditional and contemporary treatments before they are deployed around the world to terminally “spoil” fortunate guests such as me.
Two skilled masseuses subject me to an extreme form of corporal reward known as the Harmony Banyan Massage during which I am scrubbed, oiled and rubbed. At times they work symmetrically — sort of a massage in stereo — and at other times asymmetrically. I am then gently tugged, kneaded and finally, tubbed. This may be as good as it gets. Three hours later — or is it three days? — I emerge, barely coherent. A light lunch at the spa’s restaurant, of grilled seafood on a sugarcane skewer and apple pie (perhaps the best I have ever eaten) with frozen honey, provides sufficient reality and ballast to ground me again.
Treatment packages here include the Rainmist Experience, a signature Banyan Tree innovation, and the Master Therapist Experience, a 90-minute massage performed by an elite therapist and tailored to the individual guest. There are some guests who crave privacy so completely that even travelling from their villa to the spa is too public an excursion. For them is the option is a Spa Pool Villa. At the foot of its garden (with pool) is an outdoor sala featuring twin massage beds. Just buzz reception and the spa comes to you.
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Mandara Spa, J.W. Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa
If you can remember a good spa massage, possibly it wasn’t all that good. Well, that’s my theory. For me, the best scrub, rub and pamper is one that turns my mind into a vacant, vagrant entity - not so much a body experience as an out-of-body one, with recall made redundant.
At the J W Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa I am led to a private suite of marble and teak in the Mandara Spa where my travelling clobber is swapped for a crisp white gown. A skilled masseuse bathes my feet then unlocks several facial pressure points. Soon I am succumbing to soft flute music and vague aromas of incense, herbs and ylang-ylang oil. Ninety minutes drift into infinity as she systematically teases my tendons, slips my shoulder knots and turns what had passed for muscles into something as relaxed as latex.
As I emerge from my trance she assures me that this massage “soothes and balances one.” Balances? I’m so de-stressed that my bones have dissolved. Pouring myself towards the door, I recall what another spa manager once told me: “My test of a great treatment is how good I feel hours later.” Indeed, hours later I feel more than good.
My tip (here and elsewhere): try skipping the more exotic treatments. (With some featuring yoghurt, herbs, honey and coffee scrubs, the options more resemble a breakfast menu or, at other times, a New Age religion.) Go for a time-tested Traditional Thai Massage. “Firm” is the word, with deep tissue and pressure points getting plenty of attention.