26 April 2007
Spaaaaaaargh!
It's now a commonplace of travel that every up-market hotel will have a spa, wherever that hotel may be. And spas, almost universally, consist of dimly-lit rooms with pseudo-ethnic art on the walls, candles burning, and the most dimwitted of New Age music playing on an eternal loop. At the Dead Sea there's a very long history of touting the medicinal qualities of the soupy lake's mineral-rich waters, and people can be found on its shores, at least at the sections owned by the luxury hotels, covering themselves in black, gelatinous matter they dig up themselves.
But all over the world now spas and spa history are being invented, and the merits of rubbing whatever is locally available into your skin being touted. Hotels find in spas a profitable new income stream, keeping guests inside the building spending money.
I loathe spas, in a cordial sort of way, so it doesn't surprise me terribly much that work seems constantly to take me to them. I've had an Indonesian 'therapy' in Whistler BC (complete with gamelan), and had a Thai squeeze the stuffing out of every extremity in Macau (and although I dislike massages, I have to admit that she really was very good). I like immersing myself in hot water in places that have a true history of doing so, and where it also performs a social function, such as in Japan and Iceland. But being inside some windowless box and smeared with essence of bat fart to assorted bonging noises seems to me the height of farce, and to call this a kind of luxury is the height of delusion. When I hear people who plan to travel to China start to waffle on about what spas China might have (and to be sure, China will invent for you any kind of foolishness you're willing to pay for) I feel like drowning myself in a Jacuzzi. Why this obsession with making everywhere feel the same?
After 15 minutes of mummification I was unzipped and helped up to a sitting position still wrapped in the polythene and feeling like a piece of dry cleaning. After showering I felt I was a few millimetres smaller all over. I've had to do two spas so far this year, and with luck that will be it. There's only so much New Age music I can take.
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