Spah Spah Spah

My final column in the (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines appeared in April. Here is an edited exerpt:

At the new Chi spa village in the Shangri-La resort at Yanuca, Fiji Islands, they offer a “Dusk till Dawn” spa ritual, where you are guided gently, like a small child, to an ocean front villa, bathed, scrubbed, polished, massaged, fed sushi and chocolates, put into a king-sized bed with the TV remote control (or your partner, as the treatment is available for couples) and then woken at sunrise with breakfast and a facial. As spa experiences go, this is one of the best. But for years, this popular resort offered only basic massages in simple huts on the beach, which was considered the height of bliss. Trouble is, these days, we’re all so darn spoiled that bliss is not enough.

As I was wallowing in my warm bath at the Chi village, watching the sunset, peeling myself a grape, with frangipani blossoms floating all around me, I wondered about this spa thing. Where once hotels attracted clientele with state-of-the-art gyms and heated swimming pools, now they need to build a whole village on a Cecil B. DeMille scale, complete with open air showers and spa pools, fragrant steam rooms, ocean views, lush gardens, therapists trained in the latest Asian healing philosophies, relaxation pavilions, water features, temple-like ambience and products made from plants plucked from the highest reaches of the Himalayas.

A venerable hotel like the Peninsula in Hong Kong devotes a floor of prime real estate to its new Espa, which includes a waiting room where Chinese tea ceremonies are performed, a crystal steam room where lavender-infused air hisses like dragon’s breath from a giant chunk of pink crystal, treatment suites with magnificent views over the harbour and a shower that deluges you with rainforest-temperature water under changing mood lights. Australian Tom McLoughlin, owner of the intimate Huvafen Fushi resort in the Maldives, spends a small fortune sinking his treatment rooms into the coral reef, requiring a mad-genius feat of engineering, so that the experience is like lying in an aquarium, only the fish are swimming around you. The stakes are high. Not having a completely gorgeous spa in a luxury hotel is now as bad as not having clean towels.

Spa. Spa. Spa. We even demand spas in airports these days. And the concept of the “day spa,” an American term for what is basically a beauty parlour with “wet” rooms to allow for scrubs, wraps, Vichy showers and the like, has taken hold here. There are day spas everywhere, full of women (and men) lying on tables slathered in algae, wrapped in foil blankets like roasting chickens or squirming under a sheet of hot rocks heated up in a crock-pot. When you think about it, it’s quite absurd how far we all go to indulge our senses, relax our bodies or neutralise our worries. Is the world outside, beyond the reaches of the Enya soundtrack, so terrible?

It must be, if you consider how busy these places are. For a surprising number of women an appointment at the spa – for a facial or a spray-tan or perhaps a pedicure - is as regular as putting the garbage out. The big travel trend is for girlfriends to holiday together in wellness retreats, such as Chiva-Som in Thailand, for a few days of detoxing. No one really needs any of this, although I’m the first to argue for the benefits of regular massage. The culture tells us we “deserve” to be pampered. Fair enough. But what happens to our spa habit when the economy goes south? Back to egg white facemasks in the bathroom at home? Begging a neck rub from the boyfriend while he watches TV? Or will we live on air and pedicures?

Just asking.