Naked Travel- Spa Waters Near Home

by Lisa Sonne

Most journeys begin with a single step and are followed by many more. My “Holistic Journey” began with a step-up onto a “wet table,” where I then barely moved. A professional’s fingers traveled my body with liquid goodies culled globally to enrich the “signature treatment” of The Spa at Four Seasons Hotel in Westlake Village, California, now the largest Four Seasons’ spa in the world with 42,000 square feet.

When I don’t have time to do the kind of travelling that requires maps and packing, I know that eating, reading, or watching movies are all ways to bring the world to me. I also like to check out the international offerings of the best local spa to get myself in a different state – of mind and body.  It is a kind of naked travel.

When I met the creator of the 80-minute “Holistic Journey,” Sheri Claflin, she said she wants “to offer what people expect and things they don’t expect.”  She reminds me that Spa stands for the Latin “Sanus Per Aquam,” which means "health through waters” (plural). The Romans, in ancient times, would take the baths of healing waters to cure their ails.

In more modern times there are millions who have their Jacuzzis and whirlpool baths at home, and resort spas have evolved all kinds of water treatments. In past years, I’ve enjoyed “Watsu,” which is underwater shiatsu in warm waters, and Thalossotherapy, which is a salt water and seaweed treatment.

I’ve soaked in outdoor tubs at 10,000 Waters in Colorado and outdoor pools in great Onsen in Japan. I’ve soaked inside in the thermal mineral waters of The Beverly Hot Springs in Los Angeles, where waters come up hot and natural from underground – a cosmopolitan rarity. In Singapore recently, my water health treatment even involved fish- a spa experience, I would like to help import here.

For now, I am lying in a soothing room, after being offered a water prelude menu of private interior Jacuzzi with dolphin mosaics, shower room with jets at multiple heights, a steam room, wet or dry sauna, or lovely outdoor pool.  They all sounded wonderful, but just lying in a double-wide, thickly padded lounge chair under skylights in the orchid-enhanced “Serenity Room” is enough transition for me. I listen to the water falling along a glass wall into a pond, and sip water with floating cucumbers and lemons.  

I am warmly greeted and taken into one of the 28 treatment rooms. This one combines simple elegance with a garden view and beautiful orchids. She asks me to choose which essential oils I would like blended with my Turkish  sea salts for my scrub— “juniper and fennel, ylang-ylang and bergamot, or soothing pure lavender?” 

I step up to the “wet table” and am draped with towels. The verbs used to describe this treatment in the brochure are all active: “detoxify, exfoliate, soothe, and reinvigorate,” but I am now encouraged to be inactive myself.

An overhead Vichy shower arm with seven temperature-controlled showerheads sweeps over my body and cascades a liquid massage on the part of my body not being rubbed. I don’t even need to rinse off.  My dead skin cells are scrubbed off, then the  shower washes the oils away without my moving.

The aromatherapy smells, water sounds, and expert touch all create a sensuous spell – I feel like I am floating, then I feel like I am in a tropical waterfall.  The percussive drops of a liquid Morse code tap out a lullaby on my body, and I feel dreamy. The details of the treatment slip away.

Later, I will remember that gifted hands dissolved knots. I will remember the water changing temperature, then a velvety wildflower infusion being poured over me as if I were very precious, and a moisturizing Edelweiss lotion being massaged in.

There are other things to remember, like “rich in antioxidants,” but, for now, I slip in and out of active awareness.  This is my vacation. I am wrapped in warm blankets, and my feet are being rubbed -- then my scalp.

I am given a beautiful branch of white orchids to take with me -- a much nicer way than a pinch to remind me later that the dream was real, and a lovely way to say the treatment is over, but the benefits are not.

If I were a guest in the Four Seasons, I could take the elevator to my room now. Or I could go next door to the California Health & Longevity Institute, which specializes in preventative and diagnostic medicine, with western and eastern approaches, and shape up a plan to keep my health in shape. As a guest of the spa, I could soak in pools or saunas.

Instead, I walk out the door into a 9 acre garden, down a flower-lined path, toward a Chinese Pagoda surrounded by a small reflecting pond. I meander, with my long-stemmed orchids, to the nearby hot house, where the spa’s luscious orchids originate.  I push the door open. There’s no one inside this four-sided altar of voluptuous exotics.

I stand in the middle of the hothouse with my face upturned. Overhead sprayers and whirling fans create humidity for the flowers; for me they send an orchid mist that descends like a fragrant fog and spritzes my body serendipitously. This experience is not in the spa brochure, but it’s a lovely epilogue to my water treatment trip.

The world came to me—Vichy, Ylang-Ylang, Turkish sea salts, Edelweiss, and more. I am taking my glowing skin and glowing outlook home now.

Lisa Sonne has written about spa treatments on several continents and produced, directed, and wrote for  a TV series set at spas.: Lisa@WorldTouristBureau.com 

© Lisa Sonne, 2008