I know how dull it can be reading about other people having totally excellent experiences, but TRY to stay with me here.
The spa was kind of on par with being a five year old (a lactose tolerant one) and being given an ice cream factory for christmas, and walking into it for the first time.
All that Thai style decor with dark woods and wild flowers that documentaries are made about and oil burners and serenity and ponds and double, triple, quadruple room, half-outdoor, half-indoor treatment 'rooms,' that have pink flower petals in massive, full, dark marble (stone? slate? granite? fairy floss?) spa baths and mega size two-people showers and steam rooms and outdoor showers (you CAN NOT escape here dirty seemed to be the message) hiding in the garden and tea, fresh tea everywhere you
look and... so on.
Ok. So we've put on the funniest disposable underpants known to man - a fetching black, 80s style g-string for the ladies, and mini-hotpants slash belt for the gentleman. Both made of black, sheer panty hose material. Hot. As. As Boyfriend is a treatment virgin (SACRE BLEU) he's particulary amused.
Once we've stopped laughing, we:
Lay down
Have lovely treatmentaticians rub beautifully-scented, hot body oil (mind out the gutter thank you) up and down us. And it's really, really, car-bonnet-on-a-summer's-day-in-Alice-Springs, hot.
Then, the stones. Lovely dark, smooth big pebbles that are equally hot, either A. Placed under pressure/energy points and in our hands, and B. Rubbed, with the oil gently up and down our bodies.
Sounds odd, even a little creepy, but it feels very, very excellent.
Boyfriend asks me if 'My girl did that vibrating thing on my back?'.
What?
'You know, when she puts the rocks down and then walks away and the rocks send vibrations through your back.'
Er, no.
Seems he got the bonus round with the particulary energy-filled rocks. And the tea with the LSD.
[But, actually, that's exactly what's supposed to happen: the rocks are meant to release energy and 'heal' and as his back is bung at the moment, this is actually a bit spooky. Ish.]
After all the massaging and loveliness, they leave us alone to sit on a little Thai bed in the middle
of a pond and reflect on life and drink lemongrass tea and breathe deeply and pretend this is our backyard and take a furious frenzy of photographs because it was just so stunning.
Oh, look. Here are some now: