The Naked Tourist Read online

  The principle behind “massclusivity,” whether in spas or in resorts in general, is to make the client feel like pampered royalty alone with his or her pleasures while being processed through a mildly hedonistic conveyor belt at top speed. It goes without saying that time can be made to seem much slower moving in order to amplify the feeling of recuperation. A week can be made to feel like a month, a day like a week. After all, the economic parsing of time that we have internalized since childhood falls away abruptly as soon as we are idle and abroad. For most people, the cessation of work alone achieves this illusion. In the destination spa, especially, you have too much time. Your days are empty, filled with curious frivolities that you have persuaded yourself are critical to your health. You float from hour to hour, half bored, half mesmerized, feeling as if the thousands of dollars or euros you are spending are a bargain, while they are, of course, nothing of the sort.

  The first hours and days at Chiva-Som were almost an out-of-body experience. After the pell-mell of Bangkok, the gated hush of the resort was difficult to acclimatize to. Creamy frangipanis stood around the tilted lawns; small gocarts glided along the paths, ushering visitors from the main gate to their allotted chalets. It was physically arranged as a utopian minivillage or monastery, crossed by these toy-town paths upon which guests did not appear to walk on foot, with the beach behind laid out like a giant mat. Expansive American brand resorts flanked it, though discreetly set back from the beach, their glades sprinkled with fairy lights. The mood was subdued throughout. There were almost no Thai guests that I could see; perhaps noiseless introspection, bed at eleven, and an unsalted fat-free diet was not exactly their idea of a vacation. It is, for that matter, a very Western idea of “health”—the cessation of life.

  The second night, lying in my air-conditioned chalet filled with esoteric beauty products, I dreamed that I was sleeping in this same room, but now filled with dozens of empty beds. Slowly, these beds began to fill with fat, sweaty middle-aged couples while my own bed started to shrink, diminishing in size until it became little more than a tiny square upon which I was perched like a stranded seal. I was outraged. I called the management on the phone (the receiver smelled of sandalwood incense) and threatened to leave. “This is supposed to be a relaxing experience!” I screamed at them. “It is relaxing!” they screamed back. “It is not relaxing!” I screamed again. I looked around at the groaning beds: proletarian Czechs. Then, without warning, I woke and found myself alone after all. A shrill human noise filtered through the shutters above the hum of the air conditioner. It was a chorus of female voices chanting, “Kill! Kill!” Peering out over my verandah, I saw a group of Western clients in the yoga pavilion next door thrusting high kicks into the faces of imaginary targets. The morning Thai boxing class. “Kill!” they screamed, and lashed out with their feet.

  At eight I had a consultation with Jeff, the Australian nutritionist who analyzes each guest at the beginning of his or her stay. He sat on a rubber Pilates ball behind his desk, bobbing faintly as he looked over my charts.

  “We aim for six hundred and sixty calories per meal, totally fat free. We can offer some Ayurvedic treatments alongside if you like—have you ever tried neti, the sinus-cleaning workout? It’s with a watering can.”

  “Never.”

  He bounced a little on his rubber ball and cocked his head. “It’s amazing. So is chi nei tsang, Chinese stomach massage. Our regime here is totally based on the digestive system. Stress in your gut is usually the root of your problems. Now, colonic irrigation—”

  I raised a hand to stop him.

  “Yes,” he argued, “but it has to be weeklong. You have to remember that we suffer from what I call the disorders of affluence. It’s too much good living that is breaking us down from the inside. We eat out all the time—business lunches, expense accounts—”

  He tutted and the ball wobbled. He made the business lunch sound like a comet hitting the earth.

  “I’ve never been to a business lunch,” I protested.

  An acupuncturist stopped in for a moment. They discussed a case—a celebrity, it would seem, from the lowered voices. Then he resumed: “In the West, we’re sedentary by the time we’re forty. It’s a disaster. So we try to reverse this disaster by reversing your eating mistakes. As I said, six hundred and sixty calories—”

  He explained that their only rival in the world of elite spas was Canyon Ranch in the United States. But unlike that fabulous facility, Chiva-Som was truly global. There were more Russians here than Thais. And what I had to remember was that my week there was not the usual vacation. He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. No, Chiva-Som didn’t offer “vacations.” It offered transformations.

  “Club Med doesn’t change anyone, does it?”

  I shook my head sadly. No it didn’t.

  “No other tourist experience can change people like this one. Chiva will change you for six months after you leave. Some people are transformed for life.” His expression became quite evangelical at the thought of these converted souls. “We wean people off their past lives. It’s a synergy of exercise, nutrition, relaxation, and therapy. And no French food.” He didn’t laugh. “French food kills you.”

  Does it? I thought.

  “No French food, and lots of water therapy.”

  I was then weighed and my body fat ratio assessed. I confessed that after three operations in Bangkok, my teeth were aching a bit.

  “Stress.” He sighed. “You’ll feel much better in a few days.”

  He drew up a program for me, and I felt suddenly relieved to have a Plan. For once, my eating and exercising would not be random or arbitrary, but organized and profound. They would proceed according to scientific principles. They would be a transformational conversion to a higher level of beauty, which is tantamount in our culture to a higher level of sainthood.

  I was surely stressed, as Jeff had intimated. But I was stressed mostly by the fact that I now had nothing to do all day and that I nevertheless had to find things to do. I put on my bathrobe and silk slippers and padded down the pathway to the thalassotherapy spa. Usually there was no one there, not even a damsely neurotic to flirt with, and I could flounder around the series of hot and cold pools and explore curved passageways floored with sea pebbles where the water came to the knee. It was very satai Roman, harking back to the classical baths without the kitsch of a Bangkok sauna. Statues of Apollo or the Discobolus would have gone down well here, but then so would the attendants of a Bangkok sauna. Alas, there was neither. In the sauna, I lay on the stone benches and wondered how it was that a spa could be so lonely. The Roman bath, after all, was a place of male conviviality, of extended conversations. Here, it was a setting for brooding, isolated souls pondering their navels and attempting to revive their flagging life force. But then again, the solitude of this dripping den might be preparing me for more severe adventures.

  I redressed in my very Roman robe and sauntered through the pillared lobby to the main pool, whose surface was strewn with peach-colored blossoms. Four or five Western women lay tanning on the beds, attended by uniformed youths with towels and bottled water. There was a heavy air of dejection, of pointlessness, but to swim through flowers is never entirely pointless.

  I then went to the beach, which lay beyond a low parapet at the bottom of a flight of steps. A company cop stands by the concrete steps, saluting each guest, a tap to one of those peaked military junta hats that Thai parking lot attendants and hotel guards love to wear. It was like a Saharan beach, like the vast strand at Cap Sim in Morocco where the sand never seems to end in either direction. Single spa women walked up and down with the same bathrobes as myself, splashing in the low waves. Each one seemed lost in melancholy, isolated and withdrawn among the chattering Thai families. Thais do not go to a high-end spa to lose weight or fast; they go to pamper themselves with French food and $500 mud baths. We, on the other hand, go to Thai spas to find a monkish austerity. The women all carried depressingly thick bo
oks. I saw one carrying Buddenbrooks. They stared with a faint disdain at the idle rich spilling out from the Hyatt next door but also, I would have to admit, at me. I thought of striking up a conversation—for was there not a comradeship of the common Chiva-Som bathrobe?—but the vibe was distinctly icy. The Thai girls trawling the beach, on the other hand—

  Where there is nothing to do, one spends a great part of the day thinking about lunch. Lunch looms large as a tremendous event, a festivity in the midst of nothingness, a hiatus in the droning flow of hours. When lunchtime came, I therefore felt an exaggerated relief. Situated in an elegant first-floor colonial-style salon, the restaurant served biometric meals from several circular buffets. Around these arrays of sprouts and greens, of exotic plant life and rare fruits, the guests assemble with an awkward complicity that never breaks down into mutual amiability. The tables are set individually and “privacy” is scrupulously respected—enforced, even. The women from the beach reappeared with their thick books, their skin glistening unhealthily. (Were they invalids?) They ate plates of spartan proportions, little piles of alfalfa with a few chopped nuts, and tall glasses of sugarless lemonade. They concentrated as they chewed, a picture of tense apprehension. A fat Indian businessman and his equally fat wife moved with slow, crablike circumspection around this calorie-controlled food and their expressions were equally tense. “Rabbit food,” I heard him mutter. Heavy sunglasses disguised potential celebrities. Bit by bit, the wonderful glamour of the word “lunch,” the glorious history of lunch, seeped away and I was left with this dry smorgasbord of sprouts and cress that was doing wonders for my liver, an organ I never see and that therefore plays only a subordinate role in my psyche.

  At two, I abandoned lunch and went to the Watsu pool for an appointment with my “water therapist.” The ritual is fixed and meticulously timed, like most of what happens at Chiva-Som. To the sound of soothing New Age tunes, you get into a deep, hot pool, where a muscular Thai looking a little like Yukio Mishima awaits you. He wai’s and tells you “not to worry.” Closing your eyes and floating on your back, you are twirled around in a marine ballet; you are twisted into therapeutic underwater shapes, sloshed around by your feet, caressed, and numbed. An hour passes and gradually you lose all sense of reality. You have no idea where you are or who this mystic masseur is. You are totally disoriented, and therein lies your luxury. You wonder if you are drowning or sailing through air. You wonder whether you should be aroused, or whether you are. The therapist smiles and says things like, “You let go human body.”

  That night I sat in the outdoor restaurant next to the beach, watching pink khong fai lanterns floating high in the sky, candles shimmering like static comets. The reader of Buddenbrooks sat at the next table. Willowy, tortured, with a Nikita haircut—French by the look of it. Two women in pink sarongs and hideous straw hats sipped chamomile tea by the pool. Their voices were louder, coarser—English. Guests come to Chiva to be alone, to find solitude. And yet, just beyond the nocturnal trees, the joyous clatter of Hua Hin town could be felt. It was a strange seclusion. It seemed like the solitude of the Western woman itself—a room of one’s own, far from the madding diet and even more madding husbands.

  A rake-thin figure came loping across the pool area in a black suit and tie. Surprisingly, Paul Linder, Chiva’s Swiss director, was not sweating at all. But I had to ask him why he was wearing a suit.

  “It’s a question of respect,” he replied. “The employees see me in a suit and tie, and they know I mean business.”

  The officials of global tourism are not unlike those doughty standard-bearers of vanished European empires who sweated through the tropic days in stiff stand-fall collars and tiepins, more conscious of their status as icons than of their chugging sweat glands. And like those heroic bureaucrats, they are a class of uprooted global citizens who have progressively lost their sense of national belonging. Tourism after all is the ultimate global enterprise, and it demands from its workers a globalized consciousness. And as with imperialism, many of its functionaries and administrators cast a cold eye on its excesses. Linder worked in Korea, at the Normandie restaurant at the Bangkok Oriental, in Sydney, and in San Moritz. He never thought he would be running a spa. Or making a living from transnational tourism.

  “Tourism can be a terrible thing,” he admitted, as we watched the lanterns disappear into the stratosphere. “The locals here are destroying themselves with greed. The Hyatt next door is sad.” He looked over scornfully at the glow of a thousand tree lanterns where the Hyatt entertained its masses. “But it’s fifty percent of the Thai economy. Fifty percent is a lot.”

  Hua Hin used to depend on the shrimp business. But why man a shrimp boat when you can tend frangipani trees at the Hyatt for more? Or work in a spa? Linder frowned.

  “We don’t particularly like the word ‘spa.’ Chiva isn’t really a spa. We prefer to call it a Health and Wellness Resort.”

  Again, he repeated the idea that such a resort offered a transformational experience.

  “An experience,” he insisted. “Not just fun.”

  But is experience superior to fun? Fun, in any case, is also an experience.

  Every night, after sitting alone on the restaurant terrace looking forlornly at the ethereal women, I went to bed at nine and slept as deeply as only a displaced urban insomniac can. My dreams now ran clear; I woke at first light and joined the kick-boxing class. All morning I sat in the Water Therapy Suites or pondered my intestinal health in the restaurant. I rode the golf carts back and forth and took a sugarless lemonade at the pool. For whole hours I lost any sense of being in Thailand at all, or even in the Far East. That was the idea. The advantage of its being in Thailand, for many guests, was simply the cost: $500 a night instead of $1,300.

  But as the days passed, I began to feel a nagging itch. At night, I wandered down the beach to the Hyatt. Yes, it was the unacceptable face of high-end mass tourism, and the food they served under their groves of illuminated trees was not designed to enhance one’s natural peristalsis. But it smelled good. I began to prowl through their opulent grounds, drawn by the scents of fat-fried Thai food unencumbered by a single stalk of alfalfa. Here were plump couples in tourist uniforms slouched in poolside deck chairs with plates of sautéed prawns. Here was a water bar where a smiling man made huge margaritas with liquefied kiwis. Would it be a betrayal of Chiva-Som, I wondered, if I sat here for a half hour and drank a kiwi margarita? Would I be seen and reported to Dr. Jeff?

  One night as I was doing my Watsu, I felt the first pricking of a forbidden craving. It was a simple lust, and one to which I am serially prone. I see in my mind’s eye a heavy china plate upon which has been arranged a steak seared only on the outside, accompanied by a simple garnish of crisply turned fries, long, thin, slightly charred, and very heavily salted. The salt of the fries will serve as that of the steak, for a top steak needs nothing by way of condiment. Next to this Dutch Realist apparition worthy of Vermeer stands a bottle of Volnay from a producer like Michel Lafarge, which is to say made with nary a bow to cretinous “market laws” or gumdrop anglophone tastes. You will not find this tableau at the Hua Hin Hyatt Regency, but that is the general idea. I could certainly get a steak with a bottle of Penfolds.

  But after a few explorations of the Hyatt, my fantasy returned. The wine list was shit and the steak I observed while passing a table didn’t look exactly sensational. The place was soporific—Hawaii on the Gulf of Thailand. If I was going to transgress, it would be better to go the whole hog and escape into Hua Hin itself. Leaving the saintly premises of Chiva-Som on foot, therefore, I wandered down to the guardhouse on the road and asked the two guards how I could get to Hua Hin. They looked taken aback in the extreme and tried to dissuade me from even trying. No one from Chiva-Som, they pointed out, went to Hua Hin late at night. Hua Hin was for locals, for Thais. But if I insisted, they grudgingly supposed that I could catch a passing tuk-tuk into town. It was strongly not recommended. And they drew themselves up as i
f about to utter an even sterner warning. Were they actually going to prevent me going to Hua Hin?

  “I absolutely must go to Hua Hin,” I cried. I might have added: “I am dying of virtue!”

  The tuk-tuk driver nodded in sympathy.

  “You wa’ good meat now?”

  “Yes! Steak—shrimp—anything!”

  “Purple Pussy Club?”

  “No, no: shrimp. Scwhimp.”

  He dropped me at the Hua Hin town piers, rickety wooden spits piled high with food stalls. In seconds, the human heat of Thailand was back in my lungs, and with waves churning below me I gorged on a greasy bowl of shrimp noodles.

  The place was pandemonium; a hundred hookers from the street eating guaydio naam with plastic chopsticks. I began downing Singha beers. Then grilled prawn satay, hormor with snakehead fish, and plad curry extreme hot. Sweat poured down my face, dropping into the bowl, and I guzzled various liquids infused with the fats of dead beasts, landbound and otherwise.