Perhaps it is a little loopy to chirp when your grave is being dug. Chirp? I was tickled. In a frumpy, oversized beige outfit, in the Philippines’ Puning Hot Spring Spa & Resort, I watched spa therapist Fred Pan shovel warm volcanic sand to dig the perfect sized grave for me. He folded a white towel into a neat pillow and ordered, “Here, this is your pit. Lie belly up.” I meekly obeyed. Before I could fix my limbs to the side, the sandman shovelled tonnes of sand over me. “Fifteen minutes. Stay there,” he said.
Buried in the hot, heavy sand, I looked around for company. A bunch of Japanese were cocooned next to me, buried similarly in sand being fired by coal below, their heads poking out, and a woman in white diligently fanning their sweat away.
If comparisons to lava were running through my mind as the sand weighed down on my stomach, it was probably because the sand was from the Mount Pinatubo volcano. With my heart pounding like it had moved up next to my ear, I tried to distract myself trying to spell ‘psammotherapy’ in my head. The fancy name for the sand bath or spa I was currently in, it was a favourite of the ancient Egyptians.
“Want a massage?” the sandman reappeared with a generous proposition. I smiled in affirmation, assuming he’d pull me out of the sand. No, he did not. Instead he started walking over the sand I was buried in. “This sand therapy is excellent for you. Sand is alkaline and pulls acid out of your body. It is good for heart, asthma, joints, back pain and weight loss. It will also make you prettier,” Fred Pan listed as he strolled over my right arm. Is it sand or an apothecary? I dared not argue with the sandman.
Exactly 15 minutes later, I was exhumed. One person, my grave-help, dusted sand off my nape, another slathered volcanic ash on my skin, a third hurried in with a sugary drink called mogu-mogu and Shalimar Sumggod, Assistant Operations Manager, talked numbers. “Established eight years ago, it is very popular with the Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese. Nearly 30,000 tourists come to Puning every year for the country’s only natural volcanic sand therapy,” she shares.
In Puning Hot Spring, there was no weighing scale to be found, to measure the tiny ounces of weight loss from sand therapy, and there was no mirror to check how much prettier the psammotherapy had made me. Fresh out of a volcanic sand grave, I was just happy to be alive.
