Do you fancy a caviar and pearl (extract) facial at a spa? Or how about Cleopatra's milk bath…doesn't get redolent than that does it? All those snazzy television shows with folks at really snazzy spas in really snazzy countries add to the whole mental picture of a spa.
Hold your horses before you take off on that trip. Thank God for things called day spas, in our busy cities, where one spends a day getting pampered with massages and treatments meant to pamper. And one such spa is Ela Spa, at Oberon Mall.
Ela Spa is a cocoon within mall mayhem. There is the sound of gurgling water, subtle strains of music, the fragrance of aroma oil (lemon grass?)…bliss in a spa? Almost, but first the art of choosing the treatment. The menu boasts of a range of ‘treatments' (referred to thus for convenience) but these are not of the medical kind.
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Ayurvedic ‘rituals' such as various types of ‘kizhi', ‘dhara' etc are there and then there are Thai, Balinese, Swedish massages, reflexology(hand/foot) etc. You can even get a mud bath/pack, seaweed wrap treatment here.
The menu is elaborate and you can choose your treatment. The prices of the treatment start at around Rs. 750 and go up, up and away. But these are not for the time strapped. Take a day off, or on your day off head there, switch off your cell phone …let the pampering begin. By the way, according to the staff, the milk in Cleopatra's bath is ‘cow's milk'; powder milk comes from a cow?
Since it is about experiencing the spa, I opt for ‘healing' hands. So it is to the treatment room with Cleopatra's tub (used for the milk bath) on to the water bed (which has some sort of orange/red light). It is to heal the hand so why the bed, can't I just sit? “No. This is to relax,” says the diminutive Wangma, she is a woman of very, very few words. First she pulls my hand, “to relax”, then my wrist, “to relax”. And then massages my arms, forearms actually. She then works on the arms with a pressure ball, which resembles a round rambutan. It has blunt spikes which are supposed to help in reflexology and you guessed it…“to relax.”
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A half hour passed in a jiffy, the hands were all ‘healed' and, yes, ‘relaxed'. There was soothing music, and then suddenly there was ‘dishum dishum', “some kind of fusion?”
And then the penny fell, it was the movie at Cinemax. That one was the factor, probably the only jarring note in the otherwise peaceful reverie.
There is a gym and a café too within the spa premises. So, what are you waiting for? Switch off that cell phone!