Rubbed up the wrong way

Massages add a touch of luxury to a holiday, but they leave worse for wear.

The Peruvian wood pipe music, dim lighting and deep-tissue prodding had clearly worked a miracle on the man one cubicle over. He wasn’t snoring so much as imitating a sink gurgling and mulching kitchen waste. Well at least somebody was enjoying this.

One curtain over I was being stretched and wrapped over like a human pretzel. But before being salted and baked my doughy flesh was stood on by the masseuse. A rather large woman doing some sort of balancing act on my buttocks. It’s easy to feel lightweight and carefree when the oxygen has been expelled from your lungs so vigorously. My whimpers only met with commands to ‘‘just relax’’. I had paid for this.

The spa industry is now a key element of the hospitality and tourism industry. Oiling, scrubbing, wrapping, soaking and sometimes swindling millions of travellers annually.

Top tier hotels compete to out-zen each other, with Southeast Asia awash with street hustlers hawking live fish spa scrubs and Shiatsu prodding.

But whether it’s five star or no star, many others like me struggle to know the etiquette of what the heck to do in these half-lit rooms?

One of the pitfalls of the holiday massage is a likely cultural clash if not a total communication failure.

And so, in a small town in the Cappadocia region of Turkey my fiancee found herself head deep between an old woman’s bare, sweaty bosom getting her hair washed as part of a Hamman treatment – they don’t show that technique in the shampoo commercials.

With no words spoken and directions given only in grunts and gesticulations in front of bemused locals the session ended with the Hamman first-timer doing a few confused laps of the icy plunge pool. She emerged from this cultural experience looking like a drowned rat. Relaxed? Not so much.

Recalling this travel tale over the festive season, it seemed almost obligatory to have been rubbed up the wrong way in a spa, often when in a foreign land. Over-enthusiastic and – quite literally – over-reaching masseuses were common gripes. It’s a grey area, particularly for prudish