CENTER OF CALM
The Retreat Spa takes us out the city and into serenity
When you call yourself “Manila’s Grand Icon,” it’s expected that everything one does is bigger, if not best. Okada Manila, the colossal entertainment resort overlooking Manila Bay, offers its clients and the throngs that visit its 44-hectare property daily more of more. This includes The Retreat Spa, found on the third floor of the Pearl Wing. The spa houses a state-of-theart fitness center and an incredibly inviting cerulean pool, which is for exclusive use for spa clients. The spa itself is richly designed, with mood lighting, velvet divans and a bar stocked with several kinds of water, juice, fresh fruit and an array of bite-sized canapés. Before a treatment, your attendant approaches you for a sitdown to find out your ills and treatment options. Based on that, they will make recommendations, but will acquiesce to
your preferences still; in The Retreat Spa, as with everything in Okada, the client is king.
The Retreat Spa is aptly named, as you feel very far away from the malice of the city and, after much encouragement and enough green juice, ready to face whatever is aching your body and bringing down your spirit. Armed with an elixir of healing salts, aromatic oils and their time-honed fluid, dexterous skills, the attendants can exorcise your demons: knots on your back, stiffness in the joints, itchy scalps and rough, dull skin. There are couples rooms, which are larger than most twobedroom condominiums in the city, and decidedly more luxuriously appointed. According to the attendants, you could fit five people here, but there is also another room that can fit up to 20 (“very comfortably”), which guests have used for spa parties. In the candlelit darkness, over ginger tea, vegetable wraps and wholegrain biscuits, you can party away your stress—using your inside voice, of course.
The spa offers over 30 treatments, which includes facials, scrubs, massages and combinations of all three. You could hang out at the locker rooms, which are about as far from the drab, socially-awkward high school versions of yore. Instead, there is a steam room, a sauna, a soaking tub that mimics a sloshing river, spacious private showers and several rooms made just for lounging. The robes are velvety soft and made for wandering around looking serene and rested. And since Okada excels in going over the top, they have the Wave Dream Room, which has several zero-gravity lounge chairs, so-called because they’re designed to prevent pressure from building up at any point in the body; a special light machine projects peaceful, wave-like patterns on the walls and ceilings of the darkened room while soft, unobtrusive white noise emanates from invisible speakers. It’s a room made for meditation, naps or doing nothing.
The Retreat Spa uses only high-grade, organic ingredients for their various treatments, such as the Kundalini and Anahata, the latter a chakra-centered scrub and massage combination. Afterwards, our skin shone like the shimmering glass tiles in the spa’s pool. We felt renewed and smelled of exotic citrus and flora. The ails from the previous weeks were gone; in its place was a balanced body, a soothed soul, and the realization that we were ready to head back to work and the city—just so we can could visit the spa again.