I typically enjoy a good massage especially after a long day of travel, so I decided to book one at our Trivandrum hotel Uday Suites. When I had asked him about it the evening before, our driver suggested I could get a better and much cheaper massage in town but remembering a similar offer many years ago that nearly led to a totally different sort of massage I decided against that.
So, on our 2nd day in Trivandrum, I had my first encounter with Ayurveda Massage.
The spa was on the same floor as our room so it was a short walk down the hall, but when I got there I was a bit taken aback to see that (for the first time) I would be getting a massage from a male masseuse. He spoke very little English, but I understood him to say to take off all my clothes and put on some tiny Tyvek underpants akin to what a sumo wrestler might wear and then to sit on a low wooden stool.
He first poured a very large amount of warmed oil on the top of my head and began rubbing my scalp and face vigorously and then moved to my chest and back. He told me to lay on a massive wooden table and he then poured oil everywhere and rubbed my body from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet in a repetitive action.
This was nothing like any massage I had ever gotten and at this point I was really questioning the whole process and thinking way too hard so to distract myself I began to count the number of rubs on a particular body part and wonder if there was some significance to the number. Sometimes it was a dozen times and sometimes as much as 30 times.
After about an hour of oil and repetitive rubbing he then told me to sit on a little wooden stool in an old style sweat box. The masseuse then closed the box around me as best he could with only my head exposed. My neck was a bit large for the opening in the top of box and rather than strangling me he left the top slightly open and stuff towels around the opening to keep the steam inside.
The box looked like those seen in old boxing movies where the fighter sweats off enough water to reduce weight for the weigh-in! After sweating for 10 minutes, he showed me to the shower and much to my surprise, he followed me in and gave me a vigorous full body scrubbing.
When I returned to the room Mary Anne got a good laugh out of my perplexed response when she asked how it was. I am sure there are better places to experience a Ayurveda Massage so I probably didn’t give it a fair shot but I’m glad that I did that once, so I knew that I don’t want to do it again.
But I did come away with very soft skin.