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Ultimate private island spa: Parrot Cay
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My Thai-massage therapist, Aire, is barely five feet tall and weighs perhaps 90 pounds after a meal. But she is a sprite with strength: When I tell her she can increase the pressure, she ratchets it up at once. At one point she is practically cantilevering me (who weighs 179 before dinner) off the mat. The treatment is gentle, deliberate, and powerful, and it comes with a nice dollop of Eastern philosophy: "Not like you press on today and is gone tomorrow already," she tells me when I ask whether I'll ever get rid of the pain under my right shoulder blade.
It's the hot stone massage, the Nessun Dorma of the spa world, that shows creativity here. "Eighty percent of the time you are faceup," Barter tells me, "but you are massaged on both sides. It's quite a dance." And so it turns out to be--but for the therapist more than the guest.
When I come into the massage room, the stones are laid out on the table like runway landing lights. I lie on them faceup, and Oka proceeds to run another line of them across my abdomen. It makes me feel my pulse in my stomach. Then the pas de deux begins.
Oka employs his forearm by turns as a roller, an I-beam, and a fulcrum. At one point my lower leg is hooked across his lower back, as he uses his slightly bent posture to stretch my hip. (All I can think of is that old line, "In some countries, we'd be married now.") At another point he balances and rolls my neck on his forearm as he pursues the bag of marbles that is my upper back. Near the end, he turns my body into a folding chaise and the release in my lower back is like a small landslide. Then he balls me into the fetal position and I find, with some dismay, that I'm balancing on the side edge of the table and being compacted like a car in a crusher (although there is no pain). The coda is a spinal twist.
Throughout, Oka works the stones into the massage, which sometimes requires enormous dexterity. At one point he is balancing me on my side, massaging my lower back with the stones, and keeping my posterior under wraps. Given the complicated movements, there is more than one point at which the drape seems to be headed south--then suddenly Oka does a quick tuck or fold and modesty is preserved.
On my last morning at the resort, I decide to take a chance on the tui na massage, despite being warned by Barter that it can be excruciating. "It involves a lot of cross-fiber work," she adds, "and not always in the most soothing way. But it really does the work." Yes, it does. There is a lot of pressure-point pushing with fingertip, forearm, and elbow and lots of skin kneading. (You'll be reminded of your love handles if you have them.) Tui na is a cumulative massage--for the first 30 minutes it seems less like torture and more like tedium. But then I go around a bend and when Oka is through, I feel slightly gauzy, as I do when a lot of tension suddenly slips away.
Languages evolve, and the language of luxury is no exception. We may be living in the twilight of marble and silk, posh and palatial. It's part of a more profound cultural change: Affluent people now visit resorts to be active rather than indolent, to pursue well-being rather than sheer escape, and to engage themselves rather than just indulge themselves.
Mrs. Ong is onto the seismic shift, and in the end, that may be Parrot Cay's singular achievement: It offers the coming yin-yang of our time. Worldliness without glamour. Luxury without excess. Spare without spartan. Privacy without pulling up a drawbridge. It's that rare resort that understands the difference between simple and simplicity--and gets the latter just right.
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