Herbal Spa. Mountains. Home.

People always ask me if I come from Prague. (Because it’s the only place in the Czech Republic that they know.) Ah, the disappointment on their faces when I say no. Prague is beautiful, no doubt about that. I love it. I love the medieval buildings, the art nouveau buildings, the cafés, the cobbled streets, the art galleries and the classical music. One day, when I’m in the mood to slow down, it would be wonderful to live in Prague. I’ll get an apartment overlooking the red roofs of Malá Strana (completely unaffordable, of course, but this is a fantasy, so let me finish it), and I’ll get a cat (with wise eyes) to keep me company. I’ll make tea in pretty ceramic mugs, listen to jazz records and fill the place with more and more books which I’ll bring home from an antikvariát. (Antikvariát is the Czech word for second-hand bookshop. I have no idea what a kvariát is, but in my head it stands for “big evil people-exploiting only-for-profit assembly-line bookshop chain where the staff don’t even like books”. My lifestyle would be anti all-that.)

But that’s all just a would-be may-be fantasy. In fact, the place I call home is in the Beskydy mountains, in the eastern part of the country. Here goes my little contribution to the marketing of this region, so that you know there’s more to the Czech Republic than Prague …

Today I discovered a new kind of mountain-style pampering. Herbal spa. The place I went to is called Bylinné Lázničky in a village called Komorní Lhotka. The spa is in a wooden house in a quiet location up in the mountains. We went in the evening with my mum and my sister, and all their windows were steamed up from the baths … it looked exactly like the kind of place where you would come to purify yourself.

Everything inside is decorated in wood, mountain-style. We were first led into a sort of tea room / waiting room where we were sat down to read through the menu of treatments.

First you are led into a small bathroom where you spend 20 minutes in a herbal bath.  There’s a choice of different herbs, conifers, Dead Sea salt or even bog muck. (Yeah, you read correctly: bog muck. I didn’t fancy that, frankly... just couldn’t help imagining how I’d be scraping bog muck out of my poonani the next day. Yuck.) Keeping it safe, I asked for chamomile, because it smells nice and it’s purifying and I thought I could do with some purifying. Especially my brain.

After the bath, they wrap you up into a clean white sheet and a soft warm blanket and you spend another 20 minutes lying down and relaxing. (Or that’s what they tell you to do … relaxing!) I spent 20 minutes thinking about all kinds of ridiculous things, all the random stuff my brain comes up with … and I thought how it would be nice to run a business like this (one day when I decide to escape the city). Herbal spa up in the quiet mountains. Perfect and romantic, no? Soon the cynical side of my brain interfered: running a herbal spa doesn’t involve enjoying herbal treatments; you probably just end up scrubbing a lot of bathrooms every day. It did feel quite nice to be lying down wrapped up in a clean white sheet, though. Purifying!

You can get a herbal tea infusion to sip while you sit in the bath. Mine was lemon balm.

At the end, you get a full body massage. It was a good, gentle massage, but I couldn’t quite relax … the masseur was  a man! Now, this is either your thing or it isn’t. (My mother enjoys it.  She thinks all men are bastards, so seeing a man whose job forces him to pamper women is like the fulfilment of her personal lifelong vendetta.) Personally, I prefer the Ayurveda approach: men massage men, women massage women. It just seems awkward to have my body pampered by a man who is not a romantic interest.  Maybe one day when I’m old and wrinkly and I feel all neglected, I might change my opinion about this.

But it was a nice and relaxing experience nevertheless … I left feeling all herbal and mellow.