I Am A Polar Bear

The last of the four spas I visited on my Great German Spa Towns trip and let’s get the spoiler out of the way early – it was probably my favourite. Bad Ems is a tiny place that doesn’t instinctively feel like the place to put an interesting spa with a unique feature but it is on Unesco’s list of Great European Spa Towns, so I guess it’s not wholly unreasonable. But it does feel a bit out of place, this modern glass building in this tiny town almost swallowed up by mountains.

Emser Therme is the third in the trilogy of spa/waterpark hybrid thermes on this trip, following Baden-Baden’s Caracalla and Bad Kissingen’s KissSalis. It has a main pool inside and a glass wall overlooking the outdoor pool, like all the others, but although it too has an upstairs gallery, it doesn’t feel quite as much of a double-height space as the others. Everything is in a distorted misshapen rounded rectangle shape, which feels a little less clinical and the shelf units built into the back wall are tiled in shiny reddish-orange with yellow-white LED rope lights around them, which gives a kind of fire-and-ice effect combined with the bright blue pool.

There’s not a lot up on the gallery apart from loungers, except the salt inhalation room, which is a glass box overlooking the main pool. For some reason, I skipped this – I think it’s probably because you probably need to sit on a towel in there and I was too lazy to go back downstairs and get my sitting towel. But there’s enough downstairs to keep me busy for half the day – I opted today for the full-day pass because, having arrived in Bad Ems at 8pm, I saved it for the full day on Tuesday.

Number one is the main pool, which has a large bubble pool set just a foot or two above it. It’s got the usual assortments of bubbles, jets and mushroom fountain. Then there’s the exercise pool which had an exercise class in it when I arrived. Underneath the salt inhalation room is a really weird and interesting thermal rainfall shower which seems to switch on at random when it feels like it. It’s actually half a dozen rainfall showers concentrated in a glass box and it’s really warm and I was surprised how much I liked it.

Then there’s the steam room, which is another glass box. Everywhere else, the steam room was a dark room in the back wall with a tinted door to make sure it stays dark. In here, it’s broad daylight with a red tiled bench structure in the middle for sitting. Hiding on the other side are the hot & cold plunge pools. The hot one is tiled again in red but this time with a layer of black for that feeling of sitting in a volcano. Opposite, the cold pool is blue and as I’d done in every therme so far, I never got deeper than knee-deep in it, although I could sit in the hot pool as long as my eyes could take the sun coming straight through the glass wall.

There are two outdoor pools at Emser Therme. The smaller and warmer of the two, as usual, is full of jets, bubble benches and seats and a lazy river. To my surprise, there’s no concrete wall shielding the place from public view: there’s a chainlink fence and then the river and then you can see houses and cars very clearly on the other side. Having come in broad daylight, I’d brought my sunglasses with me – I kept my sauna towel and whichever glasses I wasn’t wearing in a drybag on the shelf units because that seemed safer than just leaving my glasses loose on the shelf. I couldn’t have gone in the outdoor pool without my sunglasses. It may have been February and bitterly cold in the narrow valley of Bad Ems but the sun was blinding. I like an outdoor pool in the evening when I can sit in the hot water and gently steam while watching the lights and the stars but I do like them during the day, apart from that little bit of my brain that worries I’m going to get heatstroke because I didn’t think to bring a sunhat.

Did I mention the words “sauna towel” a minute ago? Well, I decided to get the entry into the sauna park and I brought an extra towel to sit on, as required. You scan your wristband and go in and remove your textiles and then I tried out the steam room (very much like many steam rooms) and the salt sauna (very much like an ordinary sauna with orange translucent bricks in the walls; doesn’t smell, taste or feel very different to anything else) and then I ventured out towards Emser Therme’s unique feature in the garden.

I spent the walk down the corridor mentally planning how to add buttons or poppers to an ordinary travel towel to turn it into a kind of toga, so I could be textile-free but not walking around naked but the moment I stepped outside, I discovered two things. One is that if you’re not in the hot water, it’s freezing, despite the sun. I didn’t plan to swim a few lengths in the outdoor pool but it was warm-ish and I was cold and I hung my towel up on the towel tree and waded in. First ever experience of swimming textile-free and it was deeply weird but not entirely unpleasant.

The second thing I discovered was that, unlike everywhere else, there’s no concrete wall between the outdoor sauna area and the rest of the world. There’s a concrete wall between it and the clothed outdoor pool but we’re back to the chainlink fence and the view right across the river. It’s one thing being textile-free in a dedicated textile-free area with other textile-free people. It’s quite another realising that anyone on the other side of the river can be watching you.

Ok, let’s go and do the thing I’ve come for. Down on the river is Emser Therme’s riverside sauna. That means you have to scurry down alongside the therme hotel – where guests can presumably watch the textile-free antics from their own window – and down the gangway to the small river sauna building. Actually, there are two saunas, a bar and a relax area in here. I started in the cooler sauna, which has a window overlooking the river and the opposite bank, because once you leave the main therme building, there is literally no such thing as privacy for the textile-free. After a while in there, I tried the other sauna which is so much hotter, so much more uncomfortable. As an aside, I know most of the internet would absolutely freak out if I mentioned that in both of these saunas, it was just me and a naked male stranger but the culture of these places is that this is normal. No one attempts to strike up conversation or hit on anyone, no one’s eyes linger in places they shouldn’t, no one acts creepy and I try not to think about misshapen vegetables or the fact that half the town could be staring through that massive window from the other side of the river.

I mean, it’s a nice view. The river is diverted here via a weir to feed a small hydroelectric plant and a narrow canal before rejoining the main river further up (down? Down is the direction the water’s flowing, right?) and then into the Rhine seven miles away. There are birds wading along the top of the weir and I’m reasonably sure, even in the overly-hot sauna with a naked stranger four feet away, that I said “Cormorant!” out loud at one point.

I’m not German enough to find this a pleasant place to relax. Clothed, yes. I could enjoy this pale wood building set literally on the river, with the sun shining brightly on it on a February morning. Very pleasant. But I can’t enjoy that textile-free, not in the way you’re meant to. I’d come to the textile-free sauna here specifically because I wanted to see if this river sauna lived up to the hype, and it does. But having done it, and having looked dubiously at the view of town right opposite, I was ready to go back to the clothed area. Of course, leaving a very hot sauna and having a journey of nearly one hundred metres back to the warmth of the main building, I had to stop on the way back for a quick dip in the outdoor pool, which was still a weirdly pleasant experience in a way I’m not absolutely desperate to experience a second time. I could – my local outdoor pool does monthly swimwear-free evenings but I’m not sure I could look the regular lifeguards in the eye after that.

Back inside, back into my textiles and back into the public area. I was there long enough to decided I needed some lunch and although you can have a full-on meal in the poolside cafe, paid using your wristband, I opted for a pretzel and a small Fanta. I’m warming to pretzels – I really like to eat something bread-like which has clumps of salt hiding in it. Eating and swimming together is an unusual combination, something I’ve only previously done at the Blue Lagoon and even then, it’s generally a couple of mini Babybels and/or a packet of salt & pepper crisps. It feels wrong to have actual food so close to the water but I guess I’ll point out that although this was the first place where I’d personally partaken, all the spa/waterpark thermes have poolside cafes with real food. You know, I could understand snacks, cakes, muffins etc but you can have a full-on plate of pasta or a burger or some local fish speciality, a beer, coffee etc. Feels weird to me but I guess part of the reason they have the offer of an “all day” ticket is that people do stay all day and they need sustenance.

I liked Emser Therme. Maybe I liked it because it was the quietest yet – Tuesday mornings not being comparable even to Sunday evenings – or because it had a slightly different vibe or maybe because I was there during the day instead of a cold dark evening. Maybe it was the novelty of the riverside sauna or the modern design or the openness of everything. But I liked it. I probably stayed about five hours and the only reason I left then was because I was aware that I wanted to take a peek around Bad Ems before the sun went down because I’d be leaving first thing in the morning and this one day was my only chance to see something of the town.

Something I’ve asked myself at every spa so far is “would I come back here for this?” I might. I might like to see Bad Ems in the summer. I’d made it difficult to get to because I’d come from Bad Kissingen, which resulted in the journey the day before taking five trains and a bus and the best part of eight hours and arriving after the hotel reception closed (their fault, not mine: what kind of hotel expects you to arrive by 6pm?) but it’s actually only about 15 minutes from Koblenz by train, when the train is running and when you’re coming from that direction, so it’s not nearly as remote as it felt that day. Yeah, I really liked Esmer Therme and I appreciated them doing something a little bit different from the others I’d visited.

And that’s all the hot water! On Monday I’ll tell you about the journey and then we’ll talk about each of the towns and then… well, we’ll see what comes after that. But if you’re after a spa in a Unesco Great European Spa Town in Germany, I reckon Friedrichsbad in Baden-Baden is the one if you’re after something traditional and Emser Therme if you’re after something modern.