I Am A Polar Bear

If you’re writing a book about hot baths, thermal water, steam rooms and bathing culture, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself in eastern Belgium in Spa, the town with natural thermal mineral water that gave its name to many towns with natural hot water and all places where you go to get properly relaxed. That makes it very hard to search, incidentally – you try finding out whether there’s a spa at Spa and what its name is (it’s Thermes de Spa – makes sense but still quite generic).

The spa itself is on top of a hill above the town, usually accessed by a funicular ride of two minutes but, as is typical of my luck, it had a “technical incident” (in plain English: it’s broken and is going to take weeks to fix) four days before I arrived, I had to walk up, an uphill walk of about a kilometre which is not at all a relaxing way to start your spa day. The distance isn’t the problem, it’s the 84m of ascent through woods with very uneven leaf-littered footing. Going back down later is worse; it’s completely unlit until you reach town.

I was planning to get there early but rather than stress about whether it would be full on the one day I was in the area, I booked in advance – that is, since the day pass wasn’t available on the website, I emailed and made a reservation. It was only weeks later that I discovered that day passes aren’t actually available at weekends, only the 3-hour slots – unless you request it by email, apparently. I didn’t necessarily want the whole day but neither did I want to be restricted to just three hours, especially as they’re likely to charge extra if you leave late, which is not relaxing either. And when I checked in, there was no question about day passes not being valid on Saturdays, I just handed over some money and they handed over a wristband and I did indeed have all the time I could want.

Like everywhere, you need to bring your own swimwear and towel, although you can buy swimwear there and rent towels. Because I had the luggage space, I brought a second towel for the sauna, because most saunas in Europe require you to sit on a towel and I didn’t want to worry about getting my single towel dry enough to dry myself with. I indulged in a robe – my own, a red microfibre one I bought for Iceland, which is far too bulky to take in my usual hand luggage and which doesn’t dry nearly fast enough, but that would be no problem here. And unlike most similar places I’ve been to recently which demand pool shoes/flipflops for hygiene and safety reasons, Thermes de Spa insists that you don’t bring your own shoes, for hygiene reasons. You do have to step in all the footbaths to make up for it, but I seem to remember that being the rule in Budapest too, where you also have to buy flipflops at the door if you haven’t brought your own before they’ll let you in.

As for anything else – there’s no wifi, you have to leave all electronics behind and your electronic bracelet serves as your wallet in case you want to buy any snacks or drinks at the baths side brasserie. With “a place of rest and relaxation, therefore water games are not allowed”, it sounded like this was going to be a day of pure serenity, the kind I absolutely did not get in Bucharest.

The robe was a waste of space. As I checked in, I was asked if I’d like any treatments and rather than outright say no, I asked how much they cost and decided to add a 25-minute back and leg massage for €54. As a general rule, I don’t go for the treatments – I can recall three, maybe four massages in my life and the last one must surely have been pre-pandemic. But I liked the idea of doing the spa properly in Spa and that’s the first time I’ve seen a massage for much under £120, so I went for it. When you have a treatment, they give you a nice fluffy robe for free, so there was no point in carrying my own all the way to Belgium on the train – but the train is a story for Thursday.

With the massage added to my day entry, I was also granted access to the special changing rooms – much quieter than the special ones at Therme Bucureşti. The way it works is that you change, wade through the footbath into the pool area, then go up the spiral stairs to the wellness area where you pick up a leaflet with your treatments and times printed on it. My massage was booked in for 11am with Laetitia. Pop that in your robe pocket, along with the towelling slippers that you’re apparently supposed to wear everywhere except in the wellness area, and go off to relax until massage time.

That meant exploring the pool area in as much as I needed to to find the way into the outdoor pool. I love an outdoor pool, especially when I still feel sweaty from the hike up (yes, I’d found the showers, tucked away as they are in the people-having-treatments changing room, before going near the pools). It was a warm morning, although as the day went on, I really really began to believe it was just me who was warm, because it got quite cold later on.

I liked the outdoor pool. Outdoors often feel like an afterthought – just a small pool connected to the indoor area with a cursory couple of jets here and there for the few people foolish enough to want to go outside. I do think Thermes de Spa could have made it a lot bigger but they fitted a lot in without making the pool feel overly busy.

There’s a lazy river curving round the left-hand side, enclosing a bubble pool, mushroom and wide neck massage jet and there’s a larger standing-only bubble pool on the right. Along the side against the Therme’s two-storey curved glass wall are bubble beds and seats and seven massage jets of assorted jet shapes. It’s all angled, however, so you can’t see into the valley, despite the fairly sheer edge of the hill being just a handful of metres away. I appreciate that erosion exists but I might have built my spa facility to take advantage of the views.

At quarter to eleven, I went back in, put on my robe and slippers and went up the spiral stairs to the wellness area reception. From there, I had to go up a floor in the lift and to the waiting area at the end of the corridor, where sunloungers and bistro tables overlooking the car park were supplied with flavoured water, bottles of local Spa water and hot drinks from a machine, all free for those of us having treatments, although the effect was of a relax lounge rather than a waiting area. Those printed schedules are very useful – an army of women in black and grey spa uniforms came and looked at them, leading away their victim when they’d identified the right card. By the second lady, I’d realised they have their names embroidered on their collars – but it’s not necessarily their own name, as Laetitia, when she came for me, definitely didn’t have that embroidered on her uniform, so I’d initially shaken my head when she came to check my schedule.

There are treatment rooms all along both sides of the corridor, which is wide enough to have a lift and a staircase in the middle and still have plenty of room to walk on both sides of them. In my own private room, Laetitia required me to take off my necklace and pull my swimsuit down to my hips before lying down on the bed, which I did quite carefully as the room had a big window overlooking the wooded path down to town. I’m not an expert on massages; the few I’ve had before have often been quite painful, which kind of leaves me wondering why people bother and indeed why I’m paying for this. Because they’re fixing problems, right? Working out knots and tension and pain. Well, this one was quite pleasant. There’s a particular spot halfway down my back that makes me tense every time Laetitia applied pressure to it but it didn’t hurt and neither did anything else. Definitely more the sort of massage you have for the pleasure of it rather than for some medical purpose. Highly recommended, Laetitia.

Afterwards, I went and investigated the clothed half of the relax area – that is, the sauna and steam bath, which they call a hammam although I think there’s more to a proper hammam than just a room full of steam. I missed out on the sauna because I realised I’d left my spare towel in my locker and couldn’t be bothered to retrace my steps all the way out and down and then back up but I went in the steam room. My tolerance for hot spaces where breathable air is swapped for vapour is definitely higher than it used to be. I sat in there for at least ten minutes before going and rinsing off under the cold shower – something else I’ve increased in tolerance for.

Then I went back downstairs and spent the rest of the day oscillating between the outdoor pool and the indoor facilities. Like most thermes of my experience, the indoor pool is in a double height round room where half the wall is floor to ceiling glass and the ceiling is a dome. In this case, it was more of an egg-shaped dome than proper concentric circles. The pool had several bubble bubble benches, two circular bubble pools and a mini circular pool with a mini mushroom spouting water in it. Set above it all was another circular pool, which had been used for aquarobics as I’d walked in but was empty for the rest of the day – I didn’t go and investigate further but it appears it’s not for general use. Set next to the big windows on either side of the steps to the outdoor pool are two bubbling hot tubs and miracle of miracles, they’re actually fairly warm. This is a thing thermes never get quite right – they’re always much the same temperature as the main pool, somewhere around 34-36° (they don’t label them but spend much time in Icelandic pools and you start to learn to recognise water temperatures) but these ones were somewhere around 38°, which is quite a pleasant temperature for a hot tub for me.

As it began to get dark, the floodlights in the dome turned from blue to purple, lights came on in the pool and I began to really notice the lights strung around the ceiling of the bistro and the fairy lights piled on the low windowsills of the huge glass walls. Some thermes really make a feature of their huge glass pool after dark and for the first time I began to wonder about making some spa-inspired changes to my bathroom at home. Some purple lights to pop in the bath, some fairy lights on the (much smaller) windowsill, some larger fairy lights hanging from the ceiling. New towels. Nothing that actually requires redecorating, just a few lights and textiles.

Leaving this sort of place is always difficult, especially when you know that the funicular isn’t working and you’ve got to walk down a leafy hill that you don’t remember having any lights. Maybe I’d go round by the road. The thing is, the roads down the hill are narrow, with plenty of sharp bends, have no pavements and are unlit. To walk back via the road would be no safer than walking down the path and I’d be adding extra dangers, like the extra distance and cars. No, if the funicular isn’t working, arriving and departing by foot isn’t a particular fun thing to do and perhaps the best thing would be to get a taxi. But I walked, using my phone as a torch until I got to the narrow back streets of Spa and then emerged, much to my surprise, into the annual Nut Fair.

On the one hand, Thermes de Spa isn’t as exciting as some I’ve been to. It certainly doesn’t compare, attractions-wise, to Therme Bucureşti and its sauna area isn’t nearly as extensive as any of the ones I visited in Germany at the beginning of the year, although access is included here whereas it’s an optional extra at all of those. There’s a choice between a clothed and textile-free area for the sauna and steam room so you can satisfy your own sense of hygiene and public modesty. But the outdoor pool is good and the fact that no one under 15 is allowed in means it has much more of a serene feeling than you can possibly get when there are children around treating it like an ordinary public pool. Because it doesn’t have 10 saunas, 3 steam baths, a multitude of experience showers, hot pools, cold pools and everything in between, you don’t feel like you have to tick things off a to-do list and you can just relax. I was there for nearly eight hours and never found myself getting bored. I spent a lot of time in the outdoor pool, enjoying the contrast of chilly autumn air and warm water and trying out bubbling pools and benches and jets.

And besides all that, it just feels special to be at a spa in Spa! I quite cheerfully say that this is the spa town that named all spa towns but the website points out that it’s possible that the name is derived from the Latin sparsa or spargere, to gush out. Therefore, probably the noun spa just refers to gushing water, meaning the mineral springs these towns all have in common, and Spa just got lucky that it somehow took on the word as its name, in the same way that Bath in England just got lucky that it ended up with that name and not that all baths are named after the city. And more importantly, that means it’s going to be a key chapter in the book about baths and bathing cultures that all this has been research for!