Morning Health Bath

The hostal I stayed at in Baños (Hostal Plantas y Blanco) featured "morning health bath" as one of its services, and on our second morning there, my friends and I decided to try it. We woke up early and donned our bathing suits, expecting a sauna or steam room, or maybe a hot tub with water piped in from Baños' prolilific hot springs.

We arrived as scheduled, and after hanging our towels and outerwear in the changing room, we were led into a concrete and tile room lined with several wooden stalls. Each stall was less than one meter square at the base, and rose to a height of about four feet. Within each was an adjustable seat, and had a hinged wooden door reaching from the floor to the top of the stall. After we had each taken a place in a stall, our "technician" (assistant? guide? health bath guru?) showed us each how to adjust the steam vent and shut us into our individual boxes. At the top of each door was an additional wooden panel with a half-circular cut-out for your neck, and these were slid back so we were completely enclosed in our personal steamrooms, only our heads sticking out as though detatched from our bodies.

After about 5 minutes of poaching, I started to wonder how exactly I was going to last the 40 minutes alotted for the "health bath" without getting bored. My friends, although less than 2 meters away, were out of my line of site, so we couldnt even make faces at eachother or raise our eyebrows the strange contraptions we´d found ourselves in. Suddenly, the technician was up and out of his stall, and releasing us from ours. We were led to a series of running faucets near the floor, each releasing a steady stream of icy water into a plastic bowl, dousing a folded towl. The technician demonstrated how we should use the towls to rinse - first up one leg, then the next, progressing to both legs, both arms, and the back. Just before our teeth began to chatter, the faucets were turned off and we were led back to our cells. We repeated this process three more times, but after the third, our technician led us each to a small tiled tub, slightly less than a meter square. The tub dipped to about 8 or 10 inches deep in the middle, curving up in the front and back. We were each seated in a tub - full of the icy water we were becoming accustomed to, and shown to massage our stomachs just so. After a few minutes, the technician returned, splashed us each with the icy water for 30 seconds or so, and let us back to our boxes.

After cooking for a few more minutes, we returned to the plastic bowls, repeated the rinsing process, and this time had our plastic bowls dumped over our heads before returning to our cells. Finally, after five more minutes of poaching, we were released from our boxes one at a time and hosed down - maybe even pressure washed - with what may have been a recommissioned garden hose and sprayer. Finished with our "spa treatment," we changed clothes and floated off to breakfast.