Sore Stories From The Sauna

Sun Herald

Sunday April 30, 2006

Belinda Jackson

An extreme scrub and a tub gets you up close and personal with Koreans, writes Belinda Jackson.

NOW HERE'S a picture for you. Imagine you're stark naked, lying face-up on a plastic massage table, with one leg stuck straight up in the air and a silent woman scrubbing at least two layers of skin from your buttock. There are at least 100 other women and children in the room.

Well, you wanted to see the real Korea, didn't you?

The best way to get (intensely) up close and personal with Koreans is in their saunas. Forget gentle pampering. These saunas reflect the true nature of their creators - from hot to cold, rough to gentle. It's the closest thing to an extreme sport that a mass of naked women can do together.

Naturally, like any spa, there is protocol, as I learnt when my sister Fiona and I waltzed into one of Seoul's biggest saunas in the World Cup Stadium complex. First, a man took our shoes and popped them in a locker, then sent the men and women in different directions.

At another desk, we were given tiny towels too small to guarantee modesty, plastic flip-flops and a little bucket for our toiletries and locker key (handy, unless you can pin it to yourself).

Buck naked and feeling very white, walking into the main hall was surely like stepping into a marble-floored Hades. Spread out before us were four saunas of varying temperatures and six pools and tubs - from icy plunge pools to luke-warm spas and fire-hot tubs infused with a range of herbs such as ginseng or vitamin C, for various health-giving properties.

Firstly, we took a shower from one of a dozen along the main wall. It being a Sunday afternoon, there were plenty of women shampooing, soaping and scrubbing their teeth, without a hint of self-consciousness.

All spas provide towels, but this one went the whole hog, with hair dryers, hair spray, big bottles of moisturisers, even toothpaste. What you forget, you can buy from the front desk, from face packs to hair masks, combs and even skin-bleaching products. So far, relatively normal.

In another corner were the massage tables, where four women clad only in black knickers massaged and scrubbed their customers, calling out the prices to newcomers, who could choose a professional job or DIY. Beside the showers were rows of women on small plastic stools, scrubbing their skin ruthlessly with pieces of coarse, green fabric, getting a friend to do the hard-to-reach spots. We opted for a pro job.

But before the scrub, we had to soften our skin. So it was into a sauna, out to an ice shower and into a hot plunge pool, where, feeling like a chunk of chicken in soup, I nodded cluelessly as an elderly lady chatted happily to me in Korean.

After a quarter of an hour I was a prune waiting to be skinned and a woman collected me from the tub and plonked me onto the slippery table.

For the next 20 minutes, she turned me like a flaccid whale across the table, my eyes shut tight as she scoured my skin with a mitt that felt like it was studded with nails - vaguely pleasant on my back, incredibly ticklish on my feet, but totally excruciating on my inner thighs, and I let out a squeal that echoed throughout the hall. She got the picture when I put my hands across my chest.

"Look," called Fiona from the next table. She pointed to the dead skin that was collecting on the table around me. It was a deep grey and tightly rolled. "It looks like Blu-Tak," she said, snorting. It was disgusting, but not uncommon, I realised after a quick look at my neighbours. Every few minutes, my scrubber would dash cold water over me, flushing my newly departed skin onto the floor and down a nearby drain.

By the end of the experience, I felt like I'd dropped two dress sizes, my thighs were a sparkling pink and I was surely the cleanest I've ever felt in my life. What price pride?

The writer was a guest of the Korean National Tourism Office.

TRIP NOTES

*You can rent floppy white pyjamas and venture into the mixed sex public areas for a juice or snack, check your email or use the mechanical massage machines.

*Some saunas are open 24 hours a day, so you can snooze on the heated sleeping room floors.

*Seoul World Cup Stadium station is on subway line 6. Entrance costs about $6, a scrub about $15.

*Asiana Airlines flies Sydney to Seoul daily, phone 9767 4345,http://au.flyasiana.com.

*Korean National Tourism Office, phone 9252 4147, www.tour2korea.com.