Spa Search: Maui Luxury - The New York Times

The terme attendants, who are from many different states and countries, seem to enjoy their work and happily adopt an educational role if you seem, as I must have, out of your element.

''Baby!'' exclaimed my first attendant, the one who was giving me the salt-and-honey steam wrap. She held up a red box of sea salt. ''Sixty-nine cents! Every house has some! And this! This is a luffa! In my backyard in Vera Cruz, I grow this.'' She applied the luffa vigorously to my bare skin. ''Women in southern Europe! Mexican women! Indian women!'' She poured on the salt. I felt a cool trickle, like water but not wet. ''Israeli women, you know they luffa the baby the day it is born!'' She scrubbed the salt into my back. Then she wielded the shower spigot, washing off the salt, then she exclaimed, ''Hold out your hands!'' I cupped my hands in front of me, and she poured warmed honey into them. She directed me to smear the warm honey over my naked front, as she was doing over my naked back. In the light from the window, I glistened with a goldish tint. When I was covered with honey from top to toe, she wrapped me in a sheet and led me to the steam room, where I lay down in the fog. She put cucumber slices over my closed eyelids and a cold washcloth over my face. She exclaimed, ''You all right, baby? Not too hot? I take care of you!'' Ten minutes later, she unwrapped me, turned on the cool shower in the steam room and revived me for the therapist, who gave me a hot lava massage.

Toward the end of the massage (which was very soothing), the foot person came in. This was the treatment I had been waiting for, maybe all my life -- a masseuse at my head, a masseuse at my feet, the world's most excellent argument for polygamy. They harmonized -- 10 fingers playing the melody over my feet, 10 fingers finding the rhythm over my scalp. Too soon, the foot person finished flicking my toes and kneading my arches and excused herself. My masseuse said, ''Sometimes when we do that, it's hard to stop.'' I didn't sigh. I was way beyond sighing.

That night I ate in the floating seafood restaurant, the Humuhumunukunukuapua'a, which is reached by a set of paths that wound and branched among the interconnected swimming pools and the fruit garden. The Pacific Rim cuisine was of the tall sort, with disparate ingredients stacked delicately, and abundantly, on top of one another. I slept 10 hours.

By the second salt-and-honey scrub, I was jaded enough to be a tad more investigative, and it turned out that my terme attendant was the supervisor. She told me that she supervised 13 female terme attendants who work on about 80 women every day, seven days a week, all year-round, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Each woman works 10 hours a day, four days a week. The men's side offers the same treatments (or treats, you might say), but only about 40 men a day sign up. ''And they hardly ever want this,'' she said, wrapping the sheet around me. ''They don't seem to like the scrubs.'' I felt the sheet clinging to the honey as she led me into the steam room and laid me down. More fools they, I thought.

That afternoon, I sat for a long time on the lanai, indifferent to the early March rain. There were a lot of us there, and I wondered if we looked to the families below like patients in a sanatarium, vague and white-robed, not quite ready for anything except more introspection.

The aesthetician who gave me a rose petal facial was from Owatonna, Minn., a town I know well, but she was a Maui girl now. I could tell by the frank care with which she anointed my feet and slipped them into warmed booties, by how she lingered over my hands so that there would be no tension in them and they would slumber quietly in their mittens. I saw that blue behind my closed eyes again as the steam rose around me and the fragrance of rose petals settled over me. No pressure, just smoothing and soothing and painting on the mask with soft brush and inhaling essential oils. The rose petals on my eyelids were silky and firm, cupped against the skin and decidedly vegetal but reassuring. To think every rose has scads of them! I dozed off, but it was better than a doze, more like an evaporation.

There was a bald man in the beauty salon having a pedicure and laughing.

It made me want a pedicure.

Not to mention the special coconut euphoria bath.

And the pineapple papaya scrub.

Or the sandalwood serenity wrap.

A TALE OF TWO SPAS

The Grand Wailea Resort in Maui, Hawaii, has rooms ranging from $465 to $750, depending on terrace, garden or ocean views; suites go up to $10,850. Telephone: (800) 888-6100; Web. site: www.grandwailea.com; e-mail info@grandwailea.com. The Spa Grande at the resort has a vast selection of treatments to choose from, which are charged separately from the rooms. Full- and half-day programs (between $240 and $525) are available, but guests can also schedule specific treatments (for example, the Royal Hawaiian Pohaku, an 80-minute facial using lava stones and essential oils, for $225, or a 50-minute shiatsu massage for $145). Telephone: (800) 772-1933, ext. 4949; fax (808) 874-2424.

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Rooms at Calcot Manor, Gloucester, England, range from $322 for a Sunday-Thursday double bed-and-breakfast arrangement to $762 for a Friday-Saturday stay in a family suite. For each child sharing a room, there is a daily supplemental fee (covering breakfast, high tea from the children's menu and use of the play zone) of $37 a child for kids 12 and under, $46 for 13 and over. All guests at the manor have access to the pool, gymnasium, hot tub, sauna and steam room. While a half-day package ($120) and full-day packages ($203-$424) are available, they are recommended for day visitors only. Overnight guests should book individual treatments (say, a 55-minute full-body massage, at $89) separately. Telephone: 011-44-1-666-890-391; fax: 011-44-1-666-890-394; Web site: www.calcotmanor.co.uk; e-mail: reception@calcotmanor.co.uk.

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