The Ayurvedic massage table I am being asked to lie on, with its little wooden handles at each end, looks too much like a stretcher. The container of oil that is about to be poured over my head, hanging over me on a wooden stand, resembles the bottle of an intravenous drip. The two white-uniformed attendants wait patiently. Is one of them cracking his knuckles? The worst moment on any foreign reporting assignment, as any journalist will tell you, is just before the plane lands. The worst moment on any five-star spa trip, I decide, is just before the first masseur's hand makes contact with pale, flinching flesh.
I've been to plenty of tricky places as a reporter. But until this summer I had quite deliberately never, ever been to anything as dangerous as a health resort. I was a reiki refusenik, an Ayuvirgin. Spiritual harmony, inner peace, loincloths and chanting were just a bit too, well, Sting and Trudi. Pass the full-fat Coke and crisps!
A few things happened over the summer to force what politicians might describe as a reappraisal. My dentist caused me a great deal of pain, charged me an awful lot of money, then told me that there was more of both on the way unless I changed my diet at once. I got tired of boiling to death in London Transport's ghastly 'bendy' buses, and started cycling to work. And a kind soul offered me a trip to the place which has been voted the best spa on earth. From your room at Ananda, you can see for 50 miles. You can look down on the pilgrim town of Rishikesh, tucked into a bend of the Ganges 3,000ft below, and you can follow the vast, porridge-coloured river as it loops round the Himalayan foothills and down onto the plain. Sometimes, depending on the weather, you are above the clouds. Sometimes, you can see the snow-covered Himalayas.
I arrive at this nirvana, about 150 miles north of Delhi, after a thrilling drive up one of those mountain roads, where the G-forces on the curves press you tightly into your seatbelt. I'd travelled through clouds of monsoon-season butterflies, past families of monkeys and a wild elephant. I'd entered Ananda through the Maharaja's palace that forms the resort's reception area, then been driven for a few minutes in an electric golf buggy to stupendous rooms, where even the bath has a view. So I am pretty much ahead already in the inner peace and spiritual harmony stakes, I reckon. Do I really need a full-body rub with honey-warmed sandalwood oil? Can't I just sit on my balcony and read a book? Dr Pramod Mane begs to differ.
Dr Mane is Ananda's Ayuverdic physician, the doctor whom guests must consult before embarking on their courses of treatment. He is used to nervous clients, particularly men. They tend to get dragged along to spas by their wives, it seems, and prefer to lurk in the reception area checking their emails. "In Ayuverda, nothing is good or bad," he promises me, encouragingly. "Do not eliminate anything or it will become an object of craving. Just eat it in moderation."
He seems a sympathetic sort of fellow, so I feebly wave the spa's green-bound treatments list in front of him. I've had a close look, and frankly, it has scared me. There is Kashya Vasti, a "cleansing enema where honey, oil and a herbal concoction are administered." There was Vamana, a "lukewarm saline gooseberry water solution to induce therapeutic vomiting". Don't worry, Dr Mane soothes, those are specialist treatments. Nobody has to have them! We end up settling for some of the more lo-fi options; nursery slopes for the spa virgin. I leave clutching a list of 'non-invasive' procedures, all of which seemed to end in the letter 'a'.
