Aloe-Spa Salute per Aloe - Green Spa Services

AMBIENCE A small tab on the Mexican-made towels reads: “The best things are in the detail” (my translation). This, I find, is true of the spa, from the bamboo sculpted fans to the petals strewn like confetti everywhere.

Like the ultimate Grand Designs project, the 25,000 square foot spa forms part of the resort’s mile-long range of oblong and cubed suites that runs through tropical jungle from reception to the beach.

Suites are built of local limestone and arranged around art courtyards, a cenote (a freshwater sacred lake) and, in the spa’s case, a small turquoise pool. The spa entrance has a Mayan-style thatched peak roof and dark shutters cover the high walls lending the place a cool, colonial air.

Men and women peel off into separate changing areas where a spa attendant oversees the pristine MO facilities: a vitality pool with underwater “radiator” beds, a canyon-sized, though unspectacular, experience shower, hamman, sauna, steam room and ice fountain.

QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE I was met in the pool area by Xochitl, a therapist of 12 years practice fresh from a four-month Mandarin Oriental training course. We walked robed to the dappled shade of the medicinal Mandala Garden where I sniffed and picked a couple of herbs (aloe vera and rosemary) from a choice of 12 for my treatment.

First off was MO’s customary welcome footbath. The rosemary, salts and juniper lotion combo was relished by a pair of sweaty feet that had been climbing steep temples in the jungle.

A rosemary and aloe scrub and shower left the skin ripe for my Mayan Na Lu’um massage: a traditional tummy rub favoured by Mayan healers. In most full-body massages the stomach is a five-minute postscript but in this one it was the main 40-minute focus. Being a bit ticklish here, the battle of the abdomen began as Xochitl pressed the flesh of my stomach back and forth.

This is not a treatment you’d undergo lightly with a sham therapist – the idea is to expel negative chi energy and restore balance in “an area that stores and processes many of our human emotions”. In good hands, though, you don’t mind a painful prodding of the kidneys and bladder. Especially if - as it said on the tin – it works wonders on the digestive system. It did.

The full two-hour treatment meant lying on your back for more than an hour. This was too long to be awake and inert in one position for me. I started to feel a bit of hospitalised discomfort.

Stepping out of the treatment room into the midday glare and heat was a rude awakening but it was bliss compared to the afternoon’s “Blair Witch” treatment down in the woods beside the mosquito and alligator colonised cenote.

Suffice to say that the “deep womb-like experience” of the Temazcal Ceremony was not for a claustrophobic sceptic like me. Perhaps it didn’t help that I’d spotted the Mayan Shaman who guided the journey show up in his jeans and trainers.
We stripped bare bar our swimming costumes and piled into the dome-shaped brick sauna heated by red-hot volcanic rocks in a central pit. It all seemed manageable enough until the air hole in the roof was plugged with a towel. Darkness fell.

The idea, I think, was to totally relax and, through a series of self-affirming chants and branch waving, to charge up our interior world. Alas, in such Bible-black, stuffy confines the imagination shifted into overdrive and I started to wish I hadn’t read Brian Keenan’s book about being taken hostage in Beirut.

When, after just 15 minutes, the shaman told us to shout “puerta, puerta, puerta” to open the door for a breather I practically yelled it and leapt out. The cool shower in the woods was one of the best I’d ever taken.

Notably, all the women in my group “camped out” for the hour-long ritual and claimed to love it. They enjoyed the positive chanting: “I am a genius” and “Really, I love my body” were big hits.
Oh, and right at the start as we sat around anxiously one of the women had suggested that we might all lose a few pounds if we stayed the course. Now that couldn’t have had anything to do with their stamina could it?

PRODUCTS Made from organically grown plants by London-based Aromatherapy Associates.

FOOD Café Mayana is the best spa café I’ve eaten at anywhere. An understated poolside space with a superb menu of smoothies, salads and snacks including Vietnamese rolls with fresh avocado, shrimp and mango salsa or a watercress and chicken salad with delicate edible petals. A waiter brings round a box of tea jars including pear-tree green and rose. House favourite is cucumber chaya juice, a grass-green drink made from a Mayan plant packed with vitamins. It is health in a glass.

IN-CROWD Highly polished and flush gringos, particularly Americans (Cancun is only an 80-minute flight from Miami) Mexican, Brits, French and Italians.

WALLET WATCH A one-hour Temazcal Ceremony costs $150 (£100); the two-hour Mayan Na Lu’um stomach massage cost $230, and a two-hour Tzolkin ritual, which uses fresh herbs, a poultice and is based on the principles of the Tzolkin, the Mayan lunar calendar, is $310. There is also a Sunburn Remedy wrap and water therapies in a dedicated Watsu pool.

Book with Seasons in Style (01244 202 000) - stay 7 nights, from £2280pp.Includes accommodation in a Deluxe Cenote Room, breakfast, British Airways flights from London via Mexico City and private transfers.

Source: Times Online