2015.10.10 Escape
I will cut directly to the chase: total nudity is mandatory. But the sheer delight of being steamed and soaked and scrubbed in a 17-stage succession of saunas, showers and healing thermal spas is absolutely worth a few hours in the nuddy beside a bunch of strangers.
Mark Twain had it right when he said of Germany’s Friedrichsbad bathhouse: “After 10 minutes here you forget time, after 20 minutes, the world.” I’d add that you quickly forget you’re starkers, too. For almost 140 years, everyone from celebrities and royalty to the chronically ill have flocked to Friedrichsbad, in the small southwestern spa city of Baden-Baden, less than an 1 ½ hours by train from Frankfurt.
Nicknamed Europe’s summer capital by high society types in the 19th century, Baden-Baden still exudes a regal air today.
The grassy, 2.3km Lichtentaler Allee riverside boulevard calls for gentle strolling, pretty cafes offer leisurely if somewhat pricey dining, and James Bond would feel right at home in the ornate 1800s Kurhaus casino, where Russian writer Dostoevsky compulsively gambled while penning The Gambler.
Climbing the grand staircase to Friedrichsbad’s entrance hall is like entering a charming Renaissance palace. The elegance is deliberate; this plush building opened in 1877 as an alternate playhouse for visiting gentry turfed from the casino after its forced closure under Otto von Bismarck’s decades-long gambling ban.
As I pay to enter (it’s €25 or $A40 for a basic three-hour package, but do cough up the extra €12 for the soap and brush massage), staff stress total nudity is non-negotiable.
Men and women bathe together, too, though on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays the sexes are divided in all but the last stages. At this point, I’m guessing, many modest types bow out and head next door to Caracalla Spa, a more modern, bathers-on affair.
Upstairs in an open-plan locker room, I strip off my kit and wander awkwardly, stark naked save for a little Friedrichsbad wristband, toward the main hall. No one bats an eyelid.
A fully clothed attendant greets me with a pair of ugly Crocs-style sandals and a white sheet ironed to within an inch of its life, but I hardly have time to regain my modesty before it’s whisked away again and I’m ushered beneath an enormous showerhead, from which thermal water cascades like a waterfall.
Then it’s on to stage two, a sauna heated to a steamy 54C. This is far from the cramped hotboxes of Australian gyms; here the ceiling curves to elegant domes while birds and flowers dance across handpainted majolica tiling.
Taking my cue from the only other woman in the room (I’ve happened to land in Baden-Baden on one of the gender separation days), I spread my sheet across one of a dozen or so wooden lie-lows, its slats scorching in the heat rising from the floor. Suddenly the ugly sandals make sense.
In that exacting German way, a small sign details the precise number of minutes required for maximum benefit at each stage. So after the wall clock ticks off the recommended 15 minutes, I push through thick orange curtains into a smaller sauna, so hot my silver necklace pricks against my skin.
This one’s at 68C and five minutes will suffice. Exiting, I sip warm, slightly metallic tasting thermal water from a drinking fountain.
I’ve now been roasted into such a state of relaxation that I’m no longer selfconscious about my birthday suit, until an attendant herds me into a shower and then on to a massage table. Now this is truly uncomfortable, my privates laid bare before a perfect stranger.
But she’s clearly seen it all before and, brandishing two scrubbing brushes with a matter-of-fact air, asks: “Hard or soft?” I choose the latter, somewhat mercifully judging by the reviews I later read about folk who lost an epidermal layer or three to the hard brush.
She gently trickles warm water across my body before beginning a soapy head-to-toe scrub, the kind of earnest treatment one might give a slightly grimy bathtub. Exquisite. I flip over for a repeat on the other side, before she sends me back to the shower with a perfunctory slap on the backside.
Stage six is another sauna and this time I’m sent in sans slippers and modesty sheet. Apparently the world’s only sauna still powered entirely by the energy of the earth, along one wall curative thermal water spills across giant pipes, spraying a fine mist into the air and heating the room to 47C. This has to be good for the lungs.
After yet another shower, I hit the thermal pools. Baden-Baden sits atop several hot springs, which for more than 2000 years have poured forth mineral-rich thermal water.
Mark Twain claims to have stewed the rheumatism from his joints here, while the remains of Roman-built baths where soldiers rested their war-weary bodies are preserved below Friedrichsbad, and can still be toured today.
In the first pool, I experience the profound sense of total freedom that comes with skinny-dipping. I’m somehow alone, so I lay back, lift my eyes to the high tiled ceiling and let my mind take flight.
The next bathing pool is a spa proper and after pummelling the knots from my shoulders and back, I wander into Friedrichsbad’s famed central domed room, where several middle-aged men are already enjoying its circular therapy pool. They could be princes, politicians or tramps; nudity, I discover, is a great leveller. The men pay me no mind and I soon do the same, instead drinking in the room’s elegant arches, statues and perfectly circular skylight as other spa-goers wander quietly in and out.
After yet another shower, I take a very quick dip in a frigid 18C pool, hardly lasting the recommended 90 seconds, before I’m directed to dry off and lather myself in moisturiser before a wall of full-length mirrors that are just a little too well lit.
And then, finally, I’m escorted into a tranquil meditation room by an attendant who gently cocoons me in warm sheets like a protective parent tucking their favourite child into bed. Sleep instantly claims me.
Later, I emerge from the bathhouse like a contented cat, blinking, stretching, blissed out.
Friedrichsbad forced me to shed my clothes for three hours, and then, temporarily at least, stripped away my aches, pains and worries, too.
