Now I know what a wad of cookie dough feels like. Every muscle is kneaded and squeezed and ground up until it has the consistency of paste. Your fingers and toes are bent and pulled, clamped and flattened. Many times, it felt like my masseur was stopping just short of dislocating a limb or permanently disabling a nerve center. I wanted to scream, grab the bowl of aroma therapy (rosemary, by God) and bash her over the head with it. Maybe, I thought, if I could switch clothes with her, tie her up and stow her under the bed, I could escape this compound and somehow hitchhike my way back to Manila.
I guess she figured I might try something like that because one of the first things she did was kill my shoulders. And so I lay there helpless for 45 minutes, biting back curses and groans.
I suppose the key difference between this and torture is that, with torture, they stop after you’ve passed out.
And so it was in this pain-induced haze while I waited for unconsciousness or death, that I wondered, very seriously, what I was even doing here. This health resort, hidden in the hills of Batangas, was the last place I needed to be this weekend. There was no TV, no radio and most importantly, no meat. All the food was based around vegetables and nuts, and grown right there in the grounds outside our rooms.
I’m not a vegan at all, but I think even the more dedicated of vegetable lovers will be surprised at just how far they took the au natural theme in this gulag of resorts. For one thing, they don’t heat anything above 42 degrees Celsius, because it supposedly destroys the nutrients in the food. Try to imagine how awkward it is to drink soup or hot “chocolate” that’s just a few degrees shy of room temperature. Their official mantra is “85/15″, or 85% raw and 15% cooked, a ratio that every dish must follow. The little that they do cook (or I should really say, heat) uses their own exclusive brand of coconut oil, which imho tends to alter the taste of their food considerably. I’m not a culinary expert, as I’m sure you’re all aware, but I also think that the rather peculiar taste of nearly everything here may be attributed to the fact that they don’t use any salt. Not one pinch or grain. Instead, their bordering-on-insane chefs use generous amounts of vinegar to achieve a familiar salty-but-not-quite flavor. As you can imagine, the resulting aroma is tell-tale.
There is no other food in this place, except for these lukewarm, coconut-oil drenched, vinegar-flavored abominations. You have to drive for 20 minutes through overgrown, unlit pathways carved into the hillside to get to the nearest restaurant. And that’s assuming you somehow get past the compound’s cast-iron gate.
When I run to the toilet to try to vomit, I half-expected the tissue paper to be made out of a combination of banana leaves and orange peels, and a blank-faced goon to come and force the barf back in my mouth.
Vomit, vomit, vomit. Massage, massage, massage.
“Why can’t I just die, die, die?” I think, and finally, thankfully, lose consciousness.
***
When I wake up, the sadist is packing away her tools and I roll slowly off the bed to give her a tip. I limp away whimpering, but altogether optimistic that feeling would one day return to my neck and shoulders, and that I only had to stay here 1 more night.