The Maldives — a 200-island nation situated just north of the equator in the beautiful turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean — is my destination. Set to visit three spas in two atolls over the next week, I’ve just begun the 24-hour journey from New York City and am already getting a taste of what’s to come. My business class seat on Singapore Airlines feels spainspired, and I couldn’t imagine a better send off. We depart at night, and the cabin is as cool and quiet as an airborne temple.

      The towels, fragranced with Singapore Airline’s own lovely sweet flowery scent, soothe me. There is attention to the tiniest detail, an atmosphere of calm, and a comfort that is more than physical. As the flight continues, I notice that the attendants have a quality that reminds me of the best therapists: a professionalism and direct engagement with you that is thoroughly balancing.

 
THE CENTERPIECE OF MY MALDIVES spa experience is Six Senses on Soneva Gili. My butler, Azny — with large liquid ebony eyes and long black hair that drops like lacquer over her shoulders — ushers me into the boat at the airport. Her head is not covered, and because we are in a predominantly Muslim nation, I ask her about it. She says that women cover if they want to. If they don’t, they don’t. “We do not believe that women are inferior to men in any way,” she states, and we talk about the tolerant Islam of the Maldives. As our boat arrives at Soneva Gili, Frank Wesselhoft, the resident manager, is watching my face and bursts out laughing. “I know,” he says. “I still can’t believe it either.” (He was reading my mind. I was wondering how a place could be this beautiful.) But if most of this country is indeed beautiful, it is the way Soneva Gili is run that distinguishes it from every other resort in the Maldives.
      Six Senses, the luxury brand that created Soneva Gili, is very serious about the environment, from the way the resort sits in its natural setting to its impact on the Earth. Six Senses is the creation of Sonu and Eva Shivdasani (he’s English, she’s Swedish), who are committed to responsible ecology. The palm thatch on my villa — I’m perched over the water in something Robert Louis Stevenson might have dreamed of — has no plastic liner; the wood used was carefully checked for eco-compatibility. They call it “intelligent luxury,” and it gives a feel utterly unlike any five-star manicured, standard-formula paradise.
      Barefoot Fabric, the Sri Lankan company that makes all the linens in the restaurant, is part of an Earth-friendly organization that supports unwed mothers. Soneva Gili grows 60 percent of its own vegetables and has a huge salad, herb, and fruit garden — producing the arugula, Thai basil, lemongrass, and super-peppery mustard greens that I ate right from the ground, along with papaya, pomegranate, and banana. Eva admired an eco-friendly house in Sweden and decided to copy its design for the wine and cheese cellars, which they’re currently building. It’s a pleasure to ride your bike along the packed sand paths that are carefully swept every day. The leaves aren’t picked up and bagged — they’re left to rejoin nature, and the look of a truly natural setting like this is both surprising and delightful, a private tropical Garden of Eden.
      What I feel at Soneva Gili, ultimately, is a quality of pure fantasy, and it is extraordinary. They’re building a hanging rope bridge to an adjacent island that’s being created out of branches and stones deposited by the tsunami. If you can afford something seriously fantastical, the Private Reserve — the biggest over-water villa in the world — costs $10,000 per night in the high season, and the only way to reach it is by boat.
       The spa, on the other hand, is accessible by a wood bridge. I am led to the relaxation room, a space filled with ocean breezes from the astonishing Maldives North Atoll reef — you can watch tubular waves curling from the dark blue abyss of the Indian Ocean onto the light green plateau. It is possible to have a thoroughly spacentric Soneva Gili experience without setting foot in the spa itself. I looked into one of Soneva Gili’s Spa Suites: It had both an in-house spa on the roof with double massage tables for couples, open to the sky and the stars, and an air-conditioned gym on the first floor. In the treatment room, where I am embarking on The Soul of Six Senses — The Sensory Spa Journey, two therapists dry brush my entire body, then apply a balancing facial concentrate and hot compress of towels over me, finally ending with a massage. Through the glass floor below, I watch fish swimming in the lagoon. I find that the experience of an over-water spa — in particular one so integrated with the giant natural aquarium just below it — alters not only the space but also my experience: I become so conscious of the sea, of the life that fills it, that each aspect of the treatment, the touch of my therapists’ hands, is linked to it in my mind. The products — made by the Australian company Sodashi (which means “wholeness, purity, and radiance” in Sanskrit) and co-branded by Six Senses — play an essential role, and I spent quite a bit of time smelling the collection. I’m the perfume critic for The New York Times, and for me, this is the perfect way to experience a spa. One of the real pleasures of Six Senses Spa is the degree to which they’re seriously into their products, and depending on your skin type, they might carefully choose sandalwood (for dry skin), lavender (for normal skin), or lime (for oily complexions). Reserving certain ingredients and products for specific concerns and spa experiences is something Six Senses also firmly believes in: The Balinese Massage includes a scrub imported from Bali, and the Maldivian massage features a local coconut and papaya wrap. There’s a sand massage — another quintessentially Maldivian treatment, traditional to the culture — given on the beach between high and low tides, and only when that point coincides with times in the morning or afternoon when the sun is not too strong. The timing of my trip didn’t allow me to receive it, but it’s an excellent reason to come back. However, it is the natural elements — the sea, the air — that really define my spa experience here: going to sleep under the bright stars with the gentle sound of the wind tousling the palm thatch; waking with a warm ocean breeze flowing over me; and gazing at the Six Senses Spa just across the lagoon, glowing in the soft pink and orange sunrise. The wind itself is like a treatment, and it is mesmerizing. I go back to the spa for hatha yoga with Timmy George. A beginner’s session, a few feet from the enchanting sea, Timmy puts me through the Fish pose, the Warrior, a spinal twist (which I love), and the Bridge pose (which I couldn’t do to save my life), while sea sounds envelop us. I look out (arms over my head) at the shallow aquamarine shelf toward the blue water and feel an astounding sensation of being at the end of the earth — at once lonely and comforting. I can’t imagine leaving, yet I’m scheduled for two more spa stops.

 
 I BOARD A LUXURIOUS POWER BOAT, and we blast over the jet-black sea. It’s like flying through warm, humid space. When the boat arrives at One&Only at Reethi Rah, I’m shown to my immense beach villa, and I collapse. Waking in the intense morning light, I look out at coconut palms and the Maldivian sea and think that it can’t be real — turquoise, baby blue, aquamarine, and cobalt water stretching into darker, deeper blues. I again feel like I’m at the end of the earth, what I now recognize as the Maldives feeling: nothing but that deep, deep blue and space. It makes me shiver.
      I keep my eyes on the striking view while bicycling to breakfast (which I take on a deck overlooking the sea). After enjoying guava lassi and Chinese congee with fresh ginger, cilantro, and tenderly poached chicken, I’m off to the Reethi Rah spa for my 10:30 appointment. “Welcome to our world,” says my gentle guide, referring to the eight treatment villas and three Thai massage pavilions. The grassy setting reminds me of the emerald rice paddies of Luzon, in the Philippines.
      Marlyn, my therapist, is from Goa. She seats me outdoors facing the sea and begins a foot wash with an apricot kernel and spearmint scrub that has a wonderful earthy, minty smell. I focus on a bobbing raft holding two iconic beach chaises under a white umbrella. We talk easily about my life in New York, and I find myself revealing frustrations with my work, hopes, and friends. I’m having the 110-minute Ama Releasing Abhyanga massage to eliminate toxins, and Marlyn explains chakras and marma points — areas that connect to corresponding points in other places of the body — to me.
     Like so many Goans, she is Christian, and I ask if the principles of the treatment contradict Christian beliefs.
“Yes,” she says, and smiles.
“But you believe both?” I ask.
“Yes, I believe both,” she replies.
“Good,” I say. I tell her that I’m half Jewish, half Christian, and that rather than organized religion, I simply believe in being a good person, that we are all divine to the degree we are good to each other. She says, “I believe that too.” It’s a lovely moment. She carefully wraps my feet in white towels then has me select — by scent — the products that she will use: I choose orange, myrrh, and palmarosa. Next, we move to a table inside the air-conditioned treatment house, and, lights low, she goes to work. There are three doshas — pitta (fire); kapha (water), which Marlyn is treating today; and vatta (air). I find out later that during the foot washing Marlyn was actually doing a verbal consultation with me, which is how she chose this particular treatment focus and selected which doshas to work on. The room is warm, but I like it. She is practical, immediate, present. I love most when her hands float on my lower stomach and head, balancing my energy.
      She moves her hands in clockwise circles, opening the energy points — “making connection between therapist and guest,” she says quietly. I notice an astonishing sense of centeredness, more (to my surprise) than that provided by a massage, because it focuses the senses on those energy points. It’s as if she were the conductor, using touch to align all the senses in the same key, and I the orchestra. The singular aspect of the One&Only spa is that it is, in fact, a resort within a resort. It isn’t just that the shortest treatment is 80 minutes, it’s that you can actually spend almost your entire stay in the spa, through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “We do spa journeys — not spa treatments,” Marta Payne, the assistant spa director, told me. “The One&Only spa philosophy is to educate people on spa as a whole lifestyle, more than just the treatments. The spa journeys are set for this purpose, which include treatments, nutrition, exercise, and other activities provided on the island. Reethi Rah is a perfect location for spa whether you would like to start with a total change of your lifestyle or just relax,” she says. “Lifestyle consultants are available to arrange a program according to your goal during your stay, and the specialists give you additional advice on how to continue your program back at home.”

 
 AS THE MUEZZINS (MEN CHOSEN AT MOSQUES to lead services) call to noon prayer, we glide into Male’s international harbor. I pick up the only piece of trash I see (an airline baggage ticket); otherwise the place is spotless. Instantly and smoothly, I’m handed off to my new assistant — the calm, competent Shafeeu — who will take me to Cocoa Island in the South Male Atoll about 30 miles away. Cocoa Island is one of Christina Ong’s Como properties,and an exquisite, precise loveliness is her signature, an almost miniature perfection markedly different from the awesome power-luxury of One&Only and the nature-eco peace of Soneva Gili. I’ve stayed at Ong’s terrific Metropolitan in Bangkok, and as we walk along the pier, I rediscover that refined aesthetic: a tiny, graceful island; a single, utterly enchanting dining place; a blend of Shinto temple and colonial wood shutters to shield you; an inviting jeweled pool before a perfect curve of sand.
      And the spa, unique and so lovely. Located on one end of the island, Cocoa Island’s spa is comprised of several small structures that are somewhat separate, somewhat blended, in a refreshingly natural placement that makes it an integral part of the visual experience. Standing between the buildings is the reception, defined by elegant proportions of rectangles and the V of thatch, net straw, and bamboo — materials so inherently beautiful it gives you pleasure simply to look at them, to touch them with your hand, or feel them underfoot. I get a Japanese garden-like sense of peace. I enter the reception area, for which Ong employs a clean minimalism with smooth wood floors graced with British Raj and Southeast Asian furniture. I’m led by my therapist, Danti, to a small house 30 feet away (its stilted feet planted in the blue-green water), and I glance into the two-person treatment room: simplicity itself, which is true luxury to me; a bathing area of such purity, natural seclusion, and tasteful design that I couldn’t imagine wanting to leave. The one-hour Como Shambhala Massage is the spa’s signature treatment. It’s longstroke Swedish, all over the body, though Danti uses his forearms and elbows — a more systemic approach, which is perhaps why it feels Asian and holistic. It acts beautifully as a jet lag reparative.
      Following the massage, Danti brings me a delicious tea of boiled, crushed ginger root (boil it 30 minutes, then let cool) with honey and lime juice. (“No lime peel,” he says, “it makes it bitter.”) At 6:18, the call to sunset prayers is blown across the water — the sound is faint and haunting. It is, at moments, easy to confuse with the sighing of the evening breeze moving through the palms. Ultimately, this extraordinary Maldives feeling is the reason to make the long journey here — to experience the closeness to the water on these intimate, shallow islands floating barely a few feet above the big blue. You hover above the deep, on the rim of the world, and this feeling permeates everything.
      The vastness is also part of the Maldivian spa experience, and it filters into my spa journey and the touch of the therapists’ hands on my back — creating distance from everything else. It is, I think, why a massage in the Maldives feels different from one received anywhere else — because here, there is nothing else. This sensation, the tiny islands, the endless sea, and you. It’s a luxury so simple yet so precious — definitely worth traveling to.

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