Push the door and the first thing you meet is light. Red lanterns hang one after another down a wood-lattice hall, and the glow lands on dark timber floor and picks the grain out of it. Your bag is still in your hand, you have not changed yet, and your walk has already slowed down on its own.
A reader in Hong Kong wrote to ask whether the new place in Macau is just pools. It is not. What you get here is an evening: a corridor, a good sweat, cold water on your shoulders, a recliner you disappear into, and it starts the moment you push that door. So we did not send him a list of facilities. We told him the car would come for him and he should go and walk it himself. Book through us and the free private car runs both ways, anywhere in Macau, and two free add-on services are yours to choose once you are inside. All you do is get out at the door.
You walk the hall slowly because it makes you want to. Deep red walls, Chinese lattice set into both sides, a warm strip in the ceiling throwing everything down at an angle, the lattice windows dropping square after square of white light beside your feet. The timber floor takes half your footsteps, and when the door shuts the traffic on Avenida da Amizade stays outside with it. The hall is on the fourth floor of the New Orient Landmark Hotel, in the NAPE district of the Macau peninsula.
The counter front is faced in lattice panels lit from behind, so the whole desk reads as a lamp lying on its side, with dark stone across the top and a red lantern above it. All you do here is give a name: the venue already knows when you are arriving, how many of you there are and whether you want the car, so there is nothing to mime and nothing to explain twice.
In the locker room your shoes come off and the soles of your feet work it out before the rest of you does. Coat, phone, the whole weight of the day go in, the door shuts, the key stays with you. Somebody is on his way out as you go in, shoulders still pink, hair dripping, laughing at something with the friend beside him, heading for the recliners. He brings a gust of heat past you.
You follow that heat in. Pull the door of the hinoki dry room and the smell of the wood gets to you first, then the heat arrives at the back of your neck. You take the higher of the tiered benches, and it is not long before the sweat sets off from your hairline and runs. Elbows on your knees, nothing in your head, your own breathing getting longer and longer.
Then cold water, straight over the shoulders and down to your heels, and you shudder and laugh out loud. The lights over the recliners are kept deliberately low. You pick one, sink into it, skin still giving off heat, pulse dropping a notch at a time, eyelids getting heavy. The man who counted the lanterns on the way in could not now tell you how many there were.
One thing to be straight about. The venue is open 24 hours, while therapists are on shift from 13:00 until 06:00 the following morning. Those are two different clocks and we always say them separately. The corridor, the steam, the recliner: within opening hours that time is yours for as long as you want it. The session clock only starts when the therapist begins. If you want a massage the same day, land your arrival after 13:00.
Two questions the desk answers every week
“I get in after midnight. Is there anything left to enjoy?”
There is. The venue runs 24 hours, and the corridor lights, the steam and the recliners are there all night. Massage follows the therapist shift, 13:00 to 06:00. Arrive after six in the morning and the steam and the pools are unchanged; the massage waits for the afternoon.
“I only have one afternoon. Is that enough?”
It is. The walk in is a few steps, and the time goes on everything after it: a sweat, cold water, a recliner, and you are through a full round before dark. The Macau sauna you are looking for is at 555 Avenida da Amizade, fourth floor of the New Orient Landmark Hotel; which service, and where on the price board it sits, can wait until you are standing there.
You do not have to settle all of it at once. The day, the head count, roughly what time you land: one WhatsApp is enough. The car waits at the door, and when the door swings open that row of red lanterns is already lit for you, and your walk slows down on its own.
