A fasting spa on the Thai island of Koh Samui — about 400 miles down the Gulf of Thailand from Bangkok — is where you go when you want to tune in, drop out, and kick your coke habit. It's a unique form of Occidental self-torture that baffles Thais: You pay thousands of dollars to fly to a place with some of the best food on earth, and you starve yourself.
When I was living in Thailand some years ago, I sometimes went to the chic Chiva-Som spa in Hua Hin for a day or two just to see if I could stand it. Perhaps it's the power of the monastic ideal, or one's deep ancestral puritanism, but there is an undeniable appeal to the whole macabre exercise of starving oneself. This time, though, I wanted to do something more radical. I wanted a seven-day fast that a gnostic saint would have been proud of, and I wanted to see what would happen.
There's a perfect place on Samui for such experiences. It's a small, private spa called Natural High, owned and run by a British expat named Sarah Jane Goodall. Natural High is perched on the island's least developed western coast, not far from an opulent former Royal Meridien resort on Taling Ngam beach. Here, I thought to myself, I could have it both ways: I could fast for a week at the spa while the hotel's wainscoted colonial bedrooms with ocean views would offer some consolation — and the extremely moderate intake of healthy foods prescribed by the fast. And if I collapsed, there would be plenty of young female staffers in silk uniforms to help keep me alive a little longer. It might not be so bad.
The Baan Taling Ngam resort, as the hotel is now called, was virtually empty in mid-January. That was good. The last thing I wanted was to be surrounded by happy fatties. At dinner in an open sala overlooking the Gulf of Siam, I thought I spotted two or three other neurotics. But were they fasters too? No, they were gobbling up the pan-fried snapper. I was now in "pre-fast" mode and had been ordered to eat only fluids, so I ordered a tom yum soup and sucked on the bits of lemongrass.
Immediately my stomach growled, turning sideways, and it was only nine o'clock. That night, along the resort's geometric white corridors, praying mantises watched me slouch irritably but triumphantly to bed. I had passed an entire evening without eating anything solid, and I hadn't done that since around 1964. I weighed myself on the digital scales in the bathroom: 243 pounds. I was carrying around a year of New York bad living, upon which I now wanted to wreak moral vengeance.
The next morning, Sarah Jane Goodall arrived to pick me up in a Jeep at 7:00 A.M. sharp, dressed in matching scarlet head scarf and skirt, one of those London women my father used to call "blissful blondes." I had been mentally struggling with the section of the breakfast buffet devoted to croissants and Danish pastries when she handed me a plastic feeding bottle filled with a mixture of pineapple juice and bentonite clay, which apparently absorbs the body's toxins like a sponge. "Your daily detox drink, darling," she said. "Drink all of it and no cheating. I'll drive you back to the spa and we'll do your colema."
