Baby on board
A babymoon is an expectant parent’s last chance for pampering, relaxation and hot-air ballooning
WORDS DANNY WALLACE
PHOTOGRAPHY GEMMA DAY
“Your life will change, you know,” they tell you, their eyes wild and horror right across their faces. “Your life will change more than you guess!”
“Well,” you reply, perhaps with an awkward grin, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
But this just makes it worse.
“No,” they insist, gripping you by the shoulders and staring at you intently. “No, you don’t understand. Your life. It’s no longer your life. It’s theirs! They take it! Like a… like a… tiny fun-parasite! You’re just a… a facilitator. A butler. You’re no more than a glorified butler – and they don’t even pay you!”
“Well… it was nice chatting,” you try, moving away ever-so-slightly, but forget it, because they’re far from finished, and they grab you again.
“What are your ambitions?” they demand to know.
“Ambitions?”
“Yeah! Ambitions! Do you want to go in a hot-air balloon? Because you will never go in a hot-air balloon! You’ll be too busy dealing with sick and praying for just one silent moment to start messing around with hot-air balloons! You will be too weak for a dalliance with hot-air ballooning! Consider your hot-air ballooning days over!”
And you thank them for the advice, and start to slowly back away, and then you think, “When did Dad start using words like ‘dalliance’?”
But it is true. After the congratulations and the backslaps and the well-done-yous that follow your proud announcement – that you, yes you, are to become a parent come the warnings. You will not sleep. You will forget what pubs are. And you can pretty much write off holidays for the next who-knows-how-many years.
That last one hadn’t bothered me at first. Not until I realised that the last holiday my wife and I had been on – a glorious week of beaches and G&Ts and sunshine and lie-ins and battered paperbacks crumpled by water in the Dubai sun – felt like it was more than 400 years ago. I might as well have holidayed in the Triassic period.
But even as her belly began to grow a little more each day, and the warnings kept on coming, we put it off. There were too many other things we needed to do. And, anyway, where’s a good place to go when you’re pregnant?
And that’s when we heard about the concept of ‘The Babymoon’.
“It’s brilliant!” I told her, excitedly. “It’s like a proper excuse to have a holiday. A last hurrah before we swap our freedom and all our hot-air ballooning for a life of nappies and cots!”
“Hot-air ballooning?”
“And you’ll get pampered! It’s all about the pampering!”
And it is. The babymoon is all about the pampering. It’s about spas and lotions and potions, and lazy massages with oils and mud. It’s about facials and saunas and facepacks and having your feet rubbed until either you drift off or they fall off. It is, according to reports, about a pregnant woman getting recharged, replenished, refreshed and rehydrated, and really used to saying lots of words that begin with “re”, like “relaxed” and, “Really, I shouldn’t, but if I can’t have two desserts on holiday, when can I?”
It seemed… right.
“Why should we stay in the fading winter light when we can smother ourselves in sesame-seed oil and have a burly German pummel our backs?” I said. “Let’s go!”
And so, just a couple of weeks later, we find ourselves being offered a complimentary glass of Champagne as we check into Tenerife’s Abama Resort and Spa, on the smooth slopes of Spain’s highest peak, the Atlantic just a moment away, and feeling really very fancy indeed.
“Look,” I say, pointing at a leaflet I’ve just found. “At Abama Spa, we consider the mind, body and spirit in a holistic way. Through an ancestral journey, we are able to awaken to the most important moment: the present.”
“What does that mean?” asks my wife.
“I’ve absolutely no idea. But check out the treatments…”
I hand her the list.
“Aha!” she says, “’The Expectant Couple’s Massage Class’. The father’s taught loads of massage techniques so he can massage the mother throughout the rest of the pregnancy and months beyond…”
Uh-oh.
“I think I heard someone say that one was cancelled.”
“When? We’ve just arrived.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty much cancelled.”
I make a sad face and take the list back, quickly. “Hey,” I say, “you can get a Polynesian Coconut Facial Massage. You’ve always wanted one of those. It’s ‘revitalising’. You like words that begin with ‘re’.”
“And what’ll you do?”
“Reconnaissance.”
Abama, it turns out, isn’t short of places to explore. There are 12 restaurants – one headed up by chef Martín Berasategui, whose restaurant in San Sebastián has won three Michelin stars – a private beach, four pools, tennis courts, its own funicular and an 18-hole golf course. But it’s the spa we’re here to make use of, and when I make it there, my wife’s already midway through her first mother-to-be treatment – the Sesame Ritual, a “body polish with nourishing olive pulp followed by a gentle lymph-draining massage with deeply hydrating sesame oil to reduce the appearance of potential stretch marks.”
I am not sure what lymphs are and whether you’re supposed to drain them, but my wife looks too happy to talk. I decide to give it a go myself and find my way to the hydrotherapy room.
“This is based on the Roman tradition of sequential thermal bathing,” a helpful lady tells me, and I get stuck straight in. I enjoy my first-ever sauna. On her advice, I jump straight into a freezing plunge pool.
My glasses fall off and I decide not to do that again. So I head for another small room, full of flowery vapours, until I’m sure I smell like my grandma’s lavender pillow. I try the sub-zero Snow Cabin, and it feels so bad I am convinced it must be good for me, so I reward myself with a jump into the hydrotherapy pool, which pummels me about and almost instantly starts to massage the tight London knots out of my back.
And then – gloriously – a lady brings me a fruit juice and points me to a sun lounger in the garden.
All of which leaves me feeling that if a babymoon is this good for the dad, what’s it like for the mum?
“That was amazing,” says my wife, at the end of our first day. “What shall we do tomorrow?”
“We should drain some more lymphs,”
I say, studying the treatments list and yawning. “Or maybe try their salt scrub. Or flotation tank. Or an anti-ageing facial with essence of prickly pear.”
I turn the page.
“Or we could get a harmonising massage with bamboo sticks, even though that sounds like it might be a mugging of some kind.”
But there’s no reaction. She’s fallen asleep.
“Rested,” I think. “That’s another word that begins with ‘re’”.
And I turn out the light, and I start to drift off, and I realise I couldn’t care less about hot-air ballooning than I do right now.
GETTING THERE
For more about Tenerife, visit your local Thomas Cook or Going Places store, call +44 (0)844 412 5966, visit www.thomascook.com or tune in to Thomas Coook TV on Sky channel 655
WHERE THEY STAYED
Danny and Greta stayed at the clifftop Abama Golf & Spa Resort (www.thomascook.com). Their three-day luxury Babymoon detox package offers a customised diagnostic programme to expectant mothers which includes a tailored diet by a nutritionist, a fitness evaluation, pure pampering treatments (dads-to-be can also get involved), and daily access to the thermal water circuit and gym.
WHERE ELSE TO STAY
You can also soak up the west-coast sun at Barceló Varadero (www.thomascook.com), an affordable alternative for families who want to holiday on the doorstep of the Blue Flag award-winning beach, Playa de La Arena.
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