Fusion Maia: all-you-can spa

Josephine Price samples Fusion Maia's wellbeing programme in Danang, Vietnam

By Josephine Price
Published 13 Apr 2016, 11:39 BST

I emerge from the changing rooms feeling slightly self-conscious. Everyone else is serenely swanning round in waffle robes and slippers but I've been asked to don a karate-style suit ready for my stretch-release flow massage.

After contorting myself into an uncomfortable foetal position on the overnight flight, I felt tense and strained when I arrived at Fusion Maia Resort but Rini, my therapist, rectifies that over my hour-long treatment. As she clambers around me, I'm yanked, pushed and bent into an interesting range of positions. I'm unsure whether I can describe it as relaxing but as my muscles elongate and my joints decompress, it's definitely having a positive effect. I leave feeling as I imagine a yoga teacher might feel at the end of an intense session: ridiculously well stretched. It's novel for me.

On the walk back to the changing rooms, I'm told that I've got good bones. They hardly click at all, Rini says. I'm glad to have something to boast about, as I feel self-conscious once again as a passer by smirks at my get-up.

Throughout the week, I head back to the spa to try out holistic head therapies, aromatherapy facials, ‘mindful energy' reiki sessions and Ayurveda-Swedish massages. The spa menu is impressive and to make sure the selection process doesn't become too laborious, each guest at the hotel gets at least two treatments per day.

It's all part of Fusion Maia's Live Well programme and its offerings outside the spa are just as impressive: Vietnamese cooking classes, sunrise yoga on the beach, meditation, aerial yoga, tai chi, mountain hikes and more.

The food is undeniably healthy but interesting too. The menu is full of superfood stalwarts without an avocado toast in sight. Instead of simply playing on the trends that can plague so many ‘healthy' eateries, Vietnamese techniques are used to prepare delicious nutritious options that are exquisitely presented every time. There is no sense of denial either – breakfast options of steak or American pancakes make sure of that. The resort has also banished the regimented breakfast hours to further boost your zen (if it's delicate enough to be shattered by an early alarm, as mine is). You choose how, and where, you want it: in a restaurant, by the beach or in your villa's private garden by the pool after your long lie-in.

We look forward to relinquishing our health kick in the evenings too with a cocktail menu that's a brilliantly boozy version of the whopping fresh juice menu and the resort even has a mojito bar down in Hoi An (they'll organise your taxi back).

Guests get a little bit of everything here. Fusion Maia has honed the wellness break and whispers of expansion are exciting. Every destination (and traveller) needs a bit more of this kind of luxury.

Essentials

A seven-night trip to Vietnam including five nights at the spa, from £1,769.

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