Rude Travel by Vir Sanghvi: Old coast, new wave

It looked for signs of sun damage and finally posted a visual in which I looked like I had a bad case of measles. The spots marked all the places where my skin had been damaged. Then, the device looked for ‘hyperpigmentation’ (I had no idea what that meant). The machine threw up another picture of me . This time, I looked like a leopard: My face had another array of spots.

The doctor looked surprised. That’s very bad, he said. What kind of sunscreen did I use? I told him I never used any. And perhaps I should also change my moisturiser, he added. I said, shamefaced, that I had never moisturised in my life.

The doctor seemed a little less surprised this time around. By now, he had worked out that I was the kind of prehistoric male who regarded putting creams on my face as a girlie sort of thing to do. He turned the machine on again to examine my wife whose skin was, of course, glowing and wonderful: Virtually no hyper pigmentation, sun damage etc. He looked at me in triumph. Why couldn’t I follow her lead?

It seemed to me that, given that I had turned out to be the sort of dinosaur who thought only women smeared unguents on their faces, telling me to follow my wife’s example was probably not the best route for him to take.

But it wasn’t a total downer. The machine would now tell me how I would look at 80, the doctor declared. The screen threw up a picture of a bad-tempered man in early old age who had clearly coloured his beard. As this is roughly how I look now, he conceded that perhaps I would not age so badly.

Then he wanted to check how my avoidance of moisturisers, sunscreens and other kinds of goo had aged my skin. Apparently we all have two ages. Our real age and the age of our skin. The machine did its calculations. My skin was actually six years younger than my biological age, it concluded. The doctor seemed puzzled. I first looked relieved and then, extremely smug.

This was in the morning. So, I left the doctor, went off and enjoyed a delicious Thai lunch of spicy basil-scented pork with jasmine rice washed down with Singha beer. After lunch, I went back to our villa, spent a couple of languid hours in our massive pool, and wrote my The Taste column for the Hindustan Times site, while staring at the blue of the Andaman Sea and the lushness surrounding the lagoon.

That evening, I took a buggy, and went up to Age, a world-class steakhouse, where there is so much wagyu on the menu that it makes your head spin. The sommelier took me on a tour of the wine cave, where vintages of Latour and Lafite stared out at me, as did an astonishing collection of wines from the Montrachet appellations. I resisted the wagyu, ate French oysters and Australian angus and went back to my villa, utterly content.

Why waste time on moisturiser when you can have Montrachet instead?

If all this sounds ridiculously idyllic it is because it is. I spent five days living this madly unreal life with its combination of medical examinations and outrageous luxury, and when it was finally time to go home, I gave it, what is for me, the ultimate compliment: This is even better than the Maldives.

If you don’t know where Layan is, don’t worry. Neither did I until a few years ago, Bill Heinecke, the Thai-American billionaire, told me that he had built villas there and loved the place so much that he tried to spend as much time as he could in Layan.

I was intrigued enough to find out more, because Heinecke has very high standards. He owns hundreds of hotels around the world and runs his own chains: Anantara, Avani, NH, Tivoli etc.

Of late, he has been in the news because his Thai hotels were at the centre of The White Lotus TV show, where the interiors were shot at the Four Seasons, Koh Samui, (owned by Bill; managed by Four Seasons) and various Anantara properties in the Phuket area (the spa scenes, the restaurant sequences etc).

But the Anantara complex in Layan is special because it is where Heinecke actually lives. It is in Phuket, but that can be misleading. Parts of Phuket are horrible, seedy tourist traps. But it does have some great hotels set away from the touristy beaches.

I first went there in the early 1990s to stay at The Banyan Tree, a precedent-setting hotel for its time, and then over a decade later to shoot for my TV show, Asian Diary, where we focused on the Amanpuri complex and pretty much ignored the rest of Phuket.

Since then, I have felt no urge to go back until I heard about Layan from Bill and our mutual friend Sameer Sain, who has been there to stay with Bill. Even so, I probably wouldn’t have gone if Air India hadn’t started a daily direct flight from Delhi to Phuket, which meant I could avoid the usual hassle of flying to Bangkok and taking overpriced domestic flights to Phuket.

I knew virtually nothing about Layan before I landed, not even that it was 30 minutes from the airport and combined a lagoon, beaches and hills. The Anantara complex has two distinct parts. There is the main hotel, which is high-end luxury (villas with private pools etc) and a second private hotel with huge residences that are like private homes. The residences can be massive and are straight out of a James Bond movie, making even the hotel’s luxury villas look like the sort of place where Bond would stay, while the billionaire villain would be holed up in the hill in one of the smarter residences.

The James Bond references are appropriate because The Man With The Golden Gun was filmed in the area, and local legend has it that Bill Heinecke owns the actual golden gun that Scaramanga, played by Christopher Lee, used in the movie.

You can come to Layan and not bother with Layan Life, the medical centre, and just enjoy the luxury. But I was curious to see how Anantara would maintain a separate spa and a centre for Western and Thai herbal medicine.

In fact, the medical stuff was one of the highlights of my stay because the staff were so good. I loved the part where the doctor had to tell me (despite his genial disapproval of my non-existent skincare regime) how young my skin was. And a pain-management expert figured out why I was limping a little, detecting a spot between my heel and my ankle where the pain was centred. There were all kinds of treatments on offer, and though I chose to drink bubbly beverages by the bay for most of the time I was there, I could have had complete medical check-ups and cures.

Would I go back? Well, I would be mad not to. It’s not cheap but it’s much better value than the Maldives. And who can resist feeling like The Man With The Golden Holiday?

From HT Brunch, August 30, 2025

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