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“Living the skin almightiness washes noodles milk.” When a bottle of facewash confronts you with such an alluring proposition, you’d be folly to pass it by. I, for one, took to it with alacrity in the shower, taking care to give my noodles an almighty revitalisation before heading out to explore the many delights of Shenzhen’s Queen Spa & Dining. (At the entrance: “Warm Notice: Mexican guests please register at once”.)

Being male and infrequently conscious, I have only recently been alerted to the glories of the all-day spas here in China’s very special economic zone. And man, they’re awesome. For the price of a Hong Kong restaurant meal, you can be a sloth for a day, lounging around in billowy arm chairs, stuffing yourself with food, getting various body parts caressed by lithe young women, sweating in a steam room, hanging out by the pool table, or cavorting in a swimming pool. You can even stay overnight and get your undies washed.

I’m here at what must be one of the city’s biggest spa complexes – seven floors and a small town’s worth of people – with my girlfriend and two friends, a couple who have been here before. They lead us up to the third floor, where, dressed in spa-issued pyjamas, we fill small bowls with fruit and help ourselves to soft-serve ice cream before settling down into massive arm chairs with foot rests and personal TVs. The myriad chairs are arranged in rows, stretching for as far as the eye can see through the cigarette smoke (about 10 metres). Next thing I know, there’s a man with a chisel at my feet, filing thin hunks of dead skin from my heels. The flaky residue floats like parmesan cheese on to the towel below.

This treatment is just as luxurious as the not-particularly-impassioned leg massage delivered to me by a pretty masseuse who comes by to relieve my aching legs from the stress of being seated for hours with only fruit (oh yeah, and a pork-and-olive slurry, spicy beef with bamboo shoots, and a pina colada) to eat. Though I’m fully reclined and inclined to sleep, at one stage I open my eyes to find the girl yawning – as if nonchalantly rubbing my splendid pins is somehow boring. Meanwhile, a few seats over, a man has fallen asleep with his mouth agape. His loud snoring provides a bassy backdrop to the muffled TV noise that blares from the speakers in our head rests. It’s all very relaxing.

Hard as it is, we eventually summons the strength to rouse ourselves from bad HBO programming and our slump-chairs in order to check out the swimming pool. Sure, the swimming was good – a water slide and numerous massage spa pools were enough to keep my juvenile mind entertained – but the real attraction here were the free-to-borrow swim shorts, designed in true gripper style, a full 7cm in length and clingy of curves. Squeezed into these babies, I look like a pinched potato.

That doesn’t deter the somewhat over-friendly male masseuse working the body-scrub table in the male-only spa area downstairs. I’m not sure of his sexual orientation, but he certainly doesn’t need a compass to find my genitals, which he brushes over several times while rubbing my tuberish torso. I let it pass, but when he takes a bucket of water and pours a stream of hot water directly onto my John Wang, I dig deep into my Putonghua reserves and summon up the only word I think will effectively communicate my disapproval: “No”. He laughs. All I can do is join in – it’s that sort of day.

Hamish McKenzie