A barrel of your finest crude, please

So my tour guide in Azerbaijan wasn’t kidding when he said that crude oil was “good for your skin.” According to the NYTimes article “Bathing in Black Gold for Health and Profit in Azerbaijan“, there is a full on PETROLEUM SPA in Naftalan, Azerbaijan:

Oil spas have returned to Naftalan, a Soviet-era vacation spot.

Inside, Ramil Mutukhov, a lanky 25-year-old, prepares to be pampered and preened, scrubbed and peeled — in a bath of pure crude oil.

He undresses, hangs his trousers and sweatshirt on a peg, pulls off socks and underwear and folds a wad of brown paper towels. He will need them later. Then he steps into a mess of what looks, smells and flows like used engine oil. “It’s wonderful,” he says, up to his neck in oil in a sort of human lube job.

Bathing in Azeri crude? Jesus, it’s like a dream come true.

The petroleum spas of Naftalan in central Azerbaijan, one of the little-known but once popular vacation spots of the Soviet Union, are making an unlikely return in a country so awash in oil these days that people are swimming in it.

Here in Naftalan, visitors can bathe once a day in the local crude. They and doctors here say it relieves joint pain, cures psoriasis, calms nerves and beautifies skin — never mind that Western experts say it may cause cancer.

Eh, when have those Western experts ever been right about anything? Oh, right…

Each bath uses about a barrel of crude, which is recycled into a communal tank for future bathers, given the cost of oil these days. Mr. Mirzeyev also uses paper towels to wipe bathers clean, a long, hard process that involves several showers.

[...]

Unlike the oil from Azerbaijan’s offshore deposits, sold internationally under the brand Azeri Light crude, Naftalan’s oil is too heavy to have much commercial value. Luckily, because most of the bath attendants and patients seemed to smoke, it is not particularly flammable, either.

The resort has 80 rooms and 10 tubs, 5 for women, 5 for men. The tubs are not scoured between baths and, as might be expected, have perhaps the world’s worst bathtub rings — greasy and greenish brown.

Dude, WTF? I don’t want to bathe in communal, low-grade oil. No, sir! I demand a barrel of your country’s finest export. Fill my tub with my own personal barrel of Azeri light crude, straight from the Caspian!

Looks like chocolate

So how about it? Anyone willing to take a dip in crude oil on our next trip to Azerbaijan? If not, there’s always the beer spa in the Czech Republic. Mmmmm…beer spa.

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