Letting Little Fish Nibble Your Skin is The Rage in KL

“Have you been to the fish spa?” asked Sara, our guide. “Oh you’ve got to try it, I tell everyone.” she said brightly. “In fact I am going there after I drop you off at the hotel!”

The fish spa, we learned, is a place called Kenko, on an upper floor of a Kuala Lumpur shopping mall. Here, tiny ‘doctor fish’ nibble at the dead skin on people’s feet, and they also offer a full immersion fish spa, where you can have the two-inch fish munch on your body’s dead skin from head to toe.

Sara, like many other Muslim women here, is modest, and so she loves this chance to have a beauty and spa treatment without having to have human contact. The fish spa trend is huge here with the thousands of Gulf states visitors, who also enjoy sexually segregated swimming pools and airport announcements in Arabic. KL and Malaysia is where Arabs come to have fun, and these spas are quite the hot ticket.

Sony immediately piped up and wanted to try the fish spa. I demurred, since I did have a foot massage at the music festival last night, and how much attention do my feet really need?