A TONIC FOR THE WORLD WEARY

MIST coats the hills around Karlsbad in the early morning, but the old Czech spa town doesn’t sleep in.

Even before hotel breakfast buffets are laid, people trickle into the streets carrying plastic bottles and porcelain mugs. Young and old, fat and thin, solo or in salt-and-pepper-shaker couples, they head to fountains where 12 mineral springs bubble up.

Each font dispenses water at slightly varying temperatures, with varying amounts of carbon dioxide. It’s thought that each has a different therapeutic power. Spa doctors tell patients suffering jangled nerves, acne, obesity, gout and gastrointestinal disorders which one to drink. When patients reach the recommended spring, they fill up.

Only then does a summer day in Karlsbad begin.

Covering about three-quarters of the globe, water may seem common. But in Karlsbad (known in the Czech Republic as Karlovy Vary) and its sister spa Marienbad (a.k.a. Marianske Lazne), both west of Prague, there’s nothing ordinary about H2O. For centuries, people have sought cures in the piping-hot mineral water of western Bohemia.

I came here in June with no particular malady, only a desire to buff up my healthy glow and to spend a few days in the slow lane, sampling the civilized, old-fashioned, highly affordable pleasures of the two Czech spas.

Odes have been written to them, and architects have created graceful, colonnaded canopies to shelter the noble springs. Grand hotels, theaters, churches and concert halls rose alongside them, showing off a glorious melange of then-current Art Nouveau styles. In the heyday of these spas, which was around 1900, the world came to these two watering places. The bon vivant English king Edward VII regularly traveled to Marienbad, and an aging Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fell in love with a teenager there. Richard Wagner started “Lohengrin” in Karlsbad, and wise-cracking Mark Twain wrote letters home about spa-goers’ chief topic of conversation: their livers.

But both towns fell on hard times in the 20th century, especially during the late 1930s when western Bohemia, then a part of the largely German-speaking Czech Sudetenland, became a part of the Third Reich.

After that, the Iron Curtain fell and sequestered Karlsbad and Marienbad in the mountain-locked valleys of western Bohemia, leaving them chiefly to health-seekers from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

Only in the last decade have these spas begun to reawaken and spruce up. Given their illustrious past, they didn’t have to start from scratch, unlike other rediscovered places in Eastern Europe where tourist facilities are unsophisticated or altogether lacking. A convenient day-trip away from Prague, they are prime Czech destinations, with helpful tourist offices, reliable hotels and multilingual populations, though I found few Czechs in western Bohemia who speak English, probably because most visitors are Russian and German.

At the same time, the spas seem sweetly lost in time, like Eureka Springs, Ark., and California’s Carlsbad.

Between treatments, spa-goers walk in the woods, take rides in horse-drawn carriages, play cards, listen to concerts in the colonnades or simply sit on park benches. In the afternoon, they drink more spring elixir and then, magically, it’s time for dinner.

Old-world style, tidy and frugal, dedicated more to wellness than to beauty and fitness, the Czech spas are to Canyon Ranch and the Golden Door what Dr. Scholl’s sandals are to Manolo Blahnik heels. Public spas and hotels have delightful hot and cold pools full of the region’s fabled mineral water, but fancy toiletries, robes and towels are rare.

Massage therapists are highly skilled, but the average session lasts only 20 minutes and is likely to be accompanied by bright lights and loud Czech rock music.

Many of the treatments offered are as hygienic and esoteric as any you would find at the Golden Door, but their execution is more clinical than hedonistic. You’re put in a plastic body bag filled with spring-generated carbon dioxide, wrapped in local peat or given a mineral-water gum massage with no herbal tea, orchids or recorded wave sounds. That, coupled with the Czech spas’ de-emphasis on exercise, made them refreshing.

The prices are right

THEN there’s the cost. Rancho La Puerta, just south of San Diego in Baja, Mexico, and widely considered one of North America’s best moderately priced spas, recently offered me a week’s stay for an all-inclusive price of about $3,000. Even if airfare is high, you can get a week of treatments in Karlsbad or Marienbad for less than $1,000.

I started in Karlsbad, surrounded by mountains barely as high as the Adirondacks. Its parks, colonnades and main street line the shallow Tepla River, with winding lanes and backyards yielding to shaggy oak forests.

At the center of town, the most famous of its dozen springs, the Sprudel, emerges in an Old Faithful-like geyser.

It used to be enshrined under a Belle Epoque cast-iron canopy, but the Sprudel got a new colonnade in the 1970s that together with the garish, high-rise Thermal Hotel are the town’s only Soviet-era eyesores.

Compared with them, every other building in the spa district is an architectural enchantment, especially the lacy Victorian Market and Park Colonnades and the majestic Renaissance Revival Mill Colonnade, built around 1880, with five springs and a central niche for the Karlsbad orchestra.

The Town Theater is a neo-Baroque confection, coated with plaster decoration encasing murals painted by Gustav Klimt.

The onion domes of Russian Orthodox St. Peter and Paul Church and twin towers of St. Maria Magdalena Church lift the little town toward the sky, while the Grand Hotel Pupp sits like a Viennese pastry by the river.

I stayed at the Romance Pushkin, a small hotel with an Art Nouveau facade, a first-floor restaurant and a cage elevator. My single, for 80 a night including breakfast, was immaculate and tastefully decorated. Unlike big resort hotels -- the Thermal, Pupp, Bristol, Carlsbad Plaza and Imperial -- it doesn’t have spa facilities, though it offers a 10% discount on treatments at the new Chateau Spa across the street.

In the old days, people stayed in Karlsbad for weeks, consulting doctors who prescribed their treatment programs. I followed my own regime. It included buffet breakfasts at the hotel, offering, among other things, a vast array of cheese and cold cuts.

At dinner, I went to restaurants in town, serving copious portions of rich, salty Czech food, good but diet-defying. And there were snacks of ice cream and flat, round, sugar wafers called oplatky, a Karlsbad specialty.

Of course, I sampled the slightly gaseous, metallic-flavored water but never attained the degree of connoisseurship demonstrated by Karlsbad devotees who can tell the tonics apart by taste.

For exercise, I took long walks to landmarks in the woods, such as Deer’s Jump Rock and Diana Tower. Promenades around town and on paths along the river were less strenuous, with the distractions of Bohemian porcelain shops, art galleries and museums, cafes, and statues of German greats including Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller.

I spent one sunny afternoon at the Thermal Hotel’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, perched on a hill overlooking the spa district. It’s open to the public and has YMCA-style changing rooms with hair dryers and lockers, but no towels or chaise longues. I tried to do laps but kept running into people bouncing back forth across the pool like tops.

Spa treatments formed the centerpiece of my program. Though scientific proof of their efficacy may be lacking, their variety and novelty is astounding.

Every morning I tried a few at one of the city’s excellent public facilities, beginning with the Chateau Spa, built into a rocky outcrop and patterned on a Las Vegas resort. Because the spa is new, it is considered the ritziest place in town to bathe in a warm mineral water pool and have treatments.

For about $70, I had use of the pool at the Chateau Spa; had an expertly executed 40-minute Swedish massage; sat for 20 minutes in a tub with strong jets targeted on different parts of my body; took cold and hot foot baths; and tried the dental irrigation treatment using a jetted mouthpiece like a retainer that bombarded my gums with mineral water, supposedly a benefit to periodontal tissue.

Although I was warned at the Karlsbad tourist bureau that I’d find the town’s two other big public spas, Elizabethbad and Lazne III, “lower class,” I tried them. They looked a little intimidating, like 19th century sanitariums, with long, eerie corridors where people sat in folding chairs awaiting their sessions. Both had well-worn but clean indoor pools, with saunas and hot tubs, and intriguing lists of treatments.

My favorite, described in the Elizabethbad brochure as the “water cure slightly exciting,” cost about $15 and involved posing naked as a target for an attendant armed with fire hoses of hot and cold mineral water. Scoff if you like, but the treatment was invigorating and not soon to be forgotten.

Beauty treatments such as manicures and facials are gradually appearing in Czech spas, but taking the waters internally and externally remains the chief reason people come here. Many of the health-seekers in Karlsbad are Russian, mostly middle-aged women in large sizes, but not too chagrined about it to keep them from wearing tight pants and halter tops. Uninhibitedly at ease with their bodies, they were a welcome change from the surgically lifted Jane Fonda clones you see at U.S. spa resorts.

Lie still, burn calories

AFTER four days here, I drove about 25 miles south through the beautiful Bohemian countryside to Marienbad. It was founded in the early 19th century by an abbot at the nearby monastery of Tepla, who was convinced by a balneologist, or mineral water specialist, that there was money to be made from a mineral spring in the green depths of the Slavkov Forest.

The valley around it was drained, more springs were discovered -- each duly named and funneled into a fountain -- and a town was planned around lush greenswards reminiscent of London’s Hyde Park. Today, Marienbad seems frozen in an eternal afternoon nap.

Most of the spa-goers I encountered here were German and geriatric. The air is more sedate than in funky Karlsbad and slightly more pretentious, though shops on the handsome main street run by Vietnamese immigrants specialize in Asian knock-offs of Gucci and Prada.

Marienbad has most of the same attractions as Karlsbad: vintage architecture, concerts in the park, colonnades, walking paths in the woods and a grand hotel, the yellow, neo-Baroque Nove Lazne.

The Nove Lazne is part of a chain that runs seven other spa hotels in town. All of them have been lovingly renovated on the outside but are less than elegant inside, with none of the antiques and bric-a-brac that make you know you’re not at a Hilton.

I stayed at one of them, the Hotel Hvezda-Skalnik, on a handsome crescent in the center of town named for Goethe, whose nearby lodgings have been converted into a museum. The hotel has treatment facilities, though it lacks a pool. (There are no public spas in Marienbad, apart from a few in hotels that welcome outsiders.) So I booked a mini-spa package at the Hvezda-Skalnik, that included for about $115 a day breakfast; dinner or lunch; and six procedures.

I especially liked the Vibrosauna, during which I lay in a warm, closed, vibrating capsule, watching the counter on the operating panel tell me how many calories I was losing without moving a muscle: 63 in 30 minutes.

At that rate, I could have stayed in the Vibrosauna all day.

But the food was terrible, a sort of Betty Crocker-does-diet, and there were only four entree choices at dinner, labeled ration, frugal, lowering and diabetes. One night the ration offering was a plate of overdone roast beef and steamed vegetables that wouldn’t have surprised conscripts in the British Royal Navy. And there was rarely more than fruit for dessert, which explains why I kept seeing people from the hotel eating mountainous ice cream sundaes in cafes.

Then I chanced on something shocking near the Cross Spring pavilion: rows of people in workout togs on stationary bicycles, spinning, just as they do in L.A.

As it turns out, Western-style spa exercise and procedures, such as spinning, laser treatments and hot stone massage, are creeping into Karlsbad and Marienbad.

It may be inevitable, but I’m not sure it’s good. I like the idea that all you have to do to get healthy is to drink Bohemian mineral water.

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GETTING THERE:

From LAX, connecting service (change of planes) to Prague, Czech Republic, is available on Lufthansa, British Air, Air France; American and United connecting to British Air; and Air Tahiti Nui, KLM and Aer Lingus connecting to Czech Airlines. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,148.

TELEPHONES:

To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 420 (country code for the Czech Republic) and the local number.

WHERE TO STAY:

In Karlsbad:

Grand Hotel Pupp, 2 Mirove Namesti, 353-109-630, www.pupp.cz, is a neo-Baroque town landmark. Doubles from $250.

Hotel Carlsbad Plaza, 23 Marianskolazeoska; 353-225-502, www.carlsbadplaza.cz, is the height of luxury and service in Karlsbad. Doubles from $150.

Hotel Romance Pushkin, 37 Trziste; 353-222-646, www.hotelromance.cz, where I stayed, has doubles for about $80-$125, including breakfast.

Hotel Embassy, 21 Nova Louka; 353-221-161, www.embassy.cz, in the center of town, has a historic tavern on the ground floor, grandfather clocks, porcelain stoves and doubles from $115, with breakfast.

Garni Hotel Mozart, 18 Stara Louka, 353-236-072, www.hotel-mozart.cz, is tidy and well-equipped. Doubles about $80-$90, including breakfast.

Lazne III, 5 Mlynske Naboezi; 353-225-641 www.lazneIII.cz, has a public spa with an array of treatments, and Spartan rooms. Doubles $40-$50, including breakfast and spa pools.

In Marienbad:

Hvezda-Skalnik, 7 Goethovo Namesti; 354-631-111, www.marienbad.cz, is in a handsomely renovated building. The rooms are large and well-equipped, but apart from breakfast, the spa food is disheartening. Doubles $55-$90 per person, with breakfast; mini-cure program $80-$115 per person, double occupancy, with two meals and two treatments per day.

Hotel Esplanade, 438 Karlovarska; 354-622-162, www.esplanade-marienbad.cz. It has generous spa facilities, access to a nearby golf course and doubles from about $270.

Hotel Saint Antonius, 472 Anglicka, 354-622-888, is clean and convivial, on a park on the southern side of town. Doubles $50-$85, including breakfast.

WHERE TO EAT:

There are taverns and cafes, including Karlsbad’s popular Elephant on the Tepla River, and Diana at the Diana Tower, but in both spa towns, hotel dining is mainly the name of the game.

TO LEARN MORE:

Czech Tourism, (212) 288-0830, www.czechtourism.com.

-- Susan Spano