The restless years

RESTS, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention . . . Well, you get Departure Lounge's drift.

Illustration: Tom Jellett

RESTS, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention . . . Well, you get Departure Lounge's drift, even if drifting off to sleep seems a step too far for many of us.

The mad, irresistible world of travel comes with drawbacks by the luggage load but perhaps the biggest challenge is to get a good night's kip, whether backpacker, flashpacker or five-star traveller.

Lounge, who has been travelling since Paul Theroux was in short pants, is quite sure it used to be much easier to get a satisfying sleep. Life seemed so uncomplicated in the low-tech years of the 20th century. At bedtime, you just took the phone off the hook and hung up the Do Not Disturb sign (which is a DND these days . . . not to be confused with DVD or DVT, which the forever-perplexed Lounge frequently gets backwards).

Back in the dark days, there were not mobile phones blinking and beeping all night across different time zones and dastardly devices ring-a-dinging and battery chargers glowing green in the corner, like tiny hovering spaceships. And if sleep did not come easily in your hotel, you made a good old-fashioned cup of cocoa or Ovaltine and did not have to sit in the lotus position in front of the mini-bar weighing up the various benefits of chamomile tea or blends containing the frankly unappetising likes of milk thistle and dandelion root.

Pillows were once just that -- things you put under your head. Foam, mostly, or cotton-filled, if you were lucky. Now there are sleep concierges and pillow menus offering options with holy duck feathers plucked by temple maidens or, who knows, stuffings of llama's tears and yak's breath and the entire lavender harvest of Provence.

Lounge slept in a dive in Cairo once where the pillows and mattresses were stuffed with used hospital bandages. It was not a happy time, of course, but at least she didn't have to stay awake reading the pillow menu and feeling restless and inadequate that she couldn't choose between Modern Memory Foam, Therapeutic Dual Support and Magnetic Health.

Five-star chains are most competitive with their signature beds and many sell them to guests. Lounge, it must be admitted, has a Sofitel MyBed kit -- not the mattress but all the snowy-white, fluffy-puffy accoutrements, including a souffle-like mattress topper that makes sleeping in winter akin to bouncing lightly on a trampoline. It is rather decadent.

Travelodge Hotels, which has 16 properties across Australia and New Zealand, has partnered with the Sleep Health Foundation to promote the notion of good rest and has developed a list of 10 top tips for a great night's sleep. The information is pretty basic but the research does identify four types of sleepers according to their usual position assumed in bed, and attributes personality types.

Lounge is a Starfish, apparently, from which you can draw your own conclusions.

Quite how all these lists actually help you sleep Lounge is not sure, but the Travelodge Good Sleep Guide does suggest four helpful apps. Rainmaker (free) features soothing rain, the rate of which you can regulate, which is handy, given that a monsoon would be a bit daunting and we all know what the suggestion of rushing water does to our bladders in the wee hours of the morning. Relax Melodies (free) allows you to create a relaxing music mix of tinkle-tonkle tunes or, perhaps, Celine Dion melodies, and surely you'd force yourself asleep, resorting to a blow to the head with the Gideon Bible, just to get away from her.

Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock ($1.19) "analyses your sleep patterns and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase -- a more natural way to wake up feeling rested". Lounge is particularly interested in this application as after a flying visit to London last week she is brilliantly awake at 3am, feeling energetic enough to, say, climb to the top of the Empire State Building or vacuum Tasmania.

The fourth is the aSleep Kids Edition (99c), which features 15 lullabies. When Lounge travelled with her two Little Lounge sons many years past, she found they were constantly awake until they both turned 13, and then they slept for four years, waking on their respective 17th birthdays and asking for the bedsheets to be changed. Whatever sleep hormone is coursing around the bloodstreams of teenage boys could well be bottled, in Lounge's opinion, and popped in those essential oil burners and diffusers so popular in resorts.

Guests would waft off to the land of nod and think of the frangipanis we would save.

Four Seasons Sydney has a new Celebrity Bed package that gives you the bed. Apparently Julia Roberts once told Oprah Winfrey her favourite place to sleep was a Four Seasons bed. Oprah agreed, exclaiming to her audience, "The Four Seasons bed is the only bed better than my own!"

Cue the sound of an express furniture delivery van rumbling up a mansion driveway, reckons Lounge. The Four Seasons Sydney overnight deal costs a reviving $3500 for two and the home delivery of a king-sized Four Seasons bed by Sealy with "plush quilted pillow-top and a posturepedic support system to lure you into heavenly slumber".

Even the cheap-as chains are getting into the better-sleep act. Budget-basic Tune Hotels, the Asia-headquartered group that sells rooms for amazing prices (from less than $10 a night for advance bookings), is opening in Melbourne at the end of next year, and the emphasis is on getting the bed right, not any luxury falderals.

Similarly, Accor's successful Formule 1 brand, pioneered in France, is upping its offering with a fresh fit-out and more technology, all in quest of a better sleeping experience for guests. Its Cocoon Room concept is being showcased at F1 hotels in Canberra and Sydney's Campbelltown and Wentworthville.

Even airlines are getting into the sleep act, with pointy-end passengers on board British Airways, for example, being pampered with 400-thread count duvet covers. Egyptian cotton is de rigueur, it seems, whether at high altitude or tucked up at a showy hotel. Lounge, who suddenly does feel very tired, can recall when thread count just meant keeping her needlework basket in order.

• travelodge.com.au
• fourseasons.com/sydney
• tunehotels.com
• accorhotels.com