Wet on Wellington

The first in my series about international gay saunas I've been to will be about Wet on Wellington in Melbourne. It's in Collingwood to be exact, which is the gay district on the north side of the Yarra river (Melbourne is divided in two by it). I didn't have a chance to get to the other gay district in the south side but I believe there's a gay sauna there too. Melbourne seems to be covered in them in fact. For a moderately-sized city, I counted at least four gay saunas. There are also several bars/clubs that provide spaces for sex on the premises. Add in cruisy gyms (of which I am sure there are quite a few) and Melbourne men have an abundance of choice!

Here are the basics about WoW:
http://www.wetonwellington.com.au/
162 Wellington Street, Collingwood VIC 3066, Australia
Hours: Weekdays noon to 2 am, weekend 24 hours
Entry: AUD26

It's located just a block from the main gay bars in Collingwood (Sircuit and Peel) so it gets a lot of the after-club crowd. I went around midnight on a Saturday and it was packed. More and more guys just kept streaming in the later it got. I left around 3 am and it was still hopping. Because of its location, it gets a lot of different types of guys. Whatever your type is, you will probably find someone there on the weekends at night. I would be interested in finding out what the crowd is like during the day and on the weeknights. If anyone wants to leave some info in the comments. please feel free.

WoW is pretty big. It has about three floors but I wasn't entirely sure because of the somewhat confusing layout. A lot of stuff was packed into space. There were a couple of video rooms/lounges, mazes, gloryholes, and lots of private rooms. One of the most memorable things about WoW was the decor of the pool and hot tub area. Evidently taking inspiration from ancient Roman styles, there were columns and white plaster statues of naked men along one side of the long pool. The overall effect was a little cheesy but I appreciated the effort. The hot tub was deep and big enough to fit 8 comfortably. Pretty good temperature too.

On the same floor as the lockers and pool were the steam room and the dry sauna. The dry sauna was rather narrow and small. You could have maybe 4 guys in there. Any more and it would have felt quite crowded. The steam room was across from the dry sauna. As far as steam rooms go, the temperature and amount of steam were lower than I would have liked but I guess that made it more conducive to play. It was very dimly lit. There was a raised platform in the center of the room that's meant for play I guess. No one used it while I was there although there was a lot of action going on.

As I mentioned in a previous post, your entry fee gets you a locker and access to all the rooms, which are on the second floor. Most of the rooms were pretty small, about the size of a single bed. Some were double the width and a few were really large. The small and medium rooms had a vinyl-covered mattress on the floor while the larger ones had more of a bed but the same type of mattress.

Condoms and lube were provided in every room along with paper towels. The condoms were fine. Interestingly, they were all XL. One of the reasons I dinged WoW's score is that the lube was terrible. It was very watery and seemed to dry as soon as you got it on your hands. Just really made many encounters awkward because we had to keep reapplying lube.

For an establishment of its type and considering the high turnonver rate in the rooms, WoW was quite clean. I didn't really see them but they must have had staff constantly going around and cleaning up. I've been to places in the US that are much worse about cleaning up the rooms even though you are paying extra for the privilege of accessing them. And the less said about the maze areas of some of the US joints, the better.

I played with a few guys while I was there. I met someone at Sircuit and we went into WoW together. He left early and I played the field for a bit. Although there were a lot of guys, I wasn't particularly enamoured with anyone. Basically, I just messed around because I was horny and not because I was attracted to that person in particular. This was quite different from my experience at Subway Sauna. I realize that this particular aspect is beyond anyone's control and highly subjective but it's my blog and I'll complain about what I want to ;-)

In summary, I would go back to Wet on Wellington and give it another go. The facilities were good and I liked that it was very busy. And the crowd might be more to my tastes. I would be sure to bring my own lube the next time though.

Final score: 7/10 (mainly because of the lube and not finding guys I was very attracted to)