Subway Sauna

It's currently 5.45 am, which is really early for me. I just woke up quite spontaneously about 20 minutes ago. My body clock has been so strange lately. The side-effect of these circadian rhythm shenanigans is that I am much more prolific so here is the second entry in my series about non-US gay saunas. This one is my favorite of the gay saunas that I've been to! It's Subway Sauna in Melbourne.

Basic info:
http://www.subwaysauna.com.au
13/363 Flinders Street, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

Hours: 24/7

Entry: AUD24

Subway Sauna is in Melbourne proper, as you probably guessed from the address. It's in the heart of the city center (sometimes referred to as the Central Business District or CBD) by the historic and beautiful Flinders Street Station. Because of its proximity to this major transit hub, Subway Sauna is very easy to get to. It's not that hard to find from the street but the sign isn't the most eye-catching and from the outside you might think that there's no way they fit a sauna in there. But you'll be very surprised at how spacious it feels once you enter.

Subway Sauna is part of the Banana Alley Vaults (I giggled at the name too ;-P). The vaults used to be a storage vault where merchants would store their ware before bringing them to market. There were a lot of bananas stored and ripened here with ethylene gas, hence the name (thanks Wikipedia!). The vaults are quite narrow by modern shoplot standards but they make for such a memorable space and really force the interiors to be designed creatively. 

Subway Sauna is very interesting from a design standpoint. It doesn't have a lot of width and is confined to just one floor. What it does have in abundance is length. It stretches back from the entrance quite far and goes right under the train tracks (You can actually hear trains as they pass by overhead, which I thought was very cool.). The people in charge of Subway Sauna did a really awesome job with the space that they had and turned what could have been a disadvantage (a narrow, long space) into an asset. It never felt claustrophobic or confining.

Immediately after you enter is the lounge area. Since there is no restriction on serving alcohol in places that allow full nudity (there are laws prohibiting that in the US), there is a small bar attached. Off the lounge is a passageway leading to the massage room and a video room with a huge bed. I saw a group of bears there. They were having a blast :-)

Past the lounge is the locker area. Once you get past that, you enter the cruising area with private rooms. Once again I have to commend the person who laid out the interior. This area was quite compact in retrospect but it felt much bigger at the time. Unlike a lot of similar areas in other saunas I've been to, this one wasn't disorienting and yet still had a lot of nooks and crannies and dark corners. The rooms were pretty good too. Many of the ones I saw were a good size and had elevated beds. Condoms and lube were in every room. Unlike Wet on Wellington, this lube was the good stuff!

The final section of the Subway Sauna tube housed the wet area. This was the most open section and the ceiling was quite a bit higher than in the rest of the vault, enough that there was room for a smoking area up a flight of stairs. The wet ares had a nice, modern open showers that were the perfect temperature. The main feature is a large, long hot tub with a big TV playing porn on one end. There was also a good-sized steam room and a dry sauna off to one side. I liked the steam room - the temperature and humidity were low enough to allow comfortable play but high enough that it was nice to just steam. I wasn't as big a fan of the dry sauna. It felt weirdly laid out. It essentially had three alcoves.

A final bit about the premises - it is probably the nicest looking of all the gay saunas I've been to (not all that many admittedly). While Babylon in Bangkok has some beautiful outside spaces (that writeup is coming in the future), the actual sauna part of it is nothing to write home about in terms of design. Subway Sauna is quite modern and looks really cool. It makes extensive use of black, red, and wood. The overall effect is one that's contemporary but inviting.

I visited on a weekday, right around lunch time. As I had mentioned in my Wet on Wellington review,  I was a big fan of the crowd here. There weren't that many people during my visit (I'd estimate 15-20) but there were quite a few guys there that I was really attracted to and ended up having a lot of fun with. The crowd at Subway Sauna skews older than at WoW but that was perfectly fine by me. I like guys in their 40s and that was a lot of the crowd that day. Because of its location within Melbourne's city center, I think that professional guys in their 40s is the usual crowd. I didn't see that many guys in their 20s or early 30s but I was occupied for much of my time there so I could have just missed them. Guys were started streaming in right when I was leaving at 3 pm and they seemed to skew quite a bit younger.

I ended up having fun with two different guys. Both were my usual type (40s, white, in good shape, larger than me). One even had a shaved head, which drives me crazy for some reason. There is something so manly about a guy who can pull off the shaved/buzzed look. They were both really memorable sessions :-)

Final score: 9/10. I loved the space and the men. Definitely making a return visit next time I'm in Melbourne.

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)

Saunas Around the World!

I recently went on a trip where I visited three very different cities in three very different countries: Melbourne, Bangkok, and Tokyo. Although I didn't have too much time, I did make it a point to visit at least one gay sauna in all three cities.

There were quite a few differences from my experiences in American ones. All the saunas that I went to in those three cities were really large and well-maintained. The gay saunas that I've been to here in the States were much smaller and usually in a state of disrepair (with the exception of Steamworks in Chicago). Another interesting difference was how the saunas in other countries handled rooms vs lockers. The US saunas were the only ones that charged for private rooms and didn't really provide a lot of closed-off space to play if you didn't get a room. In the international saunas, it's a flat price to enter and rooms are available to anyone (Tokyo was a bit of a hybrid).

I plan to write up an entry on each place that I went to and go into detail about the people I encountered and the facilities. All were quite memorable in their own way. I'll provide a score for each place in this post in case you absolutely can't wait for the full rundown ;-)

Melbourne
Wet on Wellington - 7/10
Subway Sauna - 9/10

Bangkok 
Babylon - 8/10

Tokyo
24 Kaikan Shinjuku - 7/10