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.