The Australia Spa Road Trip That Won Over a Wellness Skeptic
Unpacked by Afar | Travel Smarter, More Responsibly
Writer Emma John recounts her 2-week road trip along Australia's Great Victorian Bathing Trail, a journey that transformed her from a spa sk
Key takeaways
- Emma John used a 250-mile road trip through Victoria to decompress after an intense cricket reporting season.
- The Hepburn Bath House is one of Australia's oldest bathhouses, with nearly 200 years of history.
Main topics
- Great Victorian Bathing Trail
- Spa and Wellness Tourism
Notable quotes
It was like sitting in a warm spoon.
Conclusion
A thoughtful exploration of how intentional slowing down can enhance o
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome Speaker 2 (0:04) to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I'm Catherine LeGrave, Executive Editor at Afar. I've loved magazines since I was a kid, and not just the stories in the magazine. The stories about how those stories got made, too. Now, decades later, that's the purpose of this whole podcast. Speaking with writers and photographers who have an ear for incredible travel experiences about how their print stories came to life. Emma John is one of those writers. The author of three books, Emma has been contributing to AFAR for more than a decade, since 2012, when she wrote a story about traveling to North Carolina to immerse herself in the world of bluegrass. Since then, she's written for us about a 25-day train journey through nine European countries, the Mississippi Blues Trail, Door County, and more. Her stories have a wonderful combination of curiosity, humor, and certainly willingness to throw herself into whatever experience she's writing about. For our summer 2026 issue, Emma took that same approach to Australia, driving 250 miles along the Great Victorian Bathing Trail to swim, soak in hot springs, and explore Victoria along the way. I sat down with her to talk about what drew her to this road trip, the experience she'd returned to Australia for, and what she discovered about the connection between water, wellness, and place. Speaker 1 (1:27) Emma, so nice to be chatting with you again. Speaker 2 (1:30) You too. Hi. Hello. Okay, so we're here to talk about Australia and this epic road trip that you took. And you write that a traditional spa vacation has never really been your thing. You need to be on the go to relax. And so what made you think that this very unusual road trip where you're essentially moving from water to water might change your mind about wellness? Speaker 1 (1:56) I think the key thing in there is the words road trip. I mean, I love Australia. I've spent a lot of time there. I've got family there. My grandparents lived there all my life. My uncle lives there. I've been there a lot. And I have... put in some miles, I would say, in Australia. I have done some big, big, big old road trips. And I think that was part of what appealed to me. I love Victoria, which is one of the states at the bottom of Australia, looks out onto the ocean, the Bight, as they call it, the Great Australian Bight, which basically becomes the very cold ocean down there. And I think it's a really pretty state. I think there was also a little trick of the timing, which was that... I cover a lot of sport and one of the things that I cover, which I love, is cricket. And there was a very big cricket contest happening, the biggest cricket contest really, between Australia and England. So I'd gone out there for that and it's very intense when you go out and you follow cricket. It's six weeks, the games can go on for five days at a time, the rivalry is very fierce, there's lots to write about. So I think that... I had just thought timing wise, do you know what? If ever I'm going to need to go and sit in a spa, it's going to be at the end of these six weeks of really hectic work. So I think that's what kind of attracted me to it, really. Speaker 2 (3:20) I love it. Sort of a back way into a different type of travel experience. And the great Victorian... bathing trail is really a collection of these very different experiences. In your story, we've got geothermal spas, sea pools, mineral springs, even swimming in a lake. Was there one stop where you thought, oh, I finally understand why people do this? Speaker 1 (3:43) Yes. Yeah, definitely. It took me a little while. It took me a while to get into it. And I think the place that it all really kind of came together for me was Hepburn. Hepburn is a tiny little spring town itself. It was like one of the very original ones that the Victorian European settlers first discovered. I think there were a lot of Swiss people there, actually. It was a very... central European thing, spas and springs, like they really appreciated them. So when those particular communities and families went out and they discovered, oh, there's this lovely spring in Hepburn, they got quite excited about it. And then other people, other kinds of settlers, German settlers, would come up to visit as well. And so it's a very tiny little village, Hepburn. And there's a slightly bigger town next to it called Daylesford. And to be honest, these two settlements almost kind of run... into each other. They've got the highest concentration of spring waters in, well, I think in the whole of Australia, actually, just between them and those two little towns. And the Hepburn Bath House has been there for like... Nearly 200 years. I mean, it's like it's the oldest bathhouse in Australia and it's still got a real community vibe about it. It does special deals for the locals, even though it's privately owned, it's still got this kind of municipal purpose to it, I would say. It's like a proper old school bathhouse. Firstly, I found it really friendly and some of the treatments in the baths are beautifully high end, but... I found it quite approachable, if that's the right word. And I think also by that time, I had actually had a few of these experiences and was not feeling quite so intimidated by them anymore and starting to understand the etiquette of how they work. Because I actually, that's one of the things that has always kind of like... Made it hard for me to relax, I think, in spas. I think there's a whole kind of language and a whole ritual that goes with bathing in spas that has become quite intricate and all these different things that are supposed to be doing different things for your body. And actually, it took me a little while to try to understand what's the etiquette here or which order should I do any of these things in and what are my expectations? I'd been on the road about five days by the time I got to Hepburn. That was the place where I just walked in. I felt comfortable because people were chatting to me and it wasn't a kind of like place where, you know, it was lots of couples quietly sitting around giving each other foot rubs. It was very much a kind of like, you know, you're around the local residents. And I really loved it there. And to the extent which, and this