S5, E51: The Australia Spa Road Trip That Won Over a Wellness Skeptic

Afar contributing writer Emma John road-trips the Great Victorian Bathing Trail, uncovering the best spa towns in Victoria, Australia—from thermal springs on the coast to century-old bathhouses inland.

A traditional spa vacation was never Emma John’s thing—she needs to be on the move to relax. So when she set out to explore Victoria Australia spas along the newly opened Great Victorian Bathing Trail, she brought her road trip instincts with her: 250 miles of driving, looping from Melbourne down to the Mornington Peninsula, across Port Phillip Bay by ferry, and back up through the best spa towns in Victoria, Australia—Hepburn Springs and Daylesford.

On this episode of Unpacked, host Katherine LaGrave talks with Emma about what she learned when a self-described spa skeptic spent a week soaking, swimming, and drinking mineral water across the state with Australia’s highest concentration of natural springs.

Emma John on Driving 250 Miles Through Australia’s Bathing Trail

In this episode of Unpacked, Five Questions, Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave talks with longtime Afar contributor Emma John about her road trip along Australia’s Great Victorian Bathing Trail, a 250-mile route through Victoria’s hot springs, sea pools, and mineral baths. They discuss how a self-described restless traveler learned to sit still in the water, what the region’s spa culture reveals about the history of the land it sits on, and the unplanned stop that turned out to be the trip’s biggest surprise.

Topics discussed in this episode

• Why a road trip through water, not a traditional spa stay, changed Emma John’s mind about wellness travel
• The stop at Hepburn Bathhouse where nearly 200 years of small-town spa culture finally clicked for her
• What “forced relaxation” taught her about the freedom of the open road versus the freedom of doing nothing
• How the history of Aboriginal displacement at Lake Daylesford reframed her understanding of the trail, and the work the Koorie Heritage Trust is doing in Melbourne to restore that history
• The unplanned detour to Trentham, and the one stop she’d go back for first

Frequently asked questions

What is the Great Victorian Bathing Trail?

The Great Victorian Bathing Trail is a roughly 250-mile route through Victoria, Australia, linking geothermal spas, sea pools, mineral springs, and lakes, from Melbourne down through the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsulas and up into the spa towns of Hepburn Springs and Daylesford.

What is the Hepburn Bathhouse?

The Hepburn Bathhouse in Hepburn Springs is one of Australia’s oldest bathhouses, drawing on the highest concentration of mineral springs in the country. It’s still locally run, with treatments that include mineral baths drawn straight from the springs.

What is the Koorie Heritage Trust?

The Koorie Heritage Trust is a First Peoples cultural organization based in Melbourne’s Federation Square, with free galleries and guides, including Rob Hyatt, who lead visitors through the city’s Aboriginal history and its connection to the Yarra River.

Where does Emma John recommend going on the trail?

She points to a ferry ride between the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsulas across Port Phillip Bay, and to Trentham, a small town near Daylesford with the restaurant Du Fermier, that she’d only had 25 minutes to explore and wants to go back for.

People, places, and resources in this episode

• “The Great Victorian Bathing Trail—One Swim at a Time” — read Emma’s Afar story
• Emma John’s author page on Afar
• Follow Emma John on Instagram
• Katherine LaGrave’s author page on Afar
• Great Victorian Bathing Trail
• Hepburn Bathhouse
• Koorie Heritage Trust
• Du Fermier, Trentham
• Bonnie Tsui’s author page on Afar

Full transcript

Katherine LaGrave: Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I’m Katherine LaGrave, 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 to 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 9 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. Emma, so nice to be chatting with you again.

Emma John: You too. Hi.

Katherine: 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?

Emma: 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.

Katherine: 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, spa, sea pools, mineral springs, even swimming in a lake. Was there one stop where you thought, oh, I finally understand why people do this?

Emma: 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, spars and springs like. They really appreciated them. So when those particular communities kind of families went out and they discovered, oh, there’s this lovely spring in Hepburn, they got quite excited about it. And then other, other people, other kinds of settlers, German settlers and 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 bathhouse 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, 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 spa is that I think there’s a whole kind of language and a whole ritual that goes with bathing and spa 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 my expectations. I’d been on the road about five days by the time I got to Hepburn, and 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, there 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 is quite funny, I actually went twice in two days. And the second day I went and I had this treatment, I suppose experience, if you like to call it a private bath. Now, if you had told me beforehand that I would happily spend 45 minutes just sitting in a bathtub as a treatment, I would have thought you were mad. And actually, it turned out to be one of the most relaxing and really enjoyable and memorable things that I did was have this bath run with mineral water from the mineral springs, and then I got to choose my own salts that would go in it. And then I was just honestly just put in a room and left, left in the bath for 40 minutes and I didn’t want to leave.

Katherine: That sounds amazing to me. It’s certainly epic in a different way. You mentioned a little this question of relaxing, and I think there’s a really funny tension throughout the story of you trying to achieve this state of Zen and also being this person who’s asking, am I relaxing yet? What did you learn about relaxation from kind of being forced to slow down in water in these ways?

Emma: Yes. Forced relaxation. It’s a funny it’s a funny thing. The first of the spa’s that I went to, I just remember keeping bumping against all the obstacles, which I felt were kind of these outside obstacles. Right? I walked up to this bar. I couldn’t even get into this bar because the sliding doors didn’t open fast enough for me. I nearly walked into them. And then there was another time when I was like, trying to get from the, uh, the dressing room, from the changing room into where I believe the pools to be. But actually, you had to go through this door that did not look like a door. And again, you had to stand in front of it and wait for it to open. But I, you know, being me, I just walk up pushing this thing, like being like, oh, well, it’s not a door, it’s a wall. So I think the main thing I learned that was all the things that I felt were these kind of external obstacles to stop me relaxing were actually all on me. It was all me trying to do things too fast. Do you know what’s really interesting? I think the thing I really learned is that one of the reasons I love road trips, the thing I love most about road trips is the sense of freedom. Freedom to change your route at any point. Freedom to go off on a tangent. Freedom to stop whenever you feel like it. Freedom to see somewhere by the side of the road and think, oh, do you know what that looks like? A cool place to eat. Yeah, I meant to stop in another 60 miles’ time, but actually that looks really fun. That’s what has always made road trips really magical for me.

The thing about spas is that you don’t need to make loads of choices. It’s a different kind of freedom. It’s a freedom to not think and not make choices. And I just think that’s why water is so great, because there’s something about immersing yourself in water that takes you slightly out of your mind, I think, and puts you back into your body because you’re kind of being held essentially like your body is being held by something else. And it’s being told, especially if you’re in one of these kind of like mineral rich or salt waters. I did a couple of these sort of salt water floats. They were my favorite thing. I wrote in my notes. I realized that I never used this, I never used this image because I thought it was a bit too weird, so I didn’t put it in the piece, but I’d written in my notes that it was like, it was like sitting in a warm spoon. It felt like I felt like I was being held up by a warm spoon. And I was like, that’s what it is. It’s like just letting, letting things happen.

Katherine: Um, I like that. I’m going to take that with me.

I want to switch gears a little bit. You know, some of these springs and bathing spots were sacred to Aboriginal communities, and then they became part of Australia’s colonial spa culture. How did learning some of that history changed the way that you experience the trail?

Emma: Well, it’s very interesting. And I think I think that kind of came slightly in waves actually, because actually when you go on the trail, it’s set up for a certain luxurious experience. Part of that is part of what has been my resistance to stuff like spas. I’ve always thought, oh gosh, isn’t it? Isn’t there something a bit narcissistic about this kind of experience, this kind of travel? It’s just it’s really all about you and your experience. And certainly, you know, a lot of spa’s that’s the way it will be marketed. It’s really kind of like this is all about you and you in the moment and that sort of wider culture of, well, hold on, this is a communal experience. And water is this very precious resource in a country like Australia. And like, what does the history of these waters mean? Certainly over the course of Australia’s settlement.

And there were places that I found where I could really dig deeper into that. Daylesford actually was one of them, Lake Daylesford. There were these great information boards as you walked around Daylesford Lake that told you the European settlement history of Daylesford Lake and how it was built in the 1920s. I think as a Edwardian tourist destination for people who, you know, had now settled in Australia and wanted to come to the Springs and have a little holiday, and how clever this was for the local economy and how wonderful this was for the development of early Australian tourism, for example.

But right alongside those boards, you also had the boards that were giving you some more of the indigenous history of that area. And that was when, you know, you sort of realised, hold on, wait, when this lake was created because it’s a man made lake that was created by damming a river, it actually really affected the indigenous communities who were already in the process of kind of being driven out and driven off their lands. In any event, but this really kind of made it. It dried up the water from where they would normally be fishing or doing other cultural practices.

So it really kind of made you think about, firstly, who owns the water at any given point and how important that is. But also then it made me look back at, wait, are there any other sites that can tell us more about indigenous bathing practices? And what was really interesting there is that there are other sites in Australia. They’re not particularly in Victoria, and the reason why it’s harder to know about the links with indigenous sacred sites and spars and spring waters in Victoria is simply because the indigenous people were so disconnected from their land. During the 20th century, a lot of that knowledge has just been completely lost. But there are sites in New South Wales. I’m pretty sure there’s some in Queensland as well, where there has been maintained a link and a through thread from the language groups, who will still have some knowledge of how those springs and sacred waters were used.

Katherine: Mhm. You start your story spending some time with a guide, Rob Hyatt, and he’s kind of giving you the history of Melbourne, which is where you started and ended your trip. And so I think that that’s a great resource for people who want to take a tour and learn a little bit more about the first peoples that lived in and around the water there.

Emma: He’s a fascinating guy. And what I love about what Rob Hyatt’s doing in Melbourne. Is that again, because, as we say, there is this understanding of the disconnection between indigenous groups and their land, particularly in Victoria. There is a really strong belief that Rob addresses that. Basically, that they’re just kind of isn’t any indigenous culture in Melbourne because, you know, the disconnect was too great and oh, well, this city, you know, just doesn’t really doesn’t really have those links anymore.

And actually, it’s so brilliant that the Koorie Heritage Trust is right in the centre of the city. It’s in Federation Square, which is the central square in Melbourne. It’s one of the most recognisable places to gather. It’s got several of the cool museums like the NGV. You can walk into the Koorie Heritage Trust, their galleries are free, their objects are on display and there are guides who are just there ready to show you around the city and tell you about its indigenous past. And that’s really kind of reclaiming some of those links, both to the land and also specifically to the river, which is known now as the Yarra River.

Katherine: Amazing. And so you take this trip and after about 250 miles of driving and let’s call it a million different ways of experiencing water, what would you say is the one thing you’d tell someone who wanted to do this trip, but isn’t necessarily a spa person?

Emma: Oh my goodness. Just to go on a ferry between the Mornington Peninsula and the Bellarine Peninsula. Honestly, anybody would enjoy this road trip even if you didn’t stop at a single spa, because it’s a really great round trip that takes in some of this southern region of Victoria’s most interesting, most beautiful natural spots. Mornington Peninsula is somewhere that Melburnians go on their, uh, you know, on their weekends. It’s got amazing food, great wine country, and it’s got these beautiful kind of national park with a big hill in the middle of it called Arthur’s Seat. And you can go down to Cape Schanck and walk along the coast looking at a lighthouse. But then you go right out to the point there’s a little town, this very kind of Italian influenced town called Sorrento, that honestly, there’s times when you feel like you’re just sort of stumbled upon Amalfi in the middle of Australia. You take the ferry from there across to the other side of Port Phillip Bay to get off at the Bellarine Peninsula.

And I thought, you know, I was already excited about it because you get to ferry takes you alongside the beach, you see Millionaires Row, you see all these incredible kind of eclectic millionaires houses and their private beaches, their private piers, their motorboats, helicopter in one case. And then you turn and you start going across the water. And the thing that nobody could have predicted on the ferry that was going to happen was that these dolphins, a pod of dolphins, just, just came right up to the edge of the ferry and just started messing around and playing in our waves alongside the boat.

And honestly, from where I was standing on the deck, that’s the closest apart from having been in the water with dolphins on occasion, but from a kind of observing them, observing them do their thing, uh, watching them do these kind of acrobatic leaps and swivels and just watching them at play. It was like being in a David Attenborough documentary. I was that close and that was just completely unexpected. And I suspect it happens all the time, to be honest, because they must know that that ferry route goes along there every day.

Katherine: One of my personal favorite parts of the story is this idea of water as a beverage right from the earth and also as ingredient. And there’s a scene in Hepburn Springs. You take a walk and you go in this town square town centre, and you try some of the natural mineral waters. What was that experience like?

Emma: Oh, I mean, you know, I’m not going to lie. Some of them taste pretty yucky, although I tried, I tried not to have as dramatic a reaction as some of the younger people that I saw drinking it. A kind of guy. And some people wouldn’t even try it. They just saw the reaction on other people’s faces and went, no, no thanks, don’t fancy that. It’s actually less about the taste, I think, than it is about the smell. Like they smell quite sulphurous before you manage to get them to your lips. And that’s what puts people off.

Actually, the taste really isn’t that bad. It’s kind of it’s kind of like, like bicarbonate of soda, which I guess is, is that baking soda? Yeah. I guess it’s like if you put too much baking soda in your cake or something or in your pancake and you’re like, oh yeah, no, that that’s kind of left a funny taste in my mouth. But you’ve got to drink it. You’ve got to drink it because it’s part of the experience. And also you kind of walk away feeling like maybe I just made myself a little bit more superhuman, even if it’s just a placebo effect, you know, it’s, it’s pretty enjoyable.

Katherine: Yeah. I remember as a kid going to Marianské Lazne and Karlovy Vary, like the spa towns in Europe, and they have also the mineral springs where I remember the rotten egg smell, as you mentioned, and also the taste. And so that really brought it back for me in your story. But as you said, you know, you talk to a receptionist and she says, hey, it’s not just tourists that do this. We have regulars that come every week and fill up their bottles. So there is a real belief in the health benefits of these waters. So if I gave you a plane ticket tomorrow and said you could only revisit one stop on the trail, where would you go?

Emma: Do you know what? There’s a place that I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked to, because I was already on my way back to Melbourne. And so this place was, again, in that kind of road trippy way was kind of like, oh, hold on, wait, this looks interesting. Let me pull over here. And it was a little town called Trentham. I’d actually stopped because there was a chef called Aaron who runs a restaurant in Kadota in Daylesford. He knows all the waters because he does use them as or he’s trying to use them as ingredients, and he’s been drinking them since he was little. And he said, oh, some of the tastiest water is the stuff out towards Trentham. There are these other springs called Lyonville Springs, and actually those ones taste pretty good.

So I had taken my route back to Melbourne via this Lyonville spring to get the best tasting water, and I filled my water bottle up with it. And then as I carried on down the road just a few miles away, was this little town called Trentham. And I’d heard about the waterfalls there. They were quite pretty and I pulled over to look at the falls and, you know, gathered with, you know, there was a little gathering of other travelers there and they were some pretty cool, spectacular kind of falls. And you didn’t have to walk anywhere to get them. You just pulled over and saw them straight from the car park pretty much. And I thought, well, I’ll just veer off because it says the town is actually just a little bit away here and you don’t drive past the town. So a lot of people miss it. I took the turn towards the town, and I discovered this really cool place that has like a really, really amazing restaurant in it called Du Fermier Restaurant, run by this chef called Annie Smithers, who’s kind of a big deal in Australia, a farm to table place that’s won lots of awards.

And then on top of that, there were these really cool cafes, amazing, kind of like contemporary art galleries. There was a historic hotel there in Australia, by the way. Hotel kind of means pub. So, you know, it does often have rooms, but really a hotel is a pub. So I stopped into this hotel and it was a really gorgeous, it had an amazing big kind of bar area and an outdoor seating area. And I stopped for a drink and a chat with the owner and I was saying how beautiful his pub was, and he said, oh, thanks very much. Yeah, well, it burned down 10 years ago, so we have completely renovated it. But they managed to renovate it in this way that that really preserved kind of 19th century features and architecture and charm of the place. I really only got, I think I got like 25 minutes in that town and I didn’t get to sit down and have a meal at Du Fermier or stop and have lunch at, you know, one of the cool cafes or meet any of the artists. And so I could go back anywhere. I think I would definitely go there. And of course, in all of these places, it doesn’t matter which of the towns you’re in, there’s always some kind of spark connection, so there’s always some kind of very nice looking salon offering all sorts of treatments. And, uh, I think that’s what I do. I persuade myself that there must be one more spa treatment that I haven’t yet tried. And it was in Trentham.

Katherine: I love that. Okay, last question. How did your idea of wellness change before, during and after this trip? How were you different as a wellness person now?

Emma: So I think the main thing has been to flip this idea that I had in my head, that it was a very selfish activity, because I now have sort of realised that the times when I relaxed and then walked out of a spa with a smile on my face, being much more generous to my fellow human beings actually made me a less selfish and less self-absorbed person. So I suppose that’s one of the key lessons is that actually, you know, oh, it turns out that all those people who bang on about mindfulness and being in the present, maybe they’ve got a really good point. And maybe that’s something that I don’t need to dismiss so quickly and could spend a little more time with.

Katherine: Amazing Emma. It was so lovely to chat with you, as always.

Emma: Thank you very much. I hope I have not come across as a, you know, a real grouch because I’ve realized that like, you know, from talking about it, it sounds like I’m like some kind of cartoonish grouch figure, but I’m on a journey. That’s what I’m going to say to you all. I’m on a journey. It can only get better from here.

Katherine: Exactly. And go and read the story and you’ll get a clearer sense of the journey. Thank you.

Emma: Thanks, Katherine.

Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked, Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find links to Emma’s stories for Afar, as well as to her social media handle. Her Instagram is at Emma John, author.

Join me in a few weeks for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award winning writers and photographers. I’ll be speaking with Afar contributing writer Bonnie Tsui, who recently traveled to Cornwall, England, to surf.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been Unpacked, Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Niki Galteland, and Katherine LaGrave. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to its other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.