Before I tell you more about this bathhouse, let me tell you a little bit about Mullumbimby.
It’s a small town about 20 minutes’ drive from Byron Bay, and like Byron Bay, it’s famous for being popular among hippies. It used to be a rustic sort of town, but now it gets a lot of attention for being a trendy town with plenty of cafes, restaurants, jewelry shops, furniture stores, and clothes shops. But once you’re out of the town center, there are still rustic houses and pasture. Byron Bay has become too popular and crowded, so more and more people prefer Mullumbimby for its relatively laid-back pace.
Located in a small trendy town, The Banya bathhouse really is stylish looking on the inside and the outside. They have used a two-story building constructed in the 1920s and kept its original form. Before becoming a bathhouse, this building housed an antique shop I quite liked. It’s a pity that the antique shop has gone, but I couldn’t be happier that this building has found a new lease of life as a bathhouse. I think one of the biggest appeals of Mullumbimby is that it has retained its original buildings to give it a vintage feel but fused that with a modern-day sensibility.
Inside the building are a pool, two hot mineral pools, a sauna, a steam room, a cold pool, massage treatment rooms, and a rooftop sun deck on the second floor.
Cactuses decorate the tops of the pure white walls that surround the hot pools and the cold pool.
The tiles on the stairs leading up to the second story are fabulous. There are a lot of places worth photographing in the bathhouse.
On the second story there are chairs and beds you can use even if your swimming costume is wet.
There is a counter bar and restaurant too, so you can also bathe and have a meal here, which is convenient. Although they call them hot baths, they are actually not quite as hot as the onsen (hot spas) in Japan. They’re more like heated swimming pools that have been warmed up, so they don’t make the blood go to your head. And you can have a blissful time relaxing with a cold champagne, beer, or cocktail in one hand after you get out of the hot bath.
It costs $60 (about 5,760 yen) for 90 minutes (towel included) or $185 (about 17,760 yen) for 90 minutes plus a 60-minute massage, which is a bit pricey.
By the way, you wear a swimsuit in the pools, something that is common outside Japan. Older people don’t mind wearing a swimsuit, which is one of the good things about Australia. It’s quite normal to see granddads and grandmas in their 70s and 80s wearing sunglasses and swimsuits at the beach or the pool.
On the day I was there, there were a number of women in their 70s in the hot pools, and when we made eye contact, they gave me a nice smile. The hot pools are around 40 degrees, which might feel a little cool to a Japanese person, but on the other hand, you can stay in for a long time and have a really good body-warming soak.
Just outside the sauna room are wooden bucket showers. When you pull the rope, the bucket tips over and showers you with cold water.
Apparently, it feels nice to splash yourself from the head down with cold water after warming up in the sauna, but I didn’t quite have the nerve and just pulled the rope gently to get the water to trickle over me.
A lot of the bathhouse spaces are open to the outdoors, so it has a really nice spacious feel. It’s a great place to visit with your friends or on a date, somewhere you can enjoy yourself in summer or in winter.
