By WellandGoodNYC.com

No one does bathing like the Japanese. And no one does laid-back like Santa Feans. Put them together and you get Ten Thousand Waves, the adobe-ryokan resort in the foothills of the Sangre de Christo Mountains of New Mexico.

For a lot less than the cost of airfare to Tokyo, you can take the waters in a Japanese-made ceramic or hinoki tub, either privately or in the women’s or coed public bath (where clothing is optional before 8:15 p.m.), breathing in scents of desert sage and piñons instead of cherry blossoms. The vistas you gaze over aren’t manicured gardens but wild mountains—and the light in New Mexico is like nowhere else.

Read more at Well + Good NYC

  Alexia Brue (left) is co-founder of Well+Good NYC. She was a contributing editor at Luxury SpaFinder and Spa magazines and is the author of Cathedrals of the Flesh: My Search for the Perfect Bath (Bloomsbury).  Melisse Gelula is co-founder of Well+Good NYC. She is the former editor-in-chief of SpaFinderLifestyle.com, spa beauty editor at Luxury SpaFinder Magazine, and travel editor at Fodor’s Travel Publications.