In a posh spa hotel in the middle of an enormous snow-covered golf course, I am lying face down on a treatment table as a monk slaps the back of my thigh with an open hand. I am finding it quite difficult to swallow a giggle, when a head suddenly appears under the donut through which I am pushing my nose.

"You are OK?" asks the monk's translator in a rising falsetto, managing to inject eighteen syllables into the short phrase. "Mmm!" I say, nodding, and give the international thumbs-up sign of OK-ness. I hear him reassure the Shaolin master in Mandarin behind me, who commences his pummelling, and I, in turn, my giggling.

The massage, however, turns out to be exactly what was needed, and is followed by an afternoon moving from one thermal pool to the next. Spa holidays might be marvellously relaxing - but how much better they are if you've been doing proper exercise first. It makes the pampering feel all the more deserved and gives the healing waters something to heal. Besides, in this world of short attention spans, just having one thing to do is never enough. More and more of us are signing up for something AND something holidays. Dive and drive. Safari and beach. And in this case, spa and ride.

Three hours earlier: I am sitting on a horse. After a lifetime of annoying horsy people by saying things like "So it's a big animal, and you sit on it, yes? And what happens then?", I am sitting on a horse, and I am, to my surprise, getting a mild amount of pleasure from it. The horse is moving, and I, sitting on his back, as natural a horseman as Napoleon was a basketball player, am learning to touch my toes and swivel in my seat and, rather touchingly, hug my horse while he walks.

After a good lesson with a very patient teacher, I have managed to reach what probably isn't technically known as second gear but should be, and am feeling very proud of myself. As I struggle to dismount with anything resembling dignity, my friends return from their ride. All more experienced riders, they've been riding through the forest, following trails as the snow gently fell around them. Ruddy cheeked and happy, we all look like good, healthy Austrians. And with a pat on the nose, we disappear off to the spa.

In my equine ignorance I am blithely unaware that I was not just riding a horse badly, but riding a highly impressive horse badly. "A LipiZZANER?!" people say, eyes wide, when I tell them I've just come back from somewhere where I rode "a lippy ... ? Lippop? Libberlobber?"

The Lipizzaner, it turns out, is a famous and popular breed. It is, in fact, the horse used by the Spanish Riding School in Vienna for its strength, beauty, and ability to do complex dressage manoeuvres like jumping up and down on the spot. Though how the first dressage rider woke up one morning and discovered that this was something his horse could do is a mystery to me still. Regardless, a riding holiday where you can watch the impressive Spanish Riding School in action, then come back to your hotel and play make-believe on a Lipizzaner of your very own takes some beating.

While Austria's reputation as a holiday destination tends to revolve around snow, there are plenty of other options. Reiter's resort is in the Burgenland region, snuggled up against the Hungarian border, in the village of Bad Tatzmanndorf. It's about 90 minutes from Vienna and an hour from Graz (with budget airline flights to the UK).

The resort is set up to provide all the holiday pursuits Austrians might expect from a break, with golf, riding, beauty treatments, soft jazz to dance to in the evenings and soft beds to sleep in when you're exhausted by it all. And, helpfully, there are two hotels: one for families, and one exclusively for adults, providing a relaxing space whether you've come with children in tow or not.

It's all meticulously organised, with clothed and non-clothed sections rigorously separated. Yes, while it's naturally very bad form to go naked in the restaurants and other clothed areas, it's just as frowned upon to go clothed into the naked areas - it's considered deeply unhygienic.

While the resort is now welcoming more overseas visitors than ever before, non-German speakers have never made up a large number of their guests, so the signage available in English is ... well, is as good as a rural hotel in Britain might be at providing every piece of information in German. The staff, however, are very happy to help if they can, and having a smattering of basic German or getting one of the nice English-speaking reception staff to show you around to begin with might just save you from turning up pantless in a strictly panted area, or the other way around.

However, it does make self-conscious small talk a little more difficult as I discovered, laid out in a beautifully clean treatment room, as a small hairy man rubbed me with sour cream, oil and salt until I felt like a Pringle. Though, thanks to this experience, I can now recognise the German for 'Oh, I'm sorry, are you ticklish?' if I ever hear it again.

After the compulsory post-peel pause I return to the thermal baths to try and deal with the righteous ache that is starting to engulf my inner thighs - a real, solid, physical proof that there is something demanding about horse riding after all. Climbing into the body-temperature water indoors, then pushing through the heavy plastic curtains that lead to the rest of the pool, I take a sharp intake of breath as I hit the outside air. It's colder than freezing as the sun goes down, and I settle in against the bubbles and watch the sky turn pink above the snowy forest.

It's a bit surreal, this spa life. But I reckon I could just about get used to it, if pushed.

· Four-night Saddle and Spa breaks start at around £400. Visit the Riding Company's website and the Reiter's resort website for more details