Jätkänkämppä Lumberjack Lodge & Smoke Sauna, Kuopio

Zagan the motorhome’s enjoying the free parking at the Spa Hotel Rauhalahti, near Kuopio in Finland (N62.86711, E27.64403). It’s free to stay here as we’ve made use of the smoke sauna owned by the hotel. If you want electricity, you can have that too, but the price then jumps to €14. There’s also a nearby campsite if you’re not a fellow car park dweller.

Zagan at the Spa Hotel Rauhalahti, near Kuopio

Last night our Internet system streamed, in perfect clarity, the defeat of the England football team to Iceland in Euro 2016¹. While waiting for the match to start (10pm here), we’d installed our new mozzie net above the bed, which meant the frustration at watching Iceland’s rather fabulous celebrations was tempered by the fact we received not a single night bite. It still took me until 1pm to drop off, still light outside as the double-sized lorries thundered past through the forest.

The Finnish mosquito: big, brave, bitey and, thankfully, stupidly slow

This morning rain fell on our lake, so we munched breakfast and headed east. I Spy on Finnish roads is a challenge, to think of anything other than T. Trees and Tarmac. That’s pretty much the constant, and you’ll need nothing but your little finger to steer, most of the time. After an hour’s driving the outskirts of Kuopio appeared. Not so much suburbs here in Finland, as buildings appearing in among clearings. Tree bark rises vertical at the edge of any human-used space, herding in the bright lights of commerce.

Kuopio has a rare feature in Finland: a hill! Turning from the main road Zagan immediately dropped into second gear and hauled himself, us, our fridge contents and food stash up a kilometre climb. The first time we’ve crawled up a hill quite that steep since, ah, Croatia probably. It felt good! At the top the locals have built a series of viewing towers over the years. The latest one’s a concrete beast rising clear above the trees and, in decent weather, handing over epic views of lakes and treetops for miles, for a mere €6 a go. In today’s rain and mist, we gave it a miss, and eyeballed the nearby ski jumps instead, narrowly missing some teenager’s pre-lunch leaps.

Piojo viewing tower in Kuopio, Finland

Puijo ski lifts in Kuopio – being sprayed with water to enable summer practice for local Eagles

There are a fair few nature trails around the Puijo tower, but in the rain, they were not for us

Puijo nature trail – well, the start of one of ’em before Charlie and I legged it back to Zagan

Great news! Returning to the dry and fly-less Zagan, Ju’s completed the long search for motorhome insurance and we’re covered for another year. The deal includes green cards for Morocco, Serbia and Turkey, cracking. Ju did all the hard work, so I’ll let her explain the process in a separate post later on. With insurance documents in our inbox, Ju then found this place in the Lonely Planet, got in touch with the hotel here to check whether we could come and get a smoke sauna. Sure, come on in was the answer, so here we are!

Jätkänkämppä Lodge with the smoke sauna by Lake Kallavesi, about a 600m walk from where we’re parked

Right then. Finnish saunas. There are enough of them in Finland to simultaneously cater for all 5.5 million Finns, they are an institution here, and more importantly they’re generally taken naked. Yep. The reserved Finns, quiet as a mouse most of the time, feel no qualms about discarding every last stitch in these beautifully heated steam huts. The reserved Jay, on the other hand, feels many qualms about sitting around without at least knee-length shorts and a T shirt on. How would this turn out?

You can eat a traditional buffet meal in an ex lumberjack lodge next to the smoke sauna. Looked nice, but we’d eaten at the tower so no chance of seeing off €28 a head worth of grub!

Having decided not to eat, we strode purposefully over to the smoke sauna (the world’s largest, no less, called a savusauna in Finnish), which can take up to 60 people. €12 each later, towels were handed over (surely a good sign) and we were pointed at separate doors (another good sign). Into separate changing rooms, my eyeballs alighted on a beer pump next to the benches. Yep – you could pour your own ice-cold pint in there! Spurred on, I whipped my kit off, loaded a few valuables into a safety box and headed for the next door. Showers. Next door. Steamed-up blackness! I couldn’t even see the floor. Glasses off (I know, I know, contacts might have been sensible), I stumbled past the bodies and found a space.

Beer pump in the sauna changing rooms!

Slowly my specs warmed and the fog lifted. Looking to my left I could see a few ladies chatting quietly. All clothed in swimsuits, phew. Turning slightly more to my left, the sight will, probably, never leave me. I’ll leave your imagination to do the work here, but the fellas, of more advanced years than me, were certainly no prudes. Ju joined me and we quietly ignored the flesh around us until the heat pushed us sweating and steaming out into the open, into the yellow-watered lake for a dip before heading back in (the locals do this even when the lake’s frozen). Both of us had spotted examples of our respective sexes sporting swimwear, so at this point gave up on towels and any idea of naked strutting, and left our swimmers on, sitting on large pieces of waxed paper provided.

Sorry, no photos from the inside of the sauna!

The experience was wonderful, once the nerves wore off. The inside of the sauna (the only Finnish word to gain widespread use outside of Finland by the way) was lit at waist level, but was otherwise dingy. There was a sign on the door banning birch twigs, traditionally used to whip the skin to improve circulation, as they make a mess. Smoke didn’t fill the room, but the delicious smell of burned wood mixed with the steam from ladled water. Always thrown by the men, only once by a defiant a lady, the water was sloshed across the room onto a pile of blackened stones two-thirds the size of a pool table. Occasionally there’d be some discussion among the men, who assumed a kind of patriarchy in handing over the ladles as they left to other naked elderly men, as to whether more water should be vaporised. No-one ever seemed to object, and we all slow-cooked to a tee. I made a half-hearted attempt to sit at the top level, gingerly placing my butt-cheeks on the wood before whipping them off for fear of rendering them cooked in lines, like a well BBQ’d steak.

One last comment on the sauna: If you’ve ever seen The Inbetweeners TV show, the one featuring a fashion show, then you’ll have a good idea of the most eye-watering sight which greeted us as we floated in the lake. A gent walking down the jetty had a rather unfortunate wardrobe failure, managing to not quite get all the crown jewels into his pair of sagging black Speedos… No, wait, another one. Swimwear was donned in order to leave the sauna and dip in the lake, however one chap dropped his towel before climbing down into the lake, to be quietly admonished by the ladies. It seems there’s a strict etiquette to follow when getting your tackle out around here…

Outside the sauna, a chap was explaining the lives of lumberjacks in these woods. I bet, for certain, the Python song ‘I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK‘ is echoing about your noggin? No? It was mine. The chap did a fine and funny job of dancing about floating logs, falling in to the amusement of the crowd before pulling himself out, emptying his wellies and pulling off some other trick. Sadly we’d no idea what he was saying, and headed back here to re-assure Charlie his feeders were both alive and well.

He’s a lumberjack and he’s OK!

No mention of wearing women’s clothing, but he could do a mean log-hand-stand thing

Hah! Good times. Tomorrow? Dunno. Either the national park over towards the Russian border, or up towards the weekend’s wife carrying championship. Finland, you’re proving to be fun.

Cheers, Jay

Note 1: We ended up streaming the football from Finnish TV (areena.yle.fi/tv/opas) as they had the rights to broadcast here. I tried streaming Radio 5 Live so we could get English commentary, but after a few minutes the pundit’s voices were replaced with a droning ‘sorry, you’re abroad, you can’t listen’ endless message. A decent VPN (technology which makes it look like your laptop’s in the UK) would avoid these problems, but we watch the TV so infrequently they’ve never been worth the cost to us.

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