So yeah that doesn’t happen every day…
I wrote this after experiencing my first mobile sauna festival in Denmark….back in 2016.
So I’m naked, cold and trying to explain to the cloakroom attendant (who looks really stoned in my opinion) that I need my ‘RED BACKPACK WITH THE BLUE COAT’ so I can get my jacket, a beer and prevent imminent death from Hypothermia.
It can only be a Sauna Party in Denmark…
It’s a fairly hard thing to explain. On one hand I’m stuck in a converted caravan with some of the best Saunameisters I’ve ever met, who proceed to deliver the most excellent Suanagus whilst experimental music plays and I find myself disappearing into an ethereal realm with a bunch of naturists and hippies.
On the other hand it’s standing room only and I’m shivering in a tent and touching flesh with people I’m not totally sure I want to touch flesh with, while a very small sauna fire emits heat at a level akin to a child’s fart.
Basically, it was a bit weird, a bit odd and a bit of a culture shock. Some people were clothed, some people were naked. There was a bar, there were drinks, there were good sauna’s, I went in the sea, it was cold. It kind of got hard to know what the etiquette was for this event. Boundaries became a bit blurred.
I can’t describe it as amazing, as for a lot of the time I was standing with nothing but a towel wrapped round me in the middle of a fairly chilly Copenhagen night and I know for a fact my wife, would have absolutely loathed the whole experience. However, it was also kind of… Amazing.
Being naked in the hippy suana, with the really avant-garde music (think Jon Hopkins overdubbed with bird noises, aboriginal chants and the sounds of children playing) was up there with some of the most trippiest experiences I’ve ever had and by the end of the whole thing, despite some unpleasant moments of cold, I felt like my third-eye had been squeegeed pretty clean
Part rave. Part naturalist health club. Completely mental… So glad I went… Kind of desperate to go back…Anyone else want to join… There’s a sauna festival in Finland this summer ,-)
Loving Denmark btw… It continues to surprise me.
Video of the event:
http://enuk.dk/sauna-event/