What’s more Finnish than a sauna? I’ve given this question a little consideration and I can’t think of anything more Finnish. I’m a bit of a fan of some spa and wellness and so went I went to test out my newfound language skills, of course I also wanted to try out a proper Finnish sauna. But finding one open to tourists is harder than you think. It seems a lot of saunas are private, in people’s homes or works. Some hotels have them but not the aparthotel I was staying in – I rarely stay in the sort of hotel that might have a sauna. There was one at the pool I planned to go to, a proper old-fashioned pool where you go in the sauna – and preferably swim too – “fabric-free”. I was quite excited about that but it turns out it’s closed for a few months for renovations.
The answer came in the form of Löyly, a luxury purpose-built proper Finnish sauna that, if it’s not actually aimed at tourists, certainly caters well to them. It’s a few stops on the tram out of the city centre, over by the cruise terminal, where it’s been able to find a reasonable-sized plot of seafront real estate. It’s a little way out of the city centre, as I said. I took tram 6 from three streets away from my apartment but the 6 also runs through the central station and through the busy stop outside Stockmann. Take it south to the terminus at Eiranranta, walk towards the sea and look to your right. That wooden hive-thing, that’s Löyly. Google Maps says the tram takes 19 minutes from the central station, so that’s nice and quick and easy, which is just what you want when your aim is relaxation and wellness.
The building is a hulking wooden hive-like thing with a large deck and ladders for direct access to the Baltic for the cold part of the sauna’s hot-and-cold treatment. Actually, two-thirds of the building is a restaurant and so is the deck. I guess food and drink is where the money is, and you can’t enlarge the sauna experience to the size it needs to be for serious tourism without losing the quiet and intimate feeling of a proper Finnish sauna. I guess the compromise would be to have several saunas and visitors could either be assigned to one or two or move around them and just hope everyone doesn’t want to go in the same one at the same time. But then you’re veering towards the territory of having to have themed saunas to differentiate between them, like at Aqua Sana, and that’s not the purpose of Finnish sauna at all.
What Löyly has is three saunas. There’s a private one hiding in the lounge area, which you can hire out for your own use. Changing facilities, lounge, deck access and whatnot are still the public facilities but you get the sauna itself to yourself. For the public saunas, there’s a “normal” one inside and a traditional smoke sauna accessed via the deck. Both have a stove about six feet high, where you need to haul down a huge foam-padded handle to lift the lid and then use a long-handled ladle to tip water on, aiming the water being more of a wild guess than an exact science.
Löyly is made from non-overlapping planks of wood. You can’t really see in from the outside but when you’re sitting in the inside sauna, which has glass walls on the sides where there aren’t benches, you can see straight through the planks and out to the world beyond so although you’re in this wooden dome, it’s still very light and bright in there. You go up a few steps, lay out your sauna cover and sit. You don’t actually have to go outside for the smoke sauna in that the wooden dome shelters you from door to door but you do have to go out of the door to get to it. It’s similar, in that there’s that big stove and the steps and the bench at the top but this one is dark. There’s one small window on one side upstairs and that window is sooty. It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust, so newcomers are always pushing at each other and asking “can we sit on the other side too?” because they can’t see it. It feels much the same too but clearly this one smokes more than the other because you can see people smudged with soot afterwards, where they’ve sat back against the wall or rubbed against something on their way to a seat.
I’ve been in many saunas before. I’ve seen people pouring water on the rocks. What I’ve never experienced is the rush of heat that accompanies it. The temperature absolutely skyrockets. It’s the done thing to make a noise that means “can I?” as you pick up the ladle and no one ever disagrees but I find it very uncomfortable. I’m not really a sauna fan. A sauna is something you do while you’re enjoying a spa or an Icelandic pool but it’s not something I actively enjoy. I went to Löyly because I’m in Finland and I want to try a proper Finnish sauna but at one point, I realised the inside of my mouth was burning. Löyly suggests taking sandals. I strongly advise taking sandals. It’s ok when you walk in, when your feet are damp because you’ve been in the shower or the sea but they dry as you sit in the sauna and someone turns the temperature up and when you get up to leave, the wooden floor burns the soles of your feet. Touching the handrail on the stairs burns but you’re carrying your wet sauna cover so you can use that as protection.
Sauna covers seem to be a uniquely Finnish thing. It’s a kind of square tea towel that you sit on. I’ve asked the internet the purpose of this and there’s only one answer, from a Finn. It’s to protect the sauna benches from your sweat and bodily oils. Ok. Nowhere else demands sauna covers or gives them out with your towel – nowhere in Iceland or the UK, I should say. I’m personally of the opinion it’s to protect your skin from that burning hot wood, having scorched my feet. This is a public mixed sauna so you wear swimwear but that’s precious little protection from the heat. I don’t know if I’ll ever have much opportunity to use one, but I found myself a Finnish sauna cover as a souvenir. It’s woven in Finland and it’s covered in cartoonish little men sitting in a sauna. That website suggests sauna pillows are a thing – for people who want to lie down, apparently.
Outside the sauna, you need to cool down. There are showers inside, and a bucket of ice water which I wasn’t going to go near. But if you want something a bit more natural, a bit more wild, there’s direct access to the Baltic. A few steps and then a rope ladder and you can step straight into the sea. The day I was there, it was a bit rough and I suspected few people would be stupid enough to do it – I’d hesitate to take a kayak out in those conditions, let alone a frail human body in nothing but swimwear. But a few people did swim a couple of strokes and I decided that while I probably wasn’t going to go in and definitely wasn’t going to let go of the ladder, I’d like to cross “dip in the Baltic” off my bucket list. Reader, I got in as far as my ankles. It burned, burned with cold. I made my way back to the showers inside and attempted to warm my poor frozen feet without boiling the rest of me, which was still warm from the sauna and the sun. Maybe I might have expected to find a piece of the sea tamed – roped off, perhaps. Walled off like the sea pools at Bude and Weston. But no, it’s a rope ladder straight into the open sea that’s so cold its name has become synonymous with the freezing cold.
You get a two hour session at Löyly. You’re given a towel, a sauna cover and a key and told what time to bring the key back. As a general rule, you need to book in advance – you might get lucky and find it’s not sold out first thing or last thing or on a midweek late autumn day but it’s definitely best to book in advance.
After my sauna, I went into the restaurant. I’m not a restaurant person but this one looks like quite an upmarket shiny one. They don’t do reservations and they don’t do table service. Go to the bar, order your food, take a table number and sit where you like. I had a pint of Coke and my first korvapuusti and went outside. I sat in the shelter of the wooden dome, since the sun looked like it was planning to cook me, and I tore my cinnamon roll apart. Very nice. Great korvapuusti. Far too big. I managed a little over half of it and then realised I was going to have to take the rest home. Did I have anything to transport it home in? Nope! So I took off my hat, put it in there and then put the hat in my bag. Three times I’ve been accused of wearing the roll under my hat like Paddington and his marmalade sandwiches. No, I did not put a sticky cinnamon bun on my clean damp hair.
