South Korea, August 2023: the World Scout Jamboree, some 40,000 scouts on a flat, treeless stretch of reclaimed shore. Daytime temperatures ran between 35 and 38 degrees. Finland's all-time record is 37.2. Hundreds of scouts were treated for the heat, and British and American scouts left for hotels.

The Finns stayed. As at earlier jamborees they had shipped saunas ahead: two wooden ones and sauna tents, open to every country at the camp. Their leader, Arvi Snäll, told Yle: "We still mean to go to the sauna in the middle of this heat, so we get ourselves clean."

That is the whole Finnish idea of it. The sauna is not where you go to be hot. It is where you go to wash.

The heat did not move the Finns, but a typhoon did: on 8 August the whole camp was evacuated ahead of Typhoon Khanun. Days earlier Snäll had already said how the trip would end: "We'll come back to Finland in August to cool off."

No Finnish scout needed care outside the camp hospital.

Would you go to a sauna at 38 degrees?

Sources: Suomen Partiolaiset (the Finnish scouts), 1.8.2023 and 25.3.2019; Yle, 3.8.2023 (Arvi Snäll's words); Yle News, 6.8. and 7.8.2023 (the temperatures; Finland's record of 37.2 degrees, Joensuu 2010; the typhoon).
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