There are many great places to get nude overseas

THIS Australian traveller loves to travel without her clothes on, although she admits the first time was pretty awkward. Here’s her number one rule.

How to travel around the world ... naked

I DO LOVE getting nude. No, no — I don’t mean that in a sexual way. But rather — there’s nothing better than hanging around sans clothes and diving into a river, lake or the sea.

That said, I’ve never been attracted by nudist camps, naked hiking or clothes-optional cruises.

The thought of socialising with a big bunch of people in their birthday suits doesn’t appeal in the slightest.

My birthday suit experiences began a fair few years before I became a travel journalist — I first came face to face with a shocking amount of nudity on student exchange in Finland.

It was a baptism of fire for this 18-year-old Tasmanian, who’d never stepped into a sauna before she found herself living in a Finnish house with one.

What happens when a modest Australian girl steps into a world of mixed-gender saunas, sans towel, sans robe, sans support system?

It sure was awkward at first but after weeks of sharing a sauna with my host mum and dad, neighbours, school friends and eventually my own family when they visited, I really got the hang of it.

I’m starting to get used to this.

Sauna time is such a big part of Finnish culture — for Finns, it is a must at regular intervals, and if they go too long without sauna, they’ll start feeling incomplete.

It’s a way of life in Finland — toddlers take their first turns in sauna at only a few months old and, from then on, never stop.

They also don’t do small talk in saunas, they discuss real issues — in this Scandinavian country major decisions get made in saunas, not boardrooms.

As it turns out, I loved every part of the sauna experience. Hitting yourself with birch leaves to get the circulation going, applying sauna honey to open the pores and running down a jetty to plunge into an icy lake. The adrenaline high afterwards was addictive.

So entertaining, watching nude people jump in ice cold water.

Since Finland, I’ve jumped at any chance to get naked whenever possible. Here are some of my other nude travel experiences:

NUDE IN NORWAY

You don’t have to try too hard in Norway before you find people swimming with bare bums.

I was in the nude, hiding behind a beach towel, right next to highway 13 in south central Norway.

No cars had passed this way for at least an hour so I thought I’d be safe to go for a skinny-dip. Having been lured by the sparkling, royal blue water of the Hardangerfjord, which this highway snaked around, I decided to park the car, quickly change and jump in.

No trip to Norway would be complete without visiting a fjord, one of the long fingers of the ocean worming inland. It may sound like I was off the beaten track, zealously bonding with nature like the Norwegians love to do, and I sort of was, but it was surprisingly easy to get here.

You don’t have to drive far from the capital Oslo before you find yourself zooming through a wilderness of waterfalls and churning rivers and forests of spruce, pine and birch.

The roads were superb and empty so driving was relaxing and you could stop pretty much anywhere and crack open the picnic basket. With a mere five million people in this long, thin and scrupulously clean country you could easily have a slice of highway, forest or fjord all to yourself.

NUDE IN NEW ZEALAND

No one will be looking at your naked body when the view is this good.

Floating in the nude in a private hot pool, I was as far from adrenaline-pumping Queenstown as I could get. Unlike many of the travellers in Queenstown, I wasn’t there to raise my heart rate.

Instead, I went for some relaxation and found the perfect place to work on that goal: the Onsen Hot Pools. These six steaming tubs were located on a cliff overlooking the Shotover River canyon, a scenic 10 minutes’ drive from central Queenstown. My Japanese-style tub, which could fit four, was housed in a private cedar-lined bathing room, complete with shower, changing area and a jaw-dropping mountain view. I touched a button and the roof and window retracted. If I jumped out of this tub I could reach down and pick wildflowers. For those who don’t visit Queenstown to tie themselves to a piece of elastic, there are plenty more relaxing activities to keep you busy.

NUDE IN ICELAND

A nude shower before jumping in, why not?

At Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon visitors do wear their swimmers and like many spas around the world, you need to take a shower before going into the pool. But the Blue Lagoon requires you to shower naked. Of course, once you’re rinsed and conditioned, you can put your bathing suit back on and head on in.

Floating in the Blue Lagoon has to be one of the most pleasant experiences you can have within 20 minutes of stepping off an international flight. It’s located only 40 minutes from Iceland’s capital Reykjavik and under half an hour from the island’s international airport. The Blue Lagoon is one of Iceland’s main tourist attractions and around 400,000 visitors flock there every year.

NUDE IN THE NETHERLANDS

Who thought the Netherlands would look this balmy?

One of the best places to have a spa experience in The Netherlands is at Veluwse Bron, located in the Hoge Veluwe — Holland’s largest national park. Inside this park you’ll also find the Kröller-Müller Museum, which has a large van Gogh collection. There are 1,000 free white bikes for visitors to use in order to cycle the paved paths. If you’re visiting the spa, pick the day with care depending on if you want to go in your birthday suit or not. Dutch spas tend to be nude ones so if you prefer to enjoy your relaxation with a swimsuit on then the spa has a number of badkledingdagen (swimsuit days) each month.

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