[ TIPS · THE DISPATCH ]

Heat, Humidity, and Sun: How Not to Wilt on a Trip Where It's 38C Every Day

I have been heat-exhausted enough times to recognise the exact moment it starts — that grey, sweaty, why-is-the-room-tilting feeling. Here's how to handle extreme heat while traveling so you never get there.

The first thing you need to understand about how to handle extreme heat while traveling is that the heat doesn’t care how excited you are about the temple. It will flatten you, beautifully scheduled itinerary and all, and it will do it fast.

I learned this in Luxor. Forty-one degrees, midday, no shade, and me marching across the Karnak complex like sightseeing was a competitive sport. About forty minutes in I went a bit grey, sat down hard on a 3,000-year-old block I definitely shouldn’t have sat on, and a guide named Hassan took one look at me and walked me into shade with a bottle of water and a small handful of salty crackers. “You drink, you eat the salt, you wait,” he said. He’d seen a hundred sunburned tourists fold exactly like that. He was right, and I’ve never forgotten it.

This is the single biggest change and it’s free. In a place that hits 38°C, the middle of the day is not for doing things. It’s for hiding.

Get up early. Annoyingly early. Do your big outdoor thing — the ruins, the hike, the market — between roughly 6 and 11am while it’s merely warm. Then from about 1 to 4pm, you do what locals have always done: nothing. Lunch, a nap, a cool café, the air-conditioned museum you were saving. Come back out at 5pm when the worst has broken and stay out into the gorgeous evening.

People resist the siesta thing because it feels lazy or like wasted holiday. It is the opposite. The locals aren’t being soft — they’re being correct. The afternoon in real heat is genuinely a bit dangerous and definitely not enjoyable, and fighting it just gets you the grey-faced Karnak experience. Lean into the rhythm of the place. It exists for a reason.

Here’s the mistake everyone makes: chugging plain water and feeling virtuous. In serious heat you sweat out a lot of salt, and if you replace only the water and not the salt, you can actually make yourself feel worse — light-headed, headachey, even crampy. It’s called hyponatremia and yes, it’s a thing, and no, it’s not just for marathon runners.

So drink water, obviously — aim to keep your pee pale, that’s the real gauge — but pair it with salt. Easiest fixes: an electrolyte tablet (Nuun, SiS, the rehydration sachets pharmacies sell everywhere) dropped in your bottle once or twice a day, or just eating salty local food. The salted nuts, the olives, the brined snacks, the noodle soup — that stuff isn’t an indulgence in the heat, it’s medicine. Your body is asking for it.

This trips up a lot of travellers. The instinct in heat is to wear as little as possible — vest, shorts, skin out. Wrong, mostly. The people who actually live in hot places cover up: loose, light-coloured, long-sleeved, breathable. There’s a reason.

Bare skin in direct sun cooks and burns. A loose long-sleeved linen or cotton shirt shades you, traps a thin layer of cooler air, and lets sweat evaporate — which is how your body cools in the first place. Light colours reflect. A proper wide-brimmed hat (not a baseball cap, your neck and ears need cover too) is worth more than any amount of sunscreen for keeping your core temperature down. And a cheap cotton scarf you can soak in water and drape on your neck is a small miracle when it’s brutal.

Humidity is its own beast, by the way. In dry heat sweat evaporates and cools you, so you can manage higher temperatures than you’d think. In humid heat — Southeast Asia, the tropics — sweat just sits on you and does nothing, so 32°C and sticky can feel worse than 40°C and dry. In the humid stuff you have to be even more aggressive about shade and rest, because your body’s main cooling trick barely works.

This is the part that matters. Heat exhaustion creeps, and if you catch it early you sit in shade for twenty minutes and you’re fine. Ignore it and it can tip into heatstroke, which is a genuine emergency.

Heat exhaustion feels like: heavy sweating then suddenly clammy, cool, pale skin; a headache; nausea or dizziness; weakness, like your legs have gone vague; maybe a fast, shallow pulse. The moment you feel that grey, tilting, why-am-I-so-tired feeling — stop. Shade, sit, sip electrolyte water, loosen clothes, wet your skin. Twenty to thirty minutes and it usually passes.

The red alert — the call-for-help version — is when sweating stops even though it’s hot, the skin goes hot and dry, body temp soars, and the person gets confused or stops making sense. That’s heatstroke. That’s not a sit-down-in-the-shade situation, that’s get-them-cool-and-get-help, fast. Cold water, ice on neck and armpits, fan them, emergency services. Don’t wait to see if it improves.

You’ll almost never reach that point if you respect the early signs. The whole skill is just not being stubborn.

Sunscreen reapplied every couple of hours, not slapped on once at breakfast. Sunglasses, because squinting all day gives you a headache that masquerades as something worse. A water bottle you actually carry instead of “I’ll buy one later.” Shade as a default, not an afterthought. And alcohol — sorry — dehydrates you exactly when you can’t afford it, so the midday beers are how a fun day becomes a grey-faced one.

None of this is dramatic. That’s the point. Handle the heat with a bit of rhythm and salt and shade, and a 38°C destination becomes one of the best trips you’ll take, all golden early mornings and long warm evenings.

Respect the afternoon, salt your water, and dress like the locals — do those three things and the heat becomes a backdrop instead of the whole story.

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