Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

Laundry is pretty straight forward for us in the US.  Either you have your own washer and dryer, or you take it to a laundry mat.  Once we left from Seattle we did our laundry at friends’ houses along the way or at laundry mats.  When we got to Mexico we were in search of laundry mats and could never find them.  We’ve learned that in Mexico and a lot of other places in Central America you need to bring your clothes to a lavandaria.  You drop your clothes off and pick them up a few hours later clean, folded and smelling fresh.  We’ve paid as little as $2.00 (in Panama) and as much as $12.00 (in Costa Rica) for this service.

In one hostel we stayed at we were able to use the washing machine, but since they didn’t have a dryer, we just hung our clothes up to dry.  Hanging up your clothes to dry is very common in Central America, and since it is usually so warm in most places, the clothes tend to dry very fast.

In many places in Central America you will also see people doing laundry in the river.  Women bring their dirty clothes, their kids, and sometimes set up an umbrella.  The clothes are washed in the river and either laid on the hot stones to dry or brought back home and hung up around the house. 

Our worst experience with laundry was in El Salvador.  We were in a small beach town and had a lot of laundry to do.  We gave it to a woman in town who said she would do it for us.  We expected to have it back later that day.  But that evening we still didn’t have our laundry back.  The entire next day it didn’t come.  On the third day we asked if we could get our laundry back since we were planning on leaving the next day.  It was brought back to us, stuffed in a bag and still totally wet and stinky.  The coast can be so humid and things often take a long time to dry.  If it is overcast and there isn’t much direct sunlight they will take days to dry.  I don’t know if this woman had hung up our clothes in the kitchen, but they smelled like corn tortillas.  We paid her and then in the next town we had to have them washed again immediately.

In a lot of places in Central America you also have what is called a pila.  It is a large stone sink with 3 compartments.  The middle section is filled up in the morning with fresh water and the other sinks on the side are left available for washing clothes/dishes/etc.  One reason the pila is filled up in the morning is because often the water is turned off later in the day and this way you have a large reserve to last you until the water comes back on. 

Many people do their laundry in the pila.  First you let the clothes soak for a short while, then you take soap and a brush and brush all the clothes.  Then they are rinsed and hung up to dry.  In Honduras we had our laundry washed by some women from our hotel.  At first it takes a little courage to give over your dirty socks and underwear for someone else to scrub.  There were two women who worked for about 2-3 hours washing and scrubbing our clothes.  They wanted $2.80 for all that work.  That is some hard earned money.

This last time at the coast in El Salvador I decided to give it a try myself.  I soaked our clothes and then started to scrub them in the pila.  It was fun at first, but the work quickly became tedious.  It is also hard on your back to bend over for that long.  I scrubbed, rinsed, wringed our clothes and then hung them up to dry.  By the next evening they were dry, but they weren’t all that clean and still smelled a bit.  All that work for nothing. 

Now we are back at our friends’ house in Guatemala City.  They have the washer and dryer I’m accustomed to from the states.  I feel like I’ve come full circle in the laundry experience.  I’ve sent our clothes to be cleaned, I washed them myself, hung them up to dry and used the washer and dryer.  The only thing I haven’t done is wash them in a river.  This experience is one example of the subtle differences between the life we know at home and life here.  In the end we can live with any of these options, but after all these experiences I still think there is nothing like pulling warm fresh smelling clothes out of the dryer. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 10:01 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.