Nancy’s Big Adventure

If you spend any appreciable amount of time in Asia outside of your hotel room you will at some point probably find yourself faced with the intimidating task of using a squat toilet.

Quite a few foreign visitors have a dread of squat toilets, and it can be a bit of a shocker for first-time visitors.  They just take a little getting used to. For the most part, everything you have ever heard is true. Facilities in China can be absolutely horrid. The good news is that public facilities are everywhere – just look for a WC sign and an arrow, and follow your nose. Most of these facilities have little or no privacy. The bad news is that almost all public facilities are small, unventilated spaces shared by many and must be avoided at all costs. The worst are the trenches that pass as toilets with no walls or doors,

  is this really a toilet?

You may find a long cement block with a trench down the center that may or may not have partitions every couple of feet or you may find individual holes in the cement, which again, may or may not offer any privacy. And yes, it can be a little intimidating to walk into a public toilet and see twenty people squatting over holes staring at the foreigner that just walked in, but at least the bathrooms are there.  If you are shy about your no. 2s (and everyone elses), China is probably not the place for you.

Bus stations will of course have bathrooms and they tend to be disgusting. Once you have experienced the inside of a restroom in a public bus station in China, you will probably become thankful that squat toilets are often the norm.Train stations are usually no better. Even airports can be a little stinky. But for all the regular buses, forget it, no toilets. Trains have toilets at one end, usually two of them, which basically consist of a hole in the floor.  Another reason why I fly …

  toilet on a train

In most villages, nobody has a bathroom and there is a public toilet facility which anyone can use. I use the word  “toilet” loosely as it is usually nothing more than a few holes in the ground behind mud brick walls. But again, the holes are there.  Especially in rural areas, it’s common that toilets flush manually, with a few scoops of water from a larger cistern. If you encounter the latter, you should see a bucket of water and a scoop nearby.

   the manual toilet (note the bucket)

Beijing is being knocked down, rebuilt, renovated and generally “spruced up” at an alarming rate. It is being modified, Westernised and re-shaped. And so, thankfully, are its toilets.  Although mostly still squats, they are clean, have sanitary bins, toilet paper and they flush!!  The best toilets I encountered were in the Singapore airport – the toilets wash your butt with warm water and then dry it with puffs of warm air.  Crazy!  Most hotels in Asia have western-style toilets, though do not count on a butt sprayer.

So, you may ask, why is she spending so much time talking about toilets?  Well, that is what we talk about. No, we do not swap sight-seeing stories – we talk about the fellow teacher who could not poop for four weeks and finally went to the ER and was transferred to Shanghai for surgery.  He elected to go home to the U.S. for medical attention, so the mystery remains – why couldn’t he poop?  No amount of Ex-Lax (or the Chinese equivalent) or herbal remedies would release the dam.  Was it an overwhelming fear of the squat toilet?  Compare that to the guy who could not stop going … well, we do not need to go into details with that one …

As I have mentioned before, everyone has a great poop story – it is generally all or nothing, and provides great entertainment, particularly after you have spent several weeks traveling in Asia and there is a large group of foreigners to chat with at the bar.  Sometimes, if you are not able to laugh, you may cry …  it is all weird crap.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 6:59 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.