by Ben Groundwater
Trust me, I've seen much, much more disgusting ones but, for pure comedy value, my favourite "bad" toilet would have to be in Thailand.
Having talked my erstwhile travel buddy, the Hilton Hippy, into slumming it for a while, we spent a week in a beachside bungalow on Kho Phangan (just us, and a few thousand other tourists).
Our little party pad was budget at best, with two bare beds, a concrete floor and a bathroom with one of those toilets I've only ever seen in Thailand - the half Western, if you will ...
I call it the half Western because the bottom bit is like a Western-style toilet, but there's no top bit, meaning to flush it you have to fill up a bucket of water and pour it into the dunny. You see them everywhere in Thailand.
But what was so great about our little bungalow's bathroom was the doorway, which was built about three centimetres lower than the Hilton Hippy and I. While this wouldn't seem like much of a hassle, when you wake up every morning with a bucket-of-vodka-Red-Bull induced hangover, you tend to forget your bathroom doorway's little idiosyncrasy.
So for seven days straight we would struggle out of bed, stumble towards the bathroom, and, crack! - smash our foreheads on the doorway. We'd then briefly writhe around on the ground in pain, get up, go to the toilet, pour the bucket of water in, and wait to watch the other one do exactly the same thing.
Toilets are the great leveller when it comes to travel. No matter what your travel habits are, it's the one place everyone has to visit. And they range from the spotlessly clean and technologically savvy (Japan) to the faeces-coated hell holes (ah, name your country).
And in the peculiar world that is life on the road, the humble crapper is the topic of constant conversation. For some reason, there's no taboos on talking about poos. Number twos become the number one thing to chat about.
I travelled through Africa for three months on an overland truck, and we'd find ourselves talking toilets as much as we would our other favourite topic: what we were going to eat when we got to Cape Town. A typical conversation would go something like this:
"Hey, where'd you go?"
"Oh, just went to the toilet."
"Really? How'd you go?"
"Yeah, not bad, pretty solid."
"Oh, nice one."
Having travelled a bit now, I've seen my fair share of disgusting dunnies - a fair few of them in camp sites in Europe. But hey, I was even shocked the first time I saw a squat. Travelling to Hanoi, I'd stopped over at KL International, and went for a quick toilet stop. There, to my surprise, was a bare hole in the ground and a hose. "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" I thought.
And that one was clean! Now I'm no expert on this, but seeing as most Asians use squat toilets ever single day of their lives, you'd think they'd have better aim. It's ridiculous the amount of squats I've walked into which look like the guy in there before me had had a fit while he was on the can. What's wrong with using the hose?
I saw a whole new spin on the squat in the train I took from Hanoi to Hue in Vietnam, where the toilets were literally holes cut in the metal floor of the train, with the tracks flashing away below.
In places like India, you've also got the dilemma of how to clean up. Do you wander around all day carrying an annoying roll of dunny paper, or do you go Indian and use the jug of water? Or, for guys, do you just adopt a "when in Rome" mentality and disregard the use of toilets altogether?
I've got to say, I'm no fan of the long-drop either. While there are a few in national parks around Australia that have made me want to grab the bog roll and head for the nearest bush, the worst I've ever seen was in a tiny place called Sipi Falls in Uganda.
The long-drops, housed in a little wooden shack, were all covered with wooden hatches. You'd walk in there, gingerly lift the hatch, and be enveloped in a swarm of flies and an almighty stench coming from the pit.
That was only a little bit worse than the combo I found in a little makeshift camp in the Serengeti, though: a long-drop squat, with the threat of being mauled by a lion while walking over to it. But hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
Then there are always those times when you can't make it to a toilet at all. It's back to nature time in the bush. While that might seem all rustic and manly, the actual act is not much fun, particularly if, like me, you miss the little hole you've just dug for yourself.
For the girls on our Africa trip, particularly when we were in Tanzania and Malawi, things were even worse. A few minutes after our truck pulled up by the side of the road, hordes of locals would inevitably appear out of nowhere, and follow the girls around to check things out, probably out of pure curiosity more than anything else.
Once, in Tanzania, I was squatting behind a bush, trying to get finished as quickly as possible, when a women and her son casually walked past about two metres away from me. Little did I know, I'd squatted right next to a walking path. I made a hasty retreat. I assume the woman and her son did, too ...
Hope you're enjoying the Backpacker blog. There'll be a new one up on smh.com.au every Wednesday, for a bit of light relief to remind you of why you went to work in the first place: to save up enough money to get the hell out of here! If there are any good travel topics you think I've missed, drop me a line at bgroundwater@fairfax.com.au.
Got a dodgy dunny story? What's the worst you've ever seen? Are some countries worse than others? Let us know. Everyone that comments on our blog entries goes into the draw to win an Ocean and Earth 65 litre Travel Backpack valued at over $120. Please include your email address in your comment to go into the draw.
