With all the news about Polonium-210 poisoning and the steady drumbeat of bird flu news, we failed to take note of the announcement that 70% of Thailand's toilets were not up to WHO standards. The shocking news came as Thailand hosted the 2006 World Toilet Expo and Forum in Bangkok. Health Minister Mongkol Na Songkhla announced at the opening ceremonies Thailand was determined to "get it together":
Authorities launched a clean-up campaign after randomly checking 6,149 public toilets across 12 of Thailand's 76 provinces in March and finding that 90 per cent did not pass the standards for cleanliness, he said.Inspectors found bathrooms lacking toilet paper or a bidet-like spray hose, as is common in Thailand as an alternative to paper. Facilities often lacked soap for cleaning hands and had cracked toilet covers.
A second round of inspections in November found that the percentage of dirty toilets had dropped to 70 per cent, and authorities are hoping to cut the number to 60 per cent in 2007, Mongkol said. (AP)
In September Bangkok opened its new international airport, designed to serve 100,000 passengers a day. Assuming equal traffic throughout 24 hours and assuming each person spends about an hour in the airport, then that's about 4200 people an hour. Since they only put in 100 toilets, that's about 42 people per toilet, each hour, or about a minute and a half apiece. Best case. This turned out to be a tad bit of a "design flaw."
Of course long lines and dirty facilities are not uncommon elsewhere, either. Just ask any football fan, especially the ones with two X chromosomes. But let's face it, some places are worse than others. In the early 90s Mrs. R. and I had some collaborations with Soviet colleagues (you remember the Soviet Union, don't you?) and we got a chance to see Russian bathrooms up close and personal. This was in Moscow, mind you. I have no idea what it's like in Kazakhistan. But I saw enough to enable me to give you a sage piece of travel advice. If Russia is in your travel plans, do yourself a favor and go to the bathroom before you leave home.
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Going to the loo in China takes the pot for worst case IMHO; that was in 2001. I've used toilets throughout the Middle East, Africa and Russia too, but China wins for now. In most of Europe the toilets were very clean, tipping bathroom attendant mandatory, but we could use the TP for stationary.
[heh, heh] It pays to know your weeds.
As we prepared for a trip through the Sacred Valley of the Inca in Peru a few years back, I wondered aloud why my daughter had packed a dozen rolls of TP.
"Trust me, we'll need 'em, Mom," she said. Need 'em we did.
We forgot to stash TP in our backpacks the day I suffered a horrific case of the turistas during a long bus trip. When we stopped at one spectacular set of ruins, I found myself racing for the john--a couple of holes in the ground behind a minimalist privacy screen. No paper, no running water.
Fortunately, my offspring, raised on a variety of both home-grown and wild edibles, discovered a big patch of ultra-lush dandelions along the outer edge of the screen. A couple of handfuls of foliage did the trick and we plucked more for the road.
[By the way, notwithstanding my bout with the turistas and a case of el seroche (altitude sickness) that occasioned an overnight stay hooked up to an IV in a Cusco clinic, I recommend this trip. Spend time in Cusco, climb Machu Picchu and take a ride through the Peruvian altiplano. Journey of a lifetime.]
Got a good hardy laugh out of this comment revere.
If Russia is in your travel plans, do yourself a favor and go to the bathroom before you leave home.
A sense of humor you have!
Always a useful reminder that sanitary sewage disposal and simple hand washing have been the two most important advances in health in human history.
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I have never been able to understand why people find it enjoyable to travel to places where they will probably come down with an intestinal bug. The prospect of spending vacation gushing with diarrhea and possibly puking one's guts out, strikes me as an exercise in masochism. And where toilet facilities are inadequate or TP unavailable, the prospect of running around in hot climates with one's bottom smeared with un-wiped poo is just plain gross.
In fact, here's a mechanism, if you will. Apparently the brain edits memories to make them consistent with one's overall set of emotional traits. So you go to the other side of the world and see the sights and endure the diarrhea and so on, and then you get back and get better, and get your pictures back from the photo lab or get around to uploading them to your computer. What you remember is the stunning view of this, and the amazing architecture of that, and the ancient wisdom of whoever-it-was, and how nice the people were. The memory of the night spent having dry heaves until every muscle in your body ached, gets edited out entirely, and the day you had diarrhea in your pants and couldn't take a bath or shower until the next night gets turned into a funny joke to laugh about, ha ha ha. Presumably people from other parts of the world make similar automatic memory-edits about getting mugged etc. during their visits to the US.
Call me an ignorant rube if you wish, but I'd sooner stay close to home.
A friend swears this is true.He was waiting for a train in India somewhere and accidently voided his bowels(Delly Belly).In desperation he ran to the nearest clothing shop,grabbed some clothing,threw money at the astonished proprietor,and just made it back in time.Onboard,he immediately found the toilet,removed his Jockeys and trousers,threw them out of the moving train window,examined his purchases and discovered that they were shirts.
mara: LOL. That should teach him something about where to take shirt.