Big issues in the smallest room
Using the lavatory can be a messy business when you’re travelling.
The auto-tuned ‘‘Konnichiwa’’. Bright lights. Warm breezes. The keyboard melody lingered until blasts from a water gun jolted me upright.
I hadn’t walked onto the set of a Japanese summertime music video headed straight for No. 1 – I was just trying to go No. 2.
The cubicle, like almost everything in Tokyo, was compact, cartoonish, and contained more space age tech than the first mission to the Moon. Enough seemingly useless buttons to rival a television remote. What does this one do? Oh, no. Cancel. Cancel. Cancel! The Land of the Rising Sun has lavatory luxury down to a fine art, but for travellers, the fright of a robotic arm appearing from below the rim is hard to forget – even with its offers of water (cold, warm, hot options available if you can figure out the remote) and air driers. Despite being one of life’s certainties, the difference in toilet design and etiquette throughout the world can knock new travellers for six. Everybody has a (horror) story.
Often we suffer in silence, because you’re not going to make your host endure a comedy routine where you gesticulate wildly, mime and stutter in tourist Japanese – or Italian, Thai or Hindi – just how to best go about using their porcelain or plastic kit. And that’s if there is even ‘‘kit’’ to speak of. On a packed train in South East Asia, the toilet was simply a small room with a hole onto the tracks, with just a bar to hold so you don’t follow it down there. Toilet paper? If you’re lucky, or came prepared with hand sanitiser too. It’s a grim reality for commuters. Suddenly gridlock on the southern motorway didn’t seem so bad. Even in moredeveloped countries, tourists can get caught out, especially as New Zealand offers many accessible public toilets. Paris, London and Rome are tourist meccas, but try finding a free public loo near their bucket-list buildings.
The amount of times I’ve hastily ordered, well anything, from a restaurant menu just to use the bog should have city planners red-faced. The other option is to cough up your euros or pence and support Europe’s bustling army of paid toilet attendants.