Travellng with humour

One of the delights in travelling in China for we foreigners, is the unexpected delights around every corner. The following story is an insight to the humour that accompanied our group on our last trip to the Kangba region of the Sichuan Provence.
The toliets:
We in the west have become so 'sanitised' as a society, that the personal and basic needs of living, are often cloaked in a veil of secrecy and not openly discussed. We have even gone to the extent of trying to disguide the common facts of life. As my family used to joke, and now my children- the Queen of England doesn't go to the toilet!). Toilets are a common example of humour. In the west we have cleansers and cleaners of every descritpion. We have sprays to mask bad smells, to keep stains off porelain, mats to keep feet of dirty floors, raised pedestals(no squatting), exhaust fans to extract bad smells, toilet papers so soft you would swear they were made from angora wool, toilet paper on demand and in copius quantities, toilet paper 'extra' holders for the toilet room so you never run out of paper(an unmentionable sin in the west- best illustrated in an episode of Signfeld, the American comedy in which Elaine finds herself begging the person in the next cubcle for "just one square" when she finds she has run out in her own one.) We have have brushes to scrub toilets, and every type of disinfectant known to mankind to scrub, rinse, bleach, cleanse, de-odour, even colour the water so its 'ocean blue!' and make that porcelain sparkle.
So it is not surprising that Chinese toilets, in particular once you leave larger centres, is such a source of amusement for westerners.

The toilets

It was with great interest that we set off on our tour of the Kangba Region and were confonted by many toilets that, well, how can it best be put - cesspools of human excretment! At one location, a bus transit station, the stuation was so bad that one member of our group explained a technique for coping that she had developed on a South Amersican trip. She would take her own toilet paper into the toilet using some of it to shove up her nostrils so she couldn't smell! This combined with my idea- roll your jeans half way up your legs before you enter the slippery floored cesspool, so the bottom of your jeans dont dip in the soup, led to a strnge sight, by anyone's standards, of a group of western women undertaking the strange prepartion ritual before entering a toilet- rolling up their jeans to the knees, with toilet paper hanging from their nostrils.!!Of course the jeans thing was fine, but the toilet paper in the nostrils forced one to breathe in through the mouth- thus gulping down large amounts of putrid air- needless to say, the toilet paper nostril thng was abandoned!! So after two days the group became proficient at spotting good native fields and forests as preferred locations for toilet stops. One such field was full of beautiful wild flowers, and it was a little off putting to be squatting behind a bush, hearing your fellow travellers not 10 feet away gushing enthusiastically about their wild flower finds. On that occasion, we all came back to our mni bus with bunches of flowers for identificaton amongst the group as we contnued our journey. Like most of you travellers, many other stories could be written, but I'll leave it that for now to continue with other stories on other subjects!

The hotels

We stayed in a range of half star hotels on this journey and it became a ritual that at each hotel we would immediatley test for water- was it clean, was it hot, was there indeed any!! In one such hotel the water screeched its way through some pipes and arrived- muddy! Our travellng companion, who was an Australian Lawyer, good humouredly had agreed to twin share his room with Mr Gu our driver. Gu was sitting on a bed in the hotel room whilst our friend had the first shower. Gu decided to make himslef a cup of tea and boiled the jug. Meanwhile, our friend is in the shower, and as you do with the first burst of water, closed his eyes and placed his head up into the warm stream of water. When he opened his eyes, he was covered in mud and dirt- not knowng if the sewerage pipes where somehow back flowing into the shower water, or what was going on, he grabbed a towel, flung it around his waiste and shot back ionto the room, grabbed the jug of water and proceeded to pour it over his head-much to the astonishment of Gu and one of our young student interpretors!! Gu laughed so hard he cried, and our friend, now with muddy head and third degree burns on his scalp somehow managed to get dressed and find his way to the room of one of our group, who was reknowned for carrying everythng accept the kitchen sink, and yes, she had a cure all burns cream that saved the day-and his head!! I can only imagine how Mr Gu has recounted that episode to friends and family, indeed anyone who would listen!!