The thing about toilets...when overlanding.
When travelling finding a decent toilet is always going to be a lottery, and more often than not you're not going to be anywhere the jackpot. If anything you're going home with the booby prize. But, when you are overlanding the odds definitely lessen and that jackpot (aka a decent clean toilet) becomes a 1 in a million opportunity. Why you may ask! Well when you overland you spend a lot of the time wild (or bush) camping, or stopping in a town for a short time. There is no dedicated porter to pitch your toilet tent, as has happened to me in the past, and you start to see the difference between necessity and luxury. Yes, to those of you back in the U.K., the ready accessibility to a clean toilet is a luxury! Some of my fellow overlanding passengers have expressed their despair, disgust and discontent at the state of the toilets we find, and have rather used the bushes, rocks or walls to shelter them while going. I, smug seasoned traveller, persevere in the belief that if they’ve gone to the trouble of building a toilet it is my duty to use it. However, there have been a few times as I have stood on rotten boards precariously perched above a long (or short) drop in the hope that I will not fall in. Then I look down as I try to keep my clothes away from the floor, which is, covered in all manner of materials that should really be inside a toilet that I have asked myself…’what on earth are you doing, Clare? I long for the seat, and my heart does sink every time I see the porcelain dish in the ground or the hole in a wee shack, but as with most things options are somewhat limited when overlanding. Or when one of my fellow passengers pushes the button in Alice indicating a 'bush pee stop' is required. The door opens and we spill out onto the road with the 'boys' going one way to relieve themselves, and the 'girls' another way in search of cover to relieve ourselves (inevitably flashing our naked bottom to at least one other fellow traveller)...or (in search of) our lost dignity.
A few images of toilets and 'bush pee stops'. 😊
