toilets of the world

by m. werneburg, 1998

the view from an outhouse at Rose Harbour, BC, Canada

a fine view from an outhouse in Rose Harbour, BC

In my travels I've seen quite a few odd things that wouldn't have occurred to me if I'd never left home. One of the things that always surprises me is the variety of toilets that we humanfolk have invented. These are some strange facilities I've met at various places.

An outhouse at the Watchman station at Ninstints, in Haidi Gwaii. The thing has no door, and perches 5 metres about the spray of a notch in the rocky shore of the island.

This was the ultimate example of the process of intertidal waste management. According to our guides, the intertidal zone is a 'safe' area for human waste, as the fauna apparently treat the stuff in a sanitary way.

Another outhouse on Haidi Gwaii, this time made of old parts of boats. It has a small picket-fence section for a door, and it looked out over the tidal flats of Rose Harbour (which were littered with beautiful old rusted whaling machinery)

The toilet in our hotel room in Amsterdam baffled me. It took me no less than five minutes to figure out how to flush it. The secret? Pull down the pipe that connected the overhead water reservoir to the 'bowl'! The actual pipe itself was the flushing mechanism. Rarely felt like more of a Dumb Tourist.

A hotel in Amsterdam. The urinals had little cubicles with doors. And there were flowers and freebie mints and whatnot.

Los Peligros, Cancun. This one was beautiful. There were even limes among the ice of the long urinal

Planet !@^#%&Hollywood, Las Vegas. There were not one, but two attendants in a restaurant where getting a meal took an hour and a half (longer for the member of our party whose order was forgotten!). I can reach the damn paper towels just fine, thanks.

A strip joint in Niagara-On-The-Lake (trust me, it's there). It was being used by far more people than intended, and let me leave it at that.

Without a doubt, Paddington Station in London. I had to pay 25p to get in, and they clearly hadn't been giving the cleaning staff coinage to access the stalls. When I found the recessed button to flush the thing, I figured out why the previous tenant hadn't bothered. Ugh.

The toilets in the men's room in Toronto's Union Station are flushed automatically by motion detectors. I was surprised to discover this when I shifted on the seat...

Japanese toilets. They have control panels. Most seem to have multiple shower settings (ulp).

The Chinese trough toilet. One long ceramic/tile trough carries water at a trickle from a raised cistern toward an outlet. On either side of the trough are raised areas for your feet. In half-height stalls (no locks) along the trough, everyone squats and craps into the same open trough. The water slowly carries the whole mess towards the outlet.

Variations on this theme include a stand-by bucket for filling (from what source, I was never able to tell) and the stand-by mop.

Runner up: the other kind of Japanese toilets. You know what I'm talking about. Or you don't, and have underdeveloped thigh muscles. A ceramic hole in the floor with a raised splash guard at one end, you crap onto dry ceramic and the flush shoves everything under the splash guard and away.

The toilets in Australian sleeper train cars are actually inside shower stalls. When not in use, they fold up into the wall, just below the space where the sink folds in. Pretty interesting design.

Perhaps the pay toilets in Perth that warn of improperly disposed needles...

Or maybe it was the one in the Vancouver west-end swimming centre with the half-height stall doors with the needle depository and the closed-circuit TV's.

Australia's country-side is dotted with special toilets that use no watter and which turn the wastes directly into soil. Very clever things.

I've discovered that the entire Oceanic region uses pretty much the same technique on saving water by having two flush buttons: one for full flushes, and another for half flushes. Every toilet I've encountered in Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji uses this technique. They also turn up in Japan and China.

Chinese toilet stalls don't have locks. Many—especially the trough type—also don't have real doors, just the low swinging saloon style affairs. Come to think of it, it's rather sad that any toilet stalls anywhere in the world need locks.

But it happens in the west as well. As mentioned above, I've seen public toilets in Vancouver that didn't have real doors so that the authorities could monitor the goings-on there.

At a gas station in Australia several of us tourists wanted to use the toilet. But one of the locals did a quick check first and warned us off. There was a venomous spider under the toilet seat! I was nowhere near that desperate.

Japanese toilets

And then there are Japanese toilets....