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NOV 26, 2006
GOING
ON THE GO
On the second page of one of my
favorite books, A
Walk In the Woods, author Bill Bryson
attempts to explain why he decided to hike the Appalachian
Trail. Among the myriad
reasons is one that I find
particularly compelling:
I wanted a little of
the swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through
eyes of
chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, “Yeah, I’ve shit in
the
woods.”
Me, too, Bill. Me, too.
If eating adventures fill the travel
magazines and are the
most oft-proffered calling card of the well-traveled – boasts of
participating
in elaborate feasts in Michelin-starred palaces of gastronomie
or discovering the particular textural nuances of
Amazonian grubs – then the truer test of genuine worldliness comes from
the
experiences post-meal. This is the
chapter that is not always told, but which everyone who hears a
food-related
travel
tale – or any travel tale at all, for that matter – wishes to know.
. . . And then what
happened? After you drank the water from the pure, idyllic mountain
stream . . . ? After you
ate those grubs or feasted
on the iguana-and-yucca stew. . . ?
After you spent a week on a train across Nepal .
. . ? After you spent a month
in the woods subsisting on
beef jerky, Power
Bars and assorted woodland berries . . . ?
And then I got dysentery.
And then I was nursed back to health by some passing
Maoist rebels. And then I was laid up for
six days in a
hospital in Kathmandu. And
then I shit in the woods.
Most true adventures have a food story
and a toilet story,
and though neither need be unpleasant (hey, the toilet story could be
an encounter with a high-tech W.C. . . . ), they often are, especially
if one leads to the other. The
worst meal I have had in my life was a mysterious “carrot loaf” at an
ostensibly-gourmet restaurant in Scotland’s
Orkney Islands; the most sick I have
been while
traveling was that evening and the next morning.
As pretty much every traveler has
noticed, and every travel
writer has commented upon, if you venture long enough and far enough,
you will
get sick. (And, of course, if you stay
at home and never leave the house, you will get sick.
And if you live a normal life and go to work
and live a Rockwellian existence in a bucolic small town and have a
white
picket fence around your historic bungalow . . . you will get sick. You will get sick, eventually, no
matter what. It’s just that it’s so much
more interesting on the road, so much more unpleasant and memorable and
worthy
of retelling months later. And now back
to the story.)
My own stable of toilet stories is
fairly small (though here
is one, from a previous Gut Reactions entry about Costa Rica), in
part
because I haven’t actually traveled that far afield – truth be told,
I’ve never
even shit in the woods; I prefer my hiking to be of the day variety,
the kind
where you OD on Imodium at the outset, use the latrine at trailhead,
and set
off for a leisurely stroll that ends several hours later at the same
outhouse,
and then it’s back to the hotel and a flushable crapper, if you please.
But I’ve also been saved by the fact
that I am exceptionally
cautious about what I ingest while on the road – it’s
pretty much just
chicken
and bottled water for me, though I am very adventurous in matters of
cookies,
pastries and other baked goods. My
culinary paranoia has, I believe, helped me stay healthy (and, I might
add,
spend more time meeting people, soaking up the scenery and otherwise
enjoying
the journey).
I’m told that in the travels ahead, I
will not be so
fortunate; the luck has to run out sometime. At
least, so says Ian Frazier in a recent essay in Outside (“A
Kielbasa Too Far”):
What undoes you,
usually, is what you gulp. . . . You
know the food is bad, the water dangerous. You
discipline yourself consciously, stick to
bottled water, eat only
the mildest, most scrutinized food. Vigilance
carries you through one trip, maybe
several. But then in an unguarded moment
you’re
hungry, you’re thirsty, something smells good, the water from the
spring looks
refreshing, your reflexes take over – and you gulp.
. . . And the result of gulping, most of the
time, is that you come down with a certain ailment.
This ailment is in fact the most common one
that travelers get. It is so well known
that it does not need to be named.
Never have I heard more frightening
words. As someone who aspires to a) see
the many
corners of the world, and b) survive, and as someone who already has a
massive
strike against him, gastroenterologically speaking, the apparent
inevitability
of traveler’s diarrhea puts a huge dent in my wanderlust.1
And still I
tell myself: take a
big bottle of Imodium, be paranoid, and go for it.
Oh, and take toilet paper, too.
That’s
another big theme I’ve
noticed in travel writing – even if you get to the porcelain throne
fast enough, you may not have a certain necessary item. One of
the many such anthologies on my
bookshelf is
titled There’s
No Toilet Paper . . . On
the Road Less Traveled (editor Doug Lansky, in the Foreward,
claims that
one of the rejected titles was Imodium
for the Soul). Over on World Hum, a
travel writing web site of the highest order, writer Frank Bures
currently has
a spectacular piece, “How
To: Use a Squat Toilet,” which addresses the toilet
paper issue and so, so many other fecal matters (sorry!) and is an
indispensable resource for all travelers, especially those who spend an
inordinate amount of time on (or on the way to) the toilet, or what
passes for
a toilet. Bures cites a book I’d not
heard of, somehow: How to Shit Around the
World, which I can only imagine is a wonderful resource, and
should find a
place in my bag along with the guidebooks and maps.
(The same author also wrote a travel book called Shitting Pretty, for what it's
worth.)
Since I’m
linking to
various other sources, I’ll leave you with two more thoughts:
From Rolf Potts, author of the Traveling
Light column on Yahoo:
One
of the most startling travel epiphanies I've had in recent years
came on a trip to Burma, when I was counting out money to buy a packet of toilet
tissues. The
Burmese kyat had recently suffered a jag of devaluation. Tallying up my
toilet-tissue money, I noticed that it consisted of twelve small
denomination
bills.
Given
that Burmese tissues came in packets of ten, it occurred to me
that it would be more economical to simply use the currency as tissue
and
pocket the difference.
. . . Which
makes me remind myself
that when I’m in a dark, foul, paper-less latrine, and I dig into my
bag, I
should be sure to sacrifice How To Shit
Around the World before tearing up the maps. . . .
And finally,
for those who
want to know what it’s like to boldly “go” where no one has gone
before: how
astronauts use the "toilet" in space.
1Actually, according to an AP article
brought to my attention by another Rolf
Potts column, there's a vaccine in the works to prevent travelers'
diarrhea. Potts claims "a sentimental fondness" for the
affliction, but I, for one, offer up a Pepto-Bismol toast in
celebration of its eradication.
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