My sister Kate has been traveling in southeast Asia with an experienced traveler, Michael, as her guide and companion. Somehow, she has been managing to blog about the experience as she goes.
I have especially been enjoying her accounts of the bathrooms as they progress from plumbed areas of civilization to towns where the common toilet is not much more than a hole in the floor. In a recent post, Kate shares a photo of a public toilet in Vietnam which looks promising at first because it’s a western-looking, plumbed thing, but the caked-mud footprints on the seat belie the reality that in this part of the world, people squat more than sit.
But much more meaningful in that recent post is the tale of the bus ride from Vinh to Hanoi, during which 32 people were packed onto a 23-person van with rows of seats and no aisle. Kate bemoans her own and Michael’s physical largesse, with nowhere for their legs to go, and the fact that a pregnant woman was throwing up next to her. To get off the bus, they had to crawl over the seats while the bus was chugging along, and kind of dive off without ever really stopping.