An untold story of Peruvian plumbing

It occurs to me that in my recent post on toilets around the world I omitted a story of Peru. This isn't a story of an oddly located toilet. Nor is it a story of a particularly unusual or disgusting toilet. It's just something that happened in Cuzco.
We had been to Puno and travelled back from there by train to Cuzco, a journey that even on schedule takes eleven hours. We stopped in Juliaca and again at Chuquibambilla and at each we were delayed in starting out again. The result was that, after a fourteen hour journey, we reached Cuzco at around eight thirty and then piled into a minibus to drive into the city. Twenty minutes later we had unloaded our gear into rooms at the Hotel Carlos V. Twenty minutes after that I was eating pizza in a tiny local restaurant and twenty minutes after that I was upstairs in the Cross Keys pub drinking a bottle of beer and listening to a splendid mix of Lou Reed, Bon Jovi and AC/DC.
I stayed there drinking and playing pool until about one in the morning when I decided that I was drunk enough and should head back to my bed. My temporary room mate, a Danish teacher, was, while not exactly a teetotaller, a rather more modest drinker than most of us and had left straight after the pizza, so I tiptoed in as softly as only a very drunken man who has been awake for about eighteen hours can. Somehow I managed to avoid waking him.

I know what you are thinking. What has this to do with toilets. Patience, I'm getting there.
Before I climbed into my bed, I decided that it would be wise to go to the toilet and relieve the pressure from all of that beer. It was, after all the first time I'd had any en suite facilities for almost two weeks. So I tiptoed into the bathroom, did what I had to do and flushed the toilet. I turned to leave but I was vaguely aware that something was wrong. The toilet was still flushing. And still flushing. And still flushing.
And it was loud. The kind of flushing that rattles all the pipes in the whole building. The kind of flushing that shakes the cistern. Certainly the kind of flushing that wakes up your Danish room mate.

It was clear that until the flushing stopped neither of us would get any more sleep. We tried, sober man and drunk man working in imperfect harmony, to fix it, but half an hour and a whole roll of insulation tape later it was still flushing and my room mate was extremely annoyed. He went off to seek an alternate room and fifteen minutes later the staff had found one for us. We moved in and he climbed grumpily into his bed.
By now my bladder was bursting again so I went into the toilet. It was about three O'clock. I did my business and turned to leave. As I did so I flushed the toilet.

I'm sure that you can guess what happened next.

An indelicate matter

Now that's what I call a long drop toilet!

I’ve talked about various aspects of travel in this blog but I’d like, if I may, to discuss a rather indelicate topic that I have so far avoided - toilets. Travelling around the world you encounter all sorts of facilities, from those best described as basic to those which are positively palatial. Some years ago a friend, who - as I’d like him to remain a friend - had better remain nameless, introduced me to someone in a pub as, “This is Bob. He likes shitting in a hole in the ground.” In his defence (or maybe not) he was already pretty drunk when he got there but he was also completely wrong. I had just returned from trekking in Nepal where for the entire duration of the six day trek I had suffered chronic constipation. The simple fact is that I find the hole-in-the-ground squat toilet almost impossible to use unless I have something to hold onto or lean against. In all my travels I don’t think I have ever managed the trick no matter how desperate the situation has become. Mind you, the extreme reaction at the end of the trek when I was again in a hotel with a western toilet made both me and the management very happy that the design of the bathroom meant the toilet and shower could be used simultaneously. Sometimes I suffer for my travel.
The worst facilities I ever came across - and the squeamish should stop reading now - were in a tiny village in Southern China. We were on our way to Laos and when we came across a village with a little café we stopped for lunch. The food was fine. The café was overwhelmed by the simultaneous arrival of fifteen or so hungry lao wai. The villagers were bemused by our presence among them.
Enquiries revealed that the only toilet was the three-walled, roofless stone structure about a hundred yards away. Exploration revealed that none of us would have been capable of using it. The toilet consisted of a hole about a foot square that was overflowing with a hideous, writhing mass of inch-long, thumb-thick maggots. I managed to get out without being sick. Others failed the trick.
You shouldn’t, however, get the idea that this is true of all Chinese facilities. I recall a very odd incident on a previous visit, in a nice hotel near Guilin where we went for dinner and a musical show. In the interval I went to the toilets which were modern, clean and decorated with lots of glass and marble. I only wanted the urinal and I was standing there going about my business when I realised that something strange was happening at my feet. I looked down to find a little old man in a blue uniform polishing my shoes. I was completely at a loss as to what to do, so I did what any Englishman would do and pretended that he wasn’t there, finished, zipped up my trousers and went to wash my hands. We had been cautioned by all our guides that tipping was illegal so I didn’t but I couldn’t help wondering which petty official he had annoyed so badly that he had been given such a demeaning job.
Mentioning the décor of that toilet has reminded me of another, this time on one of the islands off Thailand. I was on a day tour of the islands and went to a pretty good one for lunch. Lunch was served al fresco on the beach and afterwards I went for a wander along the sand. There was a sizeable tourist village there and it had lots of facilities including a number of toilet blocks. When the need occurred there was one handy. I went in and was startled by the murals painted all over the walls. They depicted scenes that, if better executed, could have come from the brushes of Bosch or Bruegel. Naked women cavorted with hideous demons in frenzied sexual activity. It’s the only occasion in my life when I have been prepared to risk people misunderstanding my intent by taking pictures inside a toilet!