places I've pooed
I'm a lucky girl. When I was in sixth form, my school (a rather nice one in Guildford) decided to raise the stakes for school-trip one-upmanship and take a few of us to Tibet for sight-seeing, hiking and fun.

Current affairs side-track: I've *seen* how Tibetans live. When people say the Chinese are nice to them and we should all leave them to it, they can fuck right off. Destroyed monastaries litter the country-side and the people live in absolute oppression. It's dreadful.

back to the point....

This trip afforded some amazing toilet experiences. So much so, that at the presentation we did on our return, I was made to speak for 15 minutes about the different lavs we'd seen, and attempted to use.

My favourite by far, was the al-fresco shitting.

In remote parts of Tibet, they don't exactly have access to sewage systems. They have to find alternatives. There are advantages to their locale though. The high altitude means flys are rare and the air is dry. Perfect conditions for storing poo. So that's what they do.

When they build a house, they have a room with no doors or windows and a lower roof than the rest of the house, so it can be accessed easily from the upper floor. They cut a couple of holes in the top and hey presto! Loo! They don't bother with a roof over it, but they do build a low wall to stop you falling off in excitement.

When the room's full, they fill in the hole and build another one. I think then after a few years they've got a room's worth of fertilizer, but I'm not sure.

We were fortunate enough to stay in one of these houses for a couple of nights while visiting Everest base camp.

Nothing will ever compare to the experience of leaving my bed in the night, fitting my head torch and heading out to the roof. Concentrating only on balance and aim, as I squatted precariously over the hole, I bared my shining white arse to hundreds of miles of the pointiest mountains in the world. A humbling experience if ever there was one.

if I get clicks I'll tell you the tale of the trough.
( catness, Sat 29 Mar 2008, 16:20, 2 replies)

*clicks*
the trough sounds interesting. Like Billy Connolly's tales of the lav in the shipyards, a continuous trough with the jobbies of everyone "upstream" sailing past under you.....
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Sat 29 Mar 2008, 18:11, closed)

...
So some monasteries have been razed. Yaaah boo. Think of it as a means of intellectual cleansing. As for opression: do you think that Tibet'd be an easy-going place otherwise? Nope. A mediaeval, feudal, poverty-stricken theocracy? Yep.

I'm with China on this one.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 31 Mar 2008, 11:28, closed)