Blog Roll

In case you were wondering, I'm not still down that mine. The trip has finally ended, it's just taken a while for us to wrap this up. We left Bolivia in early April taking in one last tourist attraction - real life dinosaur footprints! Then we headed back to Sao Paulo where it was still raining. Very hard. From Sao Paulo it was only a 12-hour flight back to Heathrow's shiny new Terminal 5. Here we saw the bleary eyes and frayed nerves (can you see frayed nerves?) of staff who had probably spent the past week dealing with angry travellers. We heard one German man confronting a Heathrow operative with the warning, 'I can get a little spicy'. He had just taken a picture of something and they wanted him to delete it. Terminal 5 still had some problems but they didn't hold us up and we got back to Manchester where we kicked back and relaxed by unpacking lots and lots of boxes.
Considering that this blog could have been called 'Look at us and our fantastic year-long holiday', I'm surprised so many people have taken the time to look at it and send us comments. So thanks very much for that, it was much appreciated.

A long, long time ago when we were somewhere in Africa, my friend Tom sent this comment:

'Didn't realise we could ask questions! Apologies if this has gone before.
So - toilets - describe them and (any) available bog roll and experiences of reactions of your different stools with different paper types. Also, how many sheets do you get in public lavs where you have to pay to use them (an average will do).
A top five would be useful.'

Well, a wise American called Dean once said to me, 'it always comes down to toilet stories'. So it felt appropriate to end with these thoughts. Most of the toilets weren't too bad. I was a bit worried about spiders and scorpions in the corrugated iron shack-style latrines found in deserty places, but we never saw any. The public lavs were even quite generous with the paper, giving out about 20 sheets on average. The revelation was South America where all paper goes in a bin, not down the toilet. This is quite odd at first but you get used to it, aided by signs that say things like, 'please use the wipe and fold method'.
However, the toilet experience wasn't always a walk in the park so we've listed some of the unpleasant/memorable experiences below.

(Lord of the Rings fans may be interested to note that this picture shows a toilet at the foot of Mount Doom in New Zealand.)

We were on a mini bus with some well-to-do Ethiopians. When we stopped at a hotel in dingy town a trendy young girl rolled up her trousers up before going in. When I went in I realised why.

Stopped at a bar on a dusty road in Ethiopia (again). It was really hot, we were standing in the shade drinking coke and attracting the interest of some really poor kids. The owner had good English and spoke proudly about his love for the BBC World Service. But he looked embarrassed when Amanda asked to use the toilet. He said, 'You cannot go, it's not fit for a lady'. Amanda wasn't taking no for an answer and we walked down a long dark corridor lined with windowless mudbrick rooms. Right at the end there was a tiny door a bit like the one in Alice in Wonderland, but this was no wonderland. It opened into a tiny dark smelly room that simply had a hole. 'It was a bit forbidding’, said Amanda.

What’s the old adage? It’s better to be inside pissing out than outside pissing in? One Ethiopian (again!!) clearly disagreed. I spotted him standing at a toilet doorway pissing straight into the room rather than walking to the urinal.

While squatting behind a bush on the banks of the Zambezi I check for dangerous animals. I look up and see a gaggle of curious baboons watching me from about 20 metres away. They were staring, perhaps thinking; ‘what on earth is he doing?’

When we stayed with Seble’s mum in Axum her two toddler grandsons Adu and Musi were always causing trouble. I recorded one incident in my diary. ‘Musi does a dump in the front yard and Adu carries it into the house in a sheaf of paper. Amanda genuinely thinks it is a generous helping of chocolate cake. Adu hits Musi (who stinks) then points at me and tries to hit me! He thinks I did it too!’

On the way to the Serengeti we stopped for a drink in a dusty Tanzanian town. The toilets were somewhere around the back of the bar. Amanda gave me the directions but I went to the wrong place and breezed confidently through someone’s back yard, smiling at a group of women doing their washing before using the family's toilet. They didn't seem to mind.

Ethiopia comes out badly on this list. I think their toilets just made the biggest impression because it was the first place we went to. Sadly, the world is full of shabby toilets. But please don't take that as my Jerry Springer-style summing up of the world trip. I'm still working on that one.