b a t t l e c a t . n e t

This travel thing may seem glamorous and exciting from where you’re sitting, but let me remind you that it can be very hard work.

I’m of the opinion that after about two days, whomever one is travelling with, the conversation will primarily be focused on toilets: proximity, cleanliness, paper quality, Western or squat and frequency of use. Successful travel is linked very closely to basic comfort, and basic comfort, in my opinion, is highly dependent on a healthy digestive track.

Travel with Dan is no exception. When we took our road trip over Christmas, we both ended up with “travel lockdown” after the first 3 days. That first week was spent discussing about how much we needed to poo, in between drinking prune juice and strong coffee and driving along the Great Ocean Road. We were out of our comfort zones and eating an awful lot of pizza and deep fried roadhouse food. Luckily, we improved our diets (lots of fresh fruit and water) and things returned to normal soon enough.

Guess what, you know those dumplings I was raving about a week or two ago? Did you see this delicious pizza thing (tu jia bing)? And I haven’t had a chance to tell you about the delicious convenience of steamed buns with all sorts of different fillings!

Well, it turns out that for some people, if your diet is a consistent mix of refined white flour dough, meat and oil, you will get constipated. Yet it also appears that for other people who travel in China, and who eat almost anything (including dumplings), you do put yourself at risk of diarrhoea. A comfortable balance can be hard to achieve when you aren’t aware of which way the tide is going to turn at any moment.

The other night we were walking back from dinner (where we may have eaten dog due to an ordering mishap) when I felt that horrible lower back clenching sensation that reminded me of a night spent over a squat toilet in Turkey. Luckily, I got back to the hostel and up all million flights of stairs with time to spare. After I’d cramped and pooped and flushed, and come out of the bathroom looking kinda green and with a killer headache that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, dammed-up Dan had the cheek to say to me. “I’m so jealous that you were able to poo”.

So, jealousy might be the bizarre reason why he tried to flush toilet paper in the squat toilet yesterday morning and blocked the drain, before going off to explore Nanjing without fear of being inconvenienced. Which meant that I’ve not only seen my poo once, but repeated times as I had to find a plunger and unclog the drain.

I’m sure that there will be very many beautiful experiences that Dan and I will treasure for years to come, but I also know that there are going to be reminders which keep resurfacing no matter how hard one tries to wash them away.