This lovely restroom at Karakul Lake in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China was neither restful, nor a room. Rooms generally have doors and resting is difficult with no comfort, a stench every bit as bad as you might imagine from the photo and no light after dark. As if that wasn’t enough, they decided to paint the walls and the floor in the least relaxing of all colors. Naturally, this was the only toilet available to those who choose to stay with a local family in a yurt, as opposed to the overpriced Chinese hotel, which was basically everyone but the Chinese tourists.
My guide for the Karakul Lake area has practical information on visiting this area. For nearby Kashgar see this guide and for the rest of China head to this page.
Saw similar “facilities” at the Tiger Leaping Gorge, and that’s a World Heritage Site for crying out loud! At least the scenery was nice.
The scenery was amazing here, too and without a door, you got to enjoy it while on the toilet…
I remember a really horrible toilet on the way to the Tiger Leaping Gorge that was so bad it also made it onto this blog. Thankfully, I missed the one at the Gorge itself.
This could be so much worse! 🙂 But still, VERY different if you are used to American privacy, and comfort. do you prefer 3 folds or 4? 🙂
You’re right, it could definitely be worse, but I’m glad it wasn’t. I mean, at least it had three walls and a hole in the floor…
HARDCORE!
It reminds me of a “bathroom” I came across in a road trip in North India. Basically it was just a cubicle of cement.. it did have a door, but there was NO HOLE! So all the lovely things you see inside the hole in this pic were just there, scattered all over the floor. You could smell it from meters and meters away.. so maybe it’s a good thing that your toilet here didn’t have a door.. at least there was good ventilation!! 😉
Not having a hole kind of defeats the purpose of a toilet, doesn’t it? In fact, without a hole, it’s really just a closet. I suppose the ventilation was nice. During the daytime. It got really cold at night though. And this was in August, so I can’t imagine how unpleasant that draft would be in the winter.
Well, if you are a women, you will never be able to use it. Basically its nothing more than a hole in the ground. Where does it all go?
It goes into a plastic bag. Where the bag goes when it’s full, I have no idea, but I’m guessing there’s a big trash pile somewhere nearby that’s full of those bags.
This is how the toilet looked like in my previous high school I was teaching. Absolutely disguising and it was a public school!!! Uffff that’s China 🙂
We had bad toilets where I worked, too, but nothing like this. You could at least flush them and the school had cleaning staff that would keep them somewhat clean. But you were working in a small town, weren’t you? I guess that would be a bit different from a school in Shanghai.
That really looks gross. I mean, they could just dig a hole in the ground, right? No need to use a plastic bag? I agree, though, that in some places, it is worse. At least you will have privacy there when you do your thing!
That’s true, at least this toilet has three walls, which is three more than some of the ones I’ve come across. As for the plastic bag, I’m guessing the theory is that removing the waste occasionally, helps cut down on the stench. Of course that assumes the bags are actually replaced, which did not seem to happen very often. Certainly not as often as any person with a normal sense of smell might have liked.
Even just in the photo i can feel the smell here just by looking at it eeeww! haha