Where da toilet paper???!!!

[MrMan]

How do you guys handle toilet facilities while traveling?

I have found that in Indonesia, there are a lot of squat toilets. Sit-down toilets can have ground-in stained footprints. In a place that really needs porcelain seats, they tend to have cheap plastic toilet seats. Hotels, nice office buildings, and higher end malls are the places to go with cleaner toilets that do not have footprints. In some of the smaller towns, it seems like it's all squat toilets, and some of those are nasty. It's almost like a 70's gas station bathroom, but with water all over the place and squat toilets instead of sit-down.

And then there is no toilet paper. I carried some in a backpack. The girls were always asking for it. I told them to put the stuff in the trash, but sometimes there was no trash. If you flush, you dip from a bucket or a cement or tile reservoir used to hold water for flushing and sometimes also for bathing. Indonesians tend to use dippers and reservoirs like this for bathing also.

Bathrooms tend to have wet floors, so men will roll up their pant lets to go to the bathroom.

A typical bathroom in a home might have tile floors, a tile water reservoir and a squat toilet. Some homes do not have a kitchen sink, and they wash dishes on the floor right where they bathe. That's kind of nasty to me, especially if there is a squat toilet in the room. Bathing is done by using a dipper to dip water out of the reservoir over one's head. So bathroom floors tend to be wet. They often don't have enough hooks or nails in the wall. The last time I was a guest overnight in a home like this, I bought suction cup hooks to take with me. to hang my towel and a bag of toiletries.

They also use their left hand and water for hygiene purposes after they go to the toilet. I talked to an expat who said he 'converted' from toilet paper to his left hand and water. Indonesians typically have soap in the bathroom, so they wash their left hands. There are sinks outside of the restroom in a lot of restaurants. They take a long time washing their hands, usually, and clean them thoroughly. That makes sense considering their restroom practices and the fact that they often eat rice with their hands.

I the city, with some of the nicer sit-down toilets, they'll have a bidet attachment where you can squirt and use paper, the best of both worlds. Some sit-down toilets will have a hose like the one used for squirting dishes in the kitchen sink in the US.