toilet advice

Waoo....you really brought me a very good new! Thanks a lot

for the most part my experiences with toilets in india as well as in other third world countries has been bad ones. trains are the worst, the stink and the actual toilets are horrible. carry toilet paper everywhere, you never know when you'll have to drop a few. chances are the seats will always be wet so i just use the hover technique. in trains i spary some axe deo on a bandana and wrap it around my face, it helps. if you in a nice hotel than i dont think you'll have a problem.

Thanks for sharing your oppinion. I don´t think i will make use of many trains in my trip, but it is good to be aware, at least not to feel shocked when facing some "strange" situations .

Actually I found most train toilets (in Sleeper Class; it's possible of course higher-class travelers are less considerate of their neighbors I am in fact only half-kidding btw) surprisingly clean now. They may not look like much in the early morning; this is more likely to have to do with people washing up in there though, not with them spraying all over it. They will be dry again a few hours later when usage has gone back to normal and everything's dried up, and usually still as non-smelly, which should probably give a good indication.

Yep, me too! No really disgusting experiences on trains at all, travelling 2AC. Given that it is just a hole, that, errr... stuff goes down (including cell phones and babies) to the track, there is not as much scope for muck as there is with stationary plumbing.

True; I remember some less-than-pleasant experiences in the past though. Wasn't very fond of using them at all back then.

No idea why that might have changed; besides a matter of luck perhaps, one guesses they may simply be cleaned a little more often. Or maybe people have grown a little more mature and considerate indeed (I was surprised at the number of public toilet and, apparently, even bath houses everywhere btw. I'm quite sure those didn't exist in the early and later nineties, or not in such numbers. Bath houses I can't remember ever seeing before.)

Your description does, again, remind me though why I prefer a shared squat toilet over a western-style one any day.

wow. its weird. cause i've been almost all over india and the toilets on the train have been the worst always. I love traveling in trains cause you get the best shots of landscapes that allude you on planes and buses. but yeah. not fond of these toilets at all. each to his own i guess.

I was in China 15 years ago. After that experience, no toilet has come as a shock any more, anywhere. I happily use any Indian toilet if the need arises. What I find useful are pants that are not so loose-fitting that they fall down as soon as you open the button or zipper, and plastic shoes.

Now only 44 days left to be in India for first time . This toilete issue keeps making me both laughing and wondering how bad it can be. Anyway....not a problem to avoid a "loose-fitting" pant...LOL.

I have a long travel by train next month and will remember eah one of u'r comments while using the toilets!!

Any ideas as how to tie up for adventure sport activities in SHimla .I am doing my own bookings for travel and stay and am at a loss whether these sport activities are only part of some fancy resort packge .Any tips are welcome.

Hi....may i ask you where are you going from and to? I am still very in doubt about making a night train trip.

It is the best way to make a long train trip!

I am not one of this site's great Indian-train fans. Really, I find it quite tedious after the first few hours --- but a journey that starts in the late afternoon, giving an hour or two site-seeing, a nights sleep and another hour or two of daylight travel the next day is a pleasant way to travel. I'd recommend 2AC as giving a little space and comfort. There is nothing to worry about at all.

Hmmm... except, of course, for the biscuit bandits!

There is a big push on to improve sanitation and the states/cities are buildng public latrines these days. I noticed several new ones in Delhi, and even tiny Pushkar has a public toilet, which is very well used by men and I did see an occasional woman entering. By the end of the day, it stinks to high heaven...but better than using the sides of the road or going out to the fields.

Well could you tell us more about the frightening toilets of the world's next would be super power?? if indian toilets are indeed better than maybe we would after all be able to beat China in our race to superpower-dom.