Shitting Pretty: How to Stay Clean and Healthy While Traveling

Whole Earth,  Spring, 2001  by Mike Gaspers

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Shitting Pretty How to Stay Clean and Healthy While Traveling Jane Wilson-Howarth 2000; 147 pp. $12.95 Travelers' Tales

A must-have for all travelers who've found themselves bonding instantly with strangers on a chicken bus in a Third World country over the similar psychedelic color of their diarrhea. (Happens to everybody.) This lighthearted book is a quick "oh, so that's what I should have done to prevent my guts from pouring out of my ass" read.

Serious and humorous. Shows us how to: eat and drink safely in a foreign country; avoid diarrhea, parasites, and diseases such as malaria, typhoid, and hepatitis; cope with unfamiliar facilities; "go" outside when no facilities are available; manage on long bus rides; outsmart gastrointestinal diseases -- the traveler's most common complaint.

Advice on eating, for example, is straightforward: Eat food that is thoroughly cooked and served very hot, and avoid hard-to-wash raw vegetables, such as lettuce. The author also claims that impure water can certainly make you sick, but the vast majority of travelers' intestinal symptoms are due to poor food handling prachces. --Mike Gaspers

"I don't know if this was true but a diplomat told me this story in 1984. Chap on his way to catch a train in Delhi suffering from diarrhea soiled himself. He dashed into a shop, gesticulated to the assistant that he needed new pants, had them wrapped and rushed to catch the train. He cleaned himself up in the toilet, tossed the soiled pants out of the window, and opened the parcel to find he'd bought a new shirt. --Neal Robbins

"It is crucially important for travelers in less hygienic regions to take special care in washing their hands before eating, and preferably after defecating. It is not always possible to find soap and running water in the place of easement, which is perhaps why door handles of squalid toilets will be hopping with virulent microbes. Whatever washing agent is used, whether it is soap or mud or ash, it is the rubbing process that gets rid of microbes; rinsing with water alone does not produce effective cleaning. Similarly, campers can scour plates clean with mud, ash, or riverside moss, then rinse and dry them in the sun; this will make them clean enough and safe enough.

COPYRIGHT 2001 New Whole Earth LLC
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning