Popagandhi

_Otto’s Guesthouse, Koh Kong_

It requires a bag of tricks and should be first rehearsed before being attempted. You will need a large plastic bag, and plenty of courage, for such an experiment. Let it first be said that the only reason this experiment awaits you is that you are a cheap bastard, or a poor student. The latter category automatically assumes qualities of the first, then again, one is more easily forgiven for it. There is nothing else to expect from a room you paid S$4 for. Be proud. You’re El Cheapo.

A few assumptions ought to be made: it is a Third World country, with little or slow development. There is no hot, or running water. Your room has more in common with a prison facility than anything designed with “comfort” in mind.

There are other intricacies involved in living in such a place, but today we will only focus on the act of showering. I say, “showering”, since baths are universally absent from such a category of accommodation.

The plastic bag will be your best friend from now on, so go ahead, compulsively hoard plastic bags whenever you can find one. Your shared bathroom will almost always have no place for you to leave your necessities in a dry place, no towel hooks, certainly nowhere for your clean set of clothes. It’s as if the planners of super-budget acommodation had expected their clientele to be without clothes at all time - which, if you think about it, a certain demographic group of travellers (18-23, white, wasted, male) certainly fits those requirements easily. In the rare event you do have such bathroom fittings present, they are usually rendered useless by the excessive presence of entire insect colonies. If you’re lucky, you will get a conventional species of insect ââ�¬â�� beetles, or something.

Instead, look for a single protruding object, preferably a sturdy, rusty nail surgically attached to what passes for a door. this is the spot where your best friend the plastic bag will hang upon. It’s a fairly simple procedure though best attempted after some practice.

First find “The Spot”. Hang one plastic bag handle off it.
Now remove your clothes, assuming you are wearing any, and roll these into the plastic bag, much in the same manner you might pack them into your backpack.
Place fresh clothes on top of this stack, in ascending order - the ones you are accustomed to putting on first should be on the very top. This order of clothes will then be superseded by your towel. (I actually had a really cute diagram here)

The order behind this arrangement makes it easy for you to reach for the first things you will put on, and leaves the stale clothes behind for the laundry. That’s essential as most of the time after the shower will be spent carefully avoiding the colonies of bugs, and fumbling for your clothes in the state of undress is not exactly recommended.

In such a state of undress and torment (read: colony of ants to north and east, big bugs to south, flies and mosquitoes encapsulating the circumference of your head and body), any time spent fumbling is time enough for your predators to launch an attack. One must be continually vigilant, practising the backpacker’s Right Arm Swing Exploding Insect move with a pail of water.

I settle into a nice comfortable position � my front a good inch from the bug the size of Vietnam, my right a comfortable distance from the family of ants escaping the great drought in Ant Land. My left hand firmly grasping the pail of water, taking alternate swigs of water at my body, and at the flies hoping to build a nest on my ear. Pleased with the superiority of my vantage point, nothing, not even the odd sounds coming from next door, not even the recent standoff with cunning Khmer touts at the border, can stop me. I am queen of this bathroom, I think, and gingerly tiptoe around the bug as quietly as I can, careful not to startle the cranky cat waiting for me outside the bathroom door.