Diarrhoea on the Yangzi

As I wrote on Friday in Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer I’ll be telling you about a few of my not so glamorous travel experiences in China over the next few days.

I spent a year and a half as a VSO volunteer in the Hunan province of China in the mid 90s. The anecdotes you’ll be able to read here over the next couple of days will be from summer holidays and spring breaks from my stay in China.

Call it a pre-Christmas present to those of you who need a cheap laugh at my expensive, or comfort to those of you who are convinced disasters only ever happen to you.

Warning: What follows is not for the faint-hearted and if you’re easily disgusted or are having your lunch in front of the screen, you’d better stop reading now!

I had survived my first term at the Teachers’ College in Xiangtan, the college was closed for the summer and I had made plans with another volunteer to travel to the south-western part of China.

We decided to start off with a trip on the Yangzi going from Yueyang to Chongqing. This was before the Yangzi cruises for tourists were introduced, we were going 3rd class on a dingy, dirty old ferry.

My fellow volunteer had invited one of her students along, who had invited a friend along, and we were all staying in a basic 4 bed cabin. The journey would take four days, with only one chance along the way to get off the ferry for a few hours.

All was well the first day on the ferry. The shared facilities were basic, and the food available wasn’t the best, but we were still excited about spending a few days on the Yangzi.
Disaster struck on the second day, when I woke up with an excruciating stomach ache. It took one trip to the public toilet to realize what was wrong – diarrhoea had crept up on me over night.

As if the prospect of being stuck on a ferry for the next three days with diarrhoea, sharing a beds-only cabin with 3 other people wasn’t bad enough, the toilet we had access to wasn’t just public, it was extremely public.

While most public toilets in China at that time were open with only a low wall dividing the holes in the ground, the toilet on this ferry had no screening whatsoever between the holes.

In fact you didn’t even get your own hole. The toilet was an open room with a long l-shaped groove running from one end of the room to the other with water gushing through it. To use the toilet you’d crouch down with a foot on either side of the groove with women in front and behind you doing the same thing.

The lack of privacy was bad enough under normal circumstances, but I have never been more embarrassed as I was crouching there with women in front and behind me witnessing my spout of diarrhoea.

To this day I cannot think or hear of the Yangzi without thinking of that l-shaped groove.

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