The Titanic Awards

UK they can’t pee in the urinal all over the floor, every toilet you go to there.

I couldn’t agree more. The UK has the worst toilets. Even the fast food chains have toilets that are usually blocked, no paper, faeces smeared on walls. Disgusting.

Man, there are so many contenders for the world’s worst toilet, it must be a mind boggling array of truly awful selections.

However I know exactly where the worst toilet in the world is, hands down, no comparison… MOROCCO. To be precise – about 100m from the beach behind a service station smack bang in the middle of Casablanca and Tanger.

Now I have seen the best and the worst that toilets have to offer. I’ve squatted in places where others dared not to squat (Jakarta domestic air-terminal public ladies toilets for one – an inch deep in urine), or Guilin train station in China (a beautiful communist style 10m dirty metal trough with no flusher) but let me tell you – this place takes the cake. I am certain this toilet eats unwitting foreign tourists.

It looks, well, modest from the outside. a rather lopsided wood shack standing remote from surrounding buildings. as you approach it you’ll note the door slightly ajar, at an angle. its obviously well used.

… the mud slide of sh*t that cascades out of the building holding the door ajar is the first indicator that perhaps all is not Bleachy-Clean in this toilet facility. If you are brave and intrepid (read: stupid and desperate for a pee) you might even stick your head through the door to work out whether its worth standing on the 8″ of crap to squat. it will be at that precise moment that you will realise that the crap-slide out the door is the least of your worries. the walls themselves (up to about head height) are coated with an inch of dark-brown pungent human excrement that you might suspect was smeared upwards by a mad-man in a vain attempt to keep this holocaust of a toilet standing. that, or the whole thing exploded.

Oh dear. Of course, my fellow intrepid travellers were not deterred and my lingering image of this place is one particularly genius backpacker standing one metre outside the shack and long-distance urinating into it. clearly he needed to GO.

I remember being a kid visiting China in 1984 and busting to poop before catching a train back to Hong Kong. My brother and I approached the toilet at the station and got no closer than 100 yards and holy crap! What a stench. I think I’ve never been so dying for a dump in all my life after lasting 6 hours on a train ride back to Hong Kong hotel bathroom. Unbearable.

Scariest toilet I’ve seen was another that caused me to hold my number 2 was caused by an horrendous toilet at the bus station in Gibraltar in 1999. A Dutch traveller who I met the day before told me about this horrendous toilet the day before, but I found myself with no choice. I entered into darkness, a bare scrap of light coming through the window. 3 cubicles, only one with a door. The 2 toilets I could see were both broken and shockingly filthy. I pushed on the only cubicle available. It was completely pitch black in there and as the door slowly creaked open, I hear from the darkness a loan groan: “errrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhh” (imagine the voice of a 70 year old drunk pedophile – well that’s what it sounded like to me.) I only got the door half open before I ran. So AVOID Gibraltar bus station toilet. And then I had to hang on for about 2 hours on a bus trip into Spain. Horrific.

I like the European idea of paying to use a public toilet. You have an attendant so it’s safe and they keep them clean. If it costs you 50cents to go to the toilet, I’d rather do that than go in filth.

Bolivia has some of the worst toilets I’ve ever seen. There must be no toilet seats in the whole country. You just crap in a dry toilet and then dump a bucket of water into the porcelin bowl. Of course it overflows. Then it appears that the used TP if you have some goes into a waste paper basket. The public toilets in Iahuanaco arwe especially disgusting.

In 1987 I had the occasion to use the public facilities in Wuhan,China. Nothing but a trench dug in the dirt. Not quite coed bc the guys had one trench and the women had the other. Nothing like having a bout of the hershey squirts while you’re being stared down by a pretty Chinese lady.

agreed. china has the worst toilets. NEVER EVER use a public toilet in rural china (or beijing for that matter…)
even hong kong has some pretty shoddy toilets!
(ie. over-flowing squat toilets, where the flush has broken!)

try toilets on the cheap trains in india… you’ll want to hold anything in for days! was on a train for 3 days delhi to goa, and so had to go…

where do malaysia stand ?