Open toilet

Something needs to be said here about the sanitation in India. To a westerner it is very difficult to believe how it could be this horrendous.

At our roadside lunch stop in Karwar on Thursday, I asked the restaurant owner if he had a toilet. He shakes his head no.

Where is there a toilet? I ask, hoping that his neighbors have one.

"Open Toilet," he smiled, waving his hand in the general area of the rest of town.

Really, I mused to myself could this be? Certainly there is cow and dog poop everywhere. And we do see people urinating in more public ways than we had expected. But it is also true that people do the number-two just about everywhere, too. I guess that for a very poor region with precious little infrastructure, closed sewer systems are just too much to ask for. But what is more frightening is the lack of understanding about how this can contribute to the spread of disease. The image below is from a public-information painting on a wall near the Chemundaswari temple in Mysore.


Monica and I went to eat dinner in the guide-book-endorsed "touristy" restaurant in Gokarna. It has balcony seating so that we can get above the flies, so prevalent at street level. Before going to our table I visited the toilet they had, which was a standard hole-in-the-ground outhouse style "squat" toilet. What struck me as odd, though, was that an identical outhouse was connected to the right. At the same level (and within splashing distance) was the location of the dishwashing station. This was not on some kind of table but at floor level.

I decided to block the whole scene from my mind---and forget also that none of the locals use toilet paper to wipe. I decided that maybe they are fastidious about cleaning their hands. I thought maybe there is some ancient system at work which can help avoid the transmission of germs. But when our drinks came out we were proven wrong. Monica ordered a Sprite, in a glass bottle. How could they screw that up? The bottle smelled strongly of rotting fish and had several globs of white goo on the upper outside. Monica had taken a sip before noticing, and when she put the bottle down she noticed a small brown smear on her hand.

Yes, it smelled of poo.

Needless to say we left and would never return to this eatery. But although this erred on the side of obvious, I don't think that it was unique. The place had average cleanliness, not worse than most of the places we went. We have hand sanitizer. We'll try to eat at places where food turnover is more frequent and where things seem thoroughly cooked. But it's always going to be some kind of a crapshoot (pun intended).

Believe what they tell you: don't drink the water.