You Can Tell a Hell of a Lot About a Country From Its Public Toilets

Maybe almost everything.

The best public toilet I’ve ever visited may have been the one at the Blue Temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

You enter through a swirling cloud of mist, past lush landscaping. But the foliage continues inside the toilet area, with openings peeking out into dense vegetation, bright skylights overhead, and even actual living trees growing between the urinals — everything befitting the restroom’s “forest primeval” theme.

Yes, in Thailand, restrooms often have themes.

Back! Back through the mists of time! Too, uh, pee.

To be clear, Thailand is a diverse country, and I saw plenty of “rustic” bathrooms there too.

Once, while exploring some backroads in Northern Thailand, we stopped to use the roadside restroom advertised by an obviously poor family. The facilities, which cost about ten cents USD to use, were surprisingly primitive, but the family could not have been any friendlier.

A “rest area” in Northern Thailand.

Michael and I have been continuously traveling the world for eight years now, and when it comes to public toilets, I’ve been struck by two things:

• How widely public toilets vary from country to country in terms of accessibility, cleanliness, and general layout.

• And how much you can tell about a country’s culture — its values and priorities — from these different public toilets.

The more I travel, the more obvious the differences become.

From just the two toilets cited above, you can tell Thailand is a vibrant, creative, friendly country with high social trust but pockets of extreme poverty.

I think you can tell a lot about my home country, the United States, from its public restrooms too — maybe almost everything.