Getting caught short is funny - if it's not happening to you. Readers recount their experiences.
Travel, it is said, broadens the mind. It certainly offers an extraordinarily broad range of experiences when it comes to toilets.
Lavatory legends have flowed in from readers in response to our compilation of toilet tales offered by local travel agents.
A couple are local stories.
Goran Persson offers a cautionary story from
his days backpacking around New Zealand of "the public urinal that hits back".
This, he explains, is the big stainless steel unit, common in many public toilets, which tends to make a loud "boing" when used in cold temperatures because of the expansion in the steel when warmed by the user. Such urinals "must be approached with great respect".
Mark Fryer recalls an enlightening family holiday at a bach in Piha when "the torch fell down the longdrop and no one was willing to get it out. The batteries lasted most, if not all, of the long weekend."
But most stories offered are horror tales of places where customs are different to those in New Zealand.
Shanny Campbell, a Newmarket-based social scientist, says her toilet stories from four work-related visits to Afghanistan "have achieved legendary status in many circles".
There is the tale of her interminable journey north from Kabul through the Salang Pass where, for hour after hour, there was nowhere to go.
"The only places you could stop had a bank on one side, a cliff on the other, and you couldn't go more than a metre from the side of the road as there were red rocks to indicate unexploded mines."
Eventually, when "two hours past my record-to-date pain threshold of needing desperately to pee" she spotted a bombed-out building with a halo sign on the side meaning it had been cleared of mines.
The driver was reluctant to stop but she forced him to pull over, grabbed the toilet paper and headed for the building. She discovered the reason for the reluctance.
"I won't go into detail or for sure you'll be sick," she says. Inside the building were "the leavings of thousands of people, all within a couple of square metres, in a climate so cold nothing ever breaks down".
Another memorable experience came later in the same trip when they stopped for lunch at Pul i Khumri - "our team watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on satellite TV and the rest of the restaurant patrons pretty much watched me" - where she delightedly discovered "they actually had a real toilet".
Unfortunately, when Shanny asked to use it, she had to stand around in a filthy alleyway for 15 minutes "while the restaurant owners tried to locate the key. In the end they got a toolbox and smashed the lock off, damaging the latch, and when the door was finally prised open with a crowbar - you can see it was reserved for real VIPs - the door would no longer close.
"The toilet was clean but otherwise disappointing since it was just a hole carved out of the floor with the ground underneath. Still, the lack of flies and excrement meant it scored highly on the Shanny Campbell filthy-toilets-of-the-world scale."
Sue Hawkins, of Mt Maunganui, had a fascinating experience when she and husband Garry rented a room above the Pathankot Railway Station for $5 a night during a honeymoon tour of Sri Lanka and India.
"We were," she says, "very pleased to secure a room with a private bathroom rather than a shared one down the hallway. However what we didn't bank on was the resident rat in our Western-style toilet.
"We tried flushing him away before calling the station manager, who continued to assure us 'no problem' as he alternated between flushing and ramming the broom handle down the toilet and on the rat's head. Eventually, on about the fifth go, he got rid of the rat."
Moira Neal recalls touring Northern India in a hire car with a helpful Sikh driver who stopped wherever there were clean toilets.
"However, one day, far out in the countryside, he stopped by a small tea stall. He disappeared, as did my husband. When they returned I inquired where the toilet was. The driver said, 'No toilet here. Madam go countryside.'
"I looked around. No trees. No bushes. Just recently harvested flat land as far as the eye could see. This madam decided she would hang on."
Barry Buckley offers a perspective on why many people refuse to eat pork.
"Travelling in South India last year my wife and I met an English girl who had been renting a cottage at a seaside village in Goa. She advised us not to eat the local pork.
She told us the toilet for her cottage was some sort of communal affair and that she had a take a stick with her to beat off the pigs so she could finish her business. They were called toilet pigs."
Tania Krupitza recounts the problems of going on safari in Africa with "a Woolworths bladder". While in the Ngorogoro Crater in Kenya, she says, "I was so desperate to pee that I even contemplated leaping out of the 4WD when we stopped to look at a pride of lions.
"In Serengeti, I took my life in my hands by getting up in the middle of the night while scanning for lions. I stood as close to the tent as I could.
"I met a traumatised woman who had shared a tent with a woman who had been too scared to leave her tent but was so desperate she used her toilet bag."
But embarrassing moments don't just arise in Third World countries.
Tania reports an experience her sister had in a Berlin pub called "Klo Kneipe" or "toilet pub".
"After several good German beers she was in the ladies about to drop her trousers when she caught sight of the beady eye of a video camera fixed on her. A sign on the door read, 'This picture is now being shown on the main screen in the bar'.
"In a panic she raced out to the bar to find it was a practical joke. But she still didn't dare avail herself of the facilities."
Then there's the experience of Jill Gardner, of Travel Comfortable, in a Parisian hotel where, as is normal in France, you pull the lever upwards to flush.
Jill had undressed and run a lovely hot bath when she decided to use the lavatory. She duly pulled the lever upwards and "it came out in my hand and the water shot upwards like the Trevi fountain. I put my finger in the top of the toilet to stop the water gushing up everywhere. But it was tricky to get a towel around myself and try to reach for the phone to call reception and ask for help."
Derek Spender, of Howick, offers an impressive story of toilet sang-froid from Paris where he attended a performance of the Moulin Rouge which has strict rules against customers causing a disturbance by going to the loo during the show.
During the gap between the meal and the start of the show there was a rush for the facilities with the result that "the queue for the women's toilet was extensive while the men's was minimal.
"The woman attendant solved the problem with Gallic aplomb by herding blocks of women from their queue into the men's toilets to make use of the empty stalls."
As it happens, I've experienced something similar in the Maidment Theatre, here in Auckland, with a few determined women bypassing the queue for the ladies by marching boldly into the gents.
And I remember attending a function in Whangarei and, on asking where the loo was, being taken outside and told, "Anywhere between here and Cape Reinga."
