Travel bugs: Bizarre hotel toilet and bathrooms

Fed up with novelty toilets? The waterless WC. Photo / Supplied

Tim Roxborogh on the joy of moaning about your holiday

Bizarre hotel bathrooms

I watched so many Hollywood Westerns as a kid that I developed a curious enthusiasm for saloon-style swinging doors. So healthy was this enthusiasm that the pre-teen version of me may have once speculated out loud something along the lines of, "Golly, wouldn't it be cool to have saloon-style swinging doors in my house one day?"

It was something about the way a person made such an announcement anytime they came through saloon-style swinging doors. No hands are needed and there's no entering a room without people knowing. These doors were cocky, they were arrogant and my gracious, I had to get some.

Perhaps blessedly, this particular interior-decorating affliction has not manifested in my life as yet. Indeed, adulthood has shifted my tastes somewhat, although that childhood dream did almost come true — to a point — some years ago in Belize in Central America.

In the middle of a three-week tour from Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, down through Belize and across Guatemala, accommodation was mainly of the two and three-star persuasion. This meant cute little boutique hotels in lovely old Spanish colonial buildings at the top end of the scale, pleasant beachside digs in the middle and one truly bizarre concrete box of a property at the bottom.

The bizarre part was not on the outside of the building as my memory of this hotel in Belize's Cayo District (famous for its Mayan ruins and some of the most sacred, historically significant caves in the Americas) is that it was entirely nondescript. As in, I'm pretty sure it was a perfect oblong shape, half a dozen stories tall and with not a solitary feature to make it stand out in anyone's mind.

Perhaps that's why they went for the saloon-style swinging doors. Normally on this trip we were two to a room, but this was the one hotel where we forced to have three of us per verrrrry small room. Dropping our bags on our beds, there they were before us, like straight out of a Clint Eastwood or John Wayne film, saloon-style swinging doors. Only these weren't to a saloon with loose women, cheap drinks, out-of-tune pianos and men considering ending your life, oh no. They weren't to a saloon at all. These were to an ensuite bathroom.

My heart skipped more than a few beats and not through the excitement of reliving all those childhood westerns. I'd longed for saloon-style swinging doors separating maybe my lounge from the kitchen, but not from the bathroom to the bedroom.

A quick human-to-door measurement revealed the doors only just came below my knees and if you were standing upright, you could see out. More crucially, your room-mates could see in. Eye-contact. While in the toilet.

Now I'm not an overly private person and nor am I a prude, but given I've been known to turn up volume knobs on stereos before venturing into bathrooms if there are people within earshot, the prospect of saloon-style swinging doors being all that separated me from my room-mates was a hernia-inducing catastrophe.

So I did what any reasonable person would. I explained to my room-mates that they'd be required to leave the room for 20-minutes to allow for the privacy I deserve, as well as for the dissipation of any associated odours. They were welcome to ask the same of me, though none of the three of us were especially keen on the idea of relaxing with a book in a room of modest proportions while your buddy's going all Gunfight At The O.K. Corral on the other side of the saloon-style swinging doors.

It may or may not be a coincidence, but my "curious enthusiasm" for saloon-style swinging doors seemed wane from this point.

Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB's Weekend Collective and blogs at RoxboroghReport.com.