A travel writer and blogger that spent £150k and travelled almost 75,000 miles through 100 countries to find the world's worst public toilet has finally found it. Graham Askey from Brighton, AKA the 'King of the Porcelain', discovered what he describes as the “perfect hell hole” in northern Tajikistan.
The 5ft bog is a ramshackle tent with walls that double as loo roll. The fabric walls that are used as shared toilet paper was the “most repellent thing of all”, according to Askey, as he made the horrifying realisation that sections had been torn off and discarded on the cubicle floor.
The 58-year-old blogger says the facility is that bad that those who are desperate enough to use it must stoop over sun-dried faeces.
To further add to the woes, there is also the danger of disturbing deadly snakes and fearless rats which have all made their homes in the nearby rocks. The toilet, not far from the Afghanistan border in the Ayni region of Tajikistan, is apparently so vile that the locals refuse to use it unless "absolutely desperate".
Askey is a self-confessed "squatter spotter" and visited hundreds of public toilets in six of the world’s seven continents before crowning the Tajikistan outhouse the worst of them all. He included 36 of the "crappiest crappers" he encountered in his new book Toilets of the Wild Frontier, which hits the shelves this week.
Other public loos that made his 'crap list' include a sink in Bangladesh that was so blocked with faeces that it was full of urine, and a bath containing “litres of number ones and twos” in China. The plug was apparently left in.
The retired builder developed his peculiar fascination for public lavatories, particularly their poor construction, on his first overseas holiday to Morocco. He has photographed only the outside of the worst loos he visited to spare readers the "vomit-inducing" contents, and spent the "absolute minimum amount of time" inside to stave off nausea.
He has thousands of views on his InsideOtherPlaces blog which he penned for the fictitious Toilet & Urinal Restoration & Design Society (‘TURDS’) and he decided to collate the worst into a book. Whilst meant to be a work of satire, it also aims to highlight the health risk posed by sub-standard sanitation.
Askey said: "After my many travels, I thought I’d seen it all, what with sh*tters on stilts, sinks seemingly full of wee and bath tubs apparently being used as makeshift bogs. But having enjoyed some of the filthiest bathroom facilities to be found anywhere on the planet, the toilet in Tajikistan has to be the worst in the world – it is the perfect hell hole.
"With no toilet paper available, the builders have conveniently built it with a fabric covering to offer wiping functionality – and it looks like the locals have made full use of it!"
