Open Writing

For the dedicated city wanderer, each decade offers different exploratory walking routes.

When I first arrived in Canada, finding grocers that stocked HP sauce and shops selling bras and blouses as long-wearing as Marks and Spencers or coats as well-priced as C&A’s, was the prime consideration. A route evolved which took in promising department stores and dress boutiques.

With the children in school, I diversified, swerving to include cinemas for half price matinees, and the Art Gallery of Ontario - which has the largest collection of Henry Moore sculpture outside Leeds - on their pay-what-you-can-day.

A decade later, the arrival of buyer-friendly bookshops with coffee counters, magazines and sofas led to a different pedestrian trail. But what dictates my path these days aren’t the offers, buys and sights, but the services! That is the public conveniences - toilets - loos - washrooms - as they say here.

((If visiting the cosmopolitan city of Toronto, the best downtown ones are;
Famous Eaton Center - climb to the upper floor - small but offering welcome respite
Historical Hudson’s Bay Co. - duck through the towels in the bath dept. to an excellent facility.
Modernistic Atrium on Bay - never queue because it’s hidden at the back downstairs
Cool College Park - share with the police courts on the lower level and see a wig.
Spectacular Royal Bank Plaza - mingle with bank staff - behind the food court donut counter
Must-Visit City Hall - Hear ten languages as conducted tours find relief.

All are of these are free, fully tiled with automatic taps and hand dryers. Of course if desperate, for the price of a coffee in popular Tim Horton’s or an ice-cream in Macdonald’s, you can access their customer-only washrooms.

The problem of the availability of public toilets hit home, a couple of years ago, high up in the beautiful Andes Mountains of Chile. A friend and I were visiting El Tatio geysers, a four-hour drive from the old village of San Pedro in the middle of the Atacama Desert. The visit involved getting up in the middle of the night and driving up the valleys to be on there at dawn when the geysers spout.

You’re never alone even in remote places these days. As the sky lightened that morning various tourist groups, muffled like arctic explorers against the freezing morn, could be seen drifting round the steaming salt funnels, peering at the eerie scenery and warming their bottoms against the stumpy rock spouts.

Part of the visitor package after the water jets and shrouded mountain vistas, included boiling the breakfast eggs in the hot water and recovering warmth and strength with mugs of tea and coffee.

Nature soon called.

People ducked off towards the rim of irregular rocks surrounding the little plateau, home to the mystical Hot Springs. They never got lost. They just followed the trail of toilet paper discards so many visitors before them had dropped. In the absence of proper facilities or waste bags when they finished, they added to the paper trail - sign-posting the way to the ‘toilets’ just as surely as the illuminated signs in the malls of downtown Toronto.

The tourist groups had arrived in minivans. Each group leader provided plastic bags for food waste, but no one attended behind the boulders.

Whenever I need a toilet now, I remember those telltale tissues on top of the world - the only time I’ve felt sickened instead of relieved to see toilet-pointing indicators.