I’m still in Taiwan and this topic haunts me on a regular basis, i hope some of you guys can relate to this – make’s my blood boil!! aaaaaargh….
2) Dirty clothes and doing laundry:
I completely understand that life on the road is a far cry from 5 star hotels and dry cleaning but when you wake up, having done no laundry for 2,3,4 weeks on end, and you have to pick up every single tshirt and choose which is the least dirty you’re in trouble. Not to mention the fact that it’s frequently 35 degrees+ so you’ve been sweating in them day in day out – no love for that at all. That combined with the fact that all your dirty clothes are shoved in one bag to fester with each other is not ideal at all. Disgusting doesn’t even begin to cover this.
On that note then, doing your laundry is a tricky situation in itself. So you’ve done no laundry for weeks, you finally have a free day (and some spare cash) to do your laundry. You find the laundry place, give it in and pick it up the following day and…. it smells like a wet dog! You know that smell when wet clothes haven’t dried properly? When they’ve been left to sit on top of each other after being cleaned rather than hung up? So you give your filthy laundry in and now, almost inconceivably, it smells worse than when you gave it in!! AAAAAAAARGH. This is a personal sore point of mine, it haunts me everytime it’s laundry-time again… speaking of which it’s about time i did some more (here we go again…)
I wash my own clothes in the sink when traveling for more than 2 weeks.
My husband tells me I am crazy but he always appreciates the clean clothes.
i need to find a willing wife to do the same
Hello, Untidy clothes are real mess in traveling. But this isn’t just when traveling. Ask the students living in hostels and on rented rooms.
Haha, I enjoy doing laundry on the road. It’s got a sort of camping aesthetic to it. In Thailand, I developed a method for quick drying t-shirts by wrapping them around oscillating fans. Worked great, but stretched out the neck a bit.
u enjoy it?! mate, we need to travel together then!
Ha ha, Johnny.
Laundry availability is definitely a thing I look for when booking travel. I’m finding that a lot of hostels offer a washer and dryer nowadays, and that puts a big ease on the burden. And in most Asian countries, you can get your bag done for you by professionals for less than $20 USD.
hey fidel, that’s all true BUT for lots of budget travelers (like me!) $20 USD is your daily budget, the thought of spending that much on laundry is criminal for us!! lol
I’ve postulated that there’s a thing called the maximum stench threshold. It’s when a person’s clothes or body are so saturated with odours that they lose these odours at the same rate that they gain new ones, thus attaining a kind of bad smell stasis.
great response! like the same sort of thing people get with dread locks right?! i’ll put it to the test! lol
I sympathise, I resorted to taking undercrackers into the shower, there’s just some things that cannot be compromised! But this isn’t just when travelling, a poor postgrad student (i.e. no luxury of a student loan) means exactly the same thing! And it seems to be far less acceptable in the UK…
hey lizzie, i guess the benefit of my horrible clothes is that most people who meet me don’t know me! Your situation has a lot more difficult consequences :S lol
Also fairly annoying when they lose T shirts and swap over towels eh?!
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