Some good friends once bought me a book called Toilets of the World with the inscription ‘Saw this and thought of you’ which I hope referred to the ‘of the world’ bit of the title and not the ‘toilets’ bit. The book has loads of photos of various interesting toilets in interesting places… Kyrgyzstan does not feature in it.

Most toilets in Kyrgyzstan are of the thigh aching squat variety; even those in restaurants. Our visit to Karakol yesterday saw me needing to pay a visit to a public loo that wasn’t in a service station or restaurant. It was a little white building tucked behind a deserted museum, and N and I approached cautiously.

On the plus side, it did have a separated side for men and a side for women. On the down side, there was no actual door and a windowless opening between the two halves let through graphic sounds and smells and not one single cubicle had a door on either. There wasn’t even evidence that there usually were doors but they had just happened to fall off or be stolen right around the time I needed to ‘go’.

Two of the cubicles didn’t have a partition between them, and this did appear to be stolen (or maybe broken and not repaired). But, for all this; when you gotta go, you gotta go and in the middle of Central Asia you can’t afford to be fussy. So I chose the cubicle with two functioning sides furthest from the opening that was the ‘door’ to the outside, away from the windowless opening between the guys’ and girls’ halves and did what had to be done.

As I left the little white building, I must admit that having no doors on the cubicle does have a bright side – no need for touching a door knob which is quite important when there’s no hot water, soap or even a sink to give your hands a good scrub!

Thigh strengthening exercises undertaken to prepare me for skiing were reaping benefits for all sorts of other reasons.