[The World Tour of Oopsies is an ongoing series of travel stories about my first decade of travel. During these adventures and misadventures, I had to unlearn many things I thought I knew about life. Welcome to my miseducation.]
Videos by TravelAwaits
Part I / Koh Pdao
While still staying on Koh Pdao with my host family, and sometime around the scorpion bite (see Chapter One), I experienced a transformative moment.
A bucket shower.
It wasn’t actually the bucket shower that tripped me up. Though I was new to the setup in which you scoop water from a large basin and toss it over your body between scrubbing, it wasn’t overwhelming for me.
Did I miss warm water? Sure. But after days spent working in high temperatures, cold-water bucket showers were a refreshing treat.
I’m talking about the first communal bucket shower I took.
I wasn’t alone during this homestay on Koh Pdao; I was joined by another traveler from my group, a young woman nicknamed Sushi. For the first week of our stay on the island, we bathed separately.
That being said, we did just about everything else together. We slept, we ate, we washed our clothes, and we hung out with our host family. In those weeks, we became like host sisters. We relied on each other as confidantes, offering support when we got our periods, and that one time I got stung by a venomous scorpion. (Again, see Chapter One.)
Sushi also helped me learn the ropes a bit faster because, though her nickname was Sushi, she had immigrated from China to California at a young age. Though we were both very American, she had a cultural key to Asia that I didn’t, having come from the more homogenous Midwest.
Still, I didn’t think much of our differences until Sushi insisted we take a bucket shower together.
Part II / The bucket shower
I fended off Sushi’s request to take a bucket shower together more than once. The idea of showering naked with a friend just didn’t make sense to me. I could shower on my own, and thanks to that handy little bucket, I could splash water any place I couldn’t reach.
Sushi eventually pointed out that nobody had washed my back since we’d gotten to Koh Pdao, at which point I got a little suspicious.
Wash my back? That had to be code for something, right?
I grew up in a Catholic family in Missouri. Even verbally, we didn’t show a lot of affection. Something like a hug was reserved for a graduation or a funeral. The idea of washing together with another person while fully naked (in a platonic sense, at least) had never drifted onto my radar.
But I was in a faraway place—a magical, safe place where everything I’d ever known was up for reinterpretation.
So, I took my towel and followed Sushi into the washing room. We disrobed and took turns using the bucket to rinse ourselves, then scrub. Sushi washed my back with soap, then rinsed me down with water. I did the same for her.
It was really that simple. And almost two decades later, I remember it well because, up until that point in time, that sort of care didn’t exist in my world.
I came from a place where nudity focused almost solely on sexual contexts. Women I had known my entire life wouldn’t have gotten naked with me, even in a utilitarian, platonic bucket-shower way. Or if they did, it would have been palpably tense.
Part III / Touch
Very quickly after the bucket shower, I realized travel would teach me more about myself than it would about the world.
Later on, when I studied culture academically, we explored this idea through Edward Said’s book Orientalism. Let me make a full-length academic book very short and generalized for travel purposes: when we travel, we situate the world according to our pre-held beliefs, rather than letting what we experience change how we understand the world.
We filter what we experience through our own pre-held beliefs, like a light through a prism. The light that enters is one and the same, but the prism’s conditions change how light is refracted through it. The prism is culture, geography, language, history, and all the other factors that generate a people; the light is consciousness.
If you want a less existential and more academic take on that concept, read Orientalism. Or take a bucket shower with a new travel companion on your next world tour.
