When I was a kid our family would often drive down to the Bellarine Peninsula. I always knew when we were passing through Werribee by the smell of the farms and wetlands that handled Melbourne’s sewage output.
I’ve been to many smelly places over the years. Durian markets, stink tofu stalls, the Paris Metro, the Lucas Heights Waste Management Facility, just to name a few. Then I have visited those that smelled of shit. Literally. No, not just the back garden when I owned a dog and I had an accident with a line trimmer. I don’t want to revisit that ever. These are places I visited willingly.
The first relates directly back to that drive through Werribee. At Scienceworks in Western Melbourne is the Spotswood Pumping Station, a heritage listed facility that once pumped Melbourne’s waste to Werribee. The tunnel beneath the pumping station is still used to this day and, as part of a personal tour in 2015, a staff member opened up the access hatch for us and out came the stench of a city’s rear end.
The smell of Melbourne brought to mind another one we’d experienced earlier that year. An art gallery is probably the last place you would expect to find a stench, but Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is no ordinary gallery.
Cloaca is a machine consisting of a series of glass flasks designed to replicate the digestive process of converting food to waste. And just like a human digestive system, at the end of the process the machine will excrete the waste. That excrement looks, and smells, just like a human shit. The artworks of MONA left many lingering memories, but that smell is strongest of the all.
The following year, it was our turn to be digested at the Singapore Science Centre. There, they had a temporary exhibit of the Human Body Experience, an inflatable mockup of the human body. You entered via the mouth, explored some of the interior with a giant heart and brain and other organs, before leaving via the intestines, emerging back into the world through an anus. It wasn’t just sights, sounds and touch either. There were realistic olfactory enhancements too and, this time, the shit was us.
Not all our poo related holiday adventures were quite so smelly. Some were rather pleasant, actually. There was the Modern Toilet restaurant in Taipei, which we visited twice, where they serve dishes like chocolate soft-serve ice cream and curry in urinal and toilet shaped bowls.
There was also Mr Toilet House in Suwon, South Korea, which featured a museum shaped like a toilet, a garden of statues doing ablutions and a poop themed library and kids play area.
The final shitty place was probably the cleanest of all. On our last trip to Japan we visited the Toto museum in the city of Kitakyushu, celebrating the inventors of the wonderful Washlet toilets.
Our travels have taken us on a journey from where waste ends to where it begins in the system, from the mouth and right through to the anus. From the city to the shitty.
What crap have you put up with on your travels?