Pit toilets are old news. I broke myself in on those within my first hour on the ground in Japan. They`re quite easy to use, provided you have reasonably good balance. Thai toilets, however, are a whole new adventure.
As you probably realize, toilet paper is used very rarely outside the Western world. In fact, it wasn`t even common in America until the advent of the ubiquitous Sears catalog.
Thai toilets feature what appears to be a vegetable washer hanging next to them, not unlike what you might see as extending from your kitchen sink. This, as Geoffe the expat phrased it, is a `bum gun`. Like most Thai water, this is unheated, which — again as Geoffe put it — is `rather bracing`.
Ostensibly, this veggie washer is an ingenious way to achieve levels of post-restroom, intimate cleanliness that you`ve never before experienced. In the unpracticed hands of a Farang tourist, however, it appears to be an excellent way to spray fecal soup across your anatomy, trousers, and perhaps the wall of the restroom that the 7-11 employees kindly allowed use of.
Oops.