I tried. Believe me, I tried so damn hard to get either a dose of the squirts or some serious constipation for PoopReporters' enjoyment. But I'm sorry to have to admit that, despite my best efforts in a strange and faraway land, I failed completely to have anything but perfect and regular stools.
Three weeks of eating mutton twice a day, and on several occasions for breakfast as well, had no unusual effect. Neither did an almost total lack of fruit and vegetables. Drinking fermented mare's milk and home-brewed vodka from communal bowls just made me stumble about a bit more than usual.
The toilets, however, were quite interesting. The long drop is an age-old and fairly environmentally-friendly type of crapper. Just dig a deep hole and plant some kind of structure on top for privacy and protection from the weather. The ones in Mongolia even had rudimentary ventilation pipes which, with the constant wind, made them reasonably odor-free.
They are mostly two-holer, mixed-sex dunnys with a dividing wall of the thinnest and cheapest plywood. Shamelessness is the order of the day in the Gobi. The sound of a stream of hot piss falling on a bed of turds has an almost musical quality to it, and any farting reverberates loudly in the vast echo chamber below the plank flooring.
Entry holes vary in shape and size. My preference was for the first type with a reasonably-sized target for logs to be released through and a sort of slot to cope with stray jets of pee. A thoughtful design.
The second most-common one is not so user-friendly: just a big old oval cut in the floor down through which petite ladies and children must regularly disappear.
I can't think of many things in life that can be more satisfying than unloading a steaming great turd down a long drop in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
