Helen Raine regales readers with some toilet humour as she travels from primitive to posh conditions. After experiencing the most basic, bucket-style WCs, nothing could ever faze her, and she’ll opt for a thatched partition and a plank of wood anytime over a regal ‘throne’ in a jewel-encrusted bathroom.

Primitive conditions: the author’s husband digging out the toilet pit.

When I bought my house, the bathroom was a bad hangover from the 1980s. The tiles were miniature and an insipid baby pink; the light fittings were glaring faux dressing room bare bulbs; and the vanity unit, once no doubt top of the range, had tired tap handles and corroded spouts.

I started off with grandiose ideas of sandstone tiles and lava sinks. After one visit to check out the prices at the hardware store, I was down to “sandstone look” tiling and an ex-display model sink (it was that or surviving on baked potato and cheese for the next six months). Still, after several weeks of work by my long-suffering father, the smallest room in the house looked sleek and luxurious. It was a step up from many that I’ve used.

Take the one in Zambia for example. I worked for a year on a conservation project deep in the heart of Kafue National Park. There was running water – from a tap at the well that was switched on once a day for an hour to let the whole village fill up their jerry cans. We’d drive a battered Land Rover there and fill up 20 cans, which would supply the drinking and washing water for the whole camp. Since the Land Rover was usually out on surveys, we had to make the water last. Showering was rationed to one bucket of water per person per week.

There was running water – from a tap at the well that was switched on once a day for an hour to let the whole village fill up their jerry cans

Used as we are to a shower or bath at least once a day, this might sound like a terrible hardship. In fact, it was an incredible luxury. I would split my bucket into two (one for washing, one for rinsing), and enter thatched walls of the shower cubicle. The floor was a trough in the baked mud overlain with planks and there was no roof. At midday, the sun would beat down from directly above and the first splash of cold water was more refreshing than the most intense power shower I’ve ever had. The view above the shoulder-high walls was rolling Africa plain under a cloudless sky. Strangely, in a camp full of people who washed rarely, the smell of freshly shampooed hair was almost repugnant in its cosmetic intensity.

With no sewers, the toilet was a composting long drop, the name being fairly self-explanatory. Due to the heady aroma, it was located down a 50-metre path away from the camp. At night, this was a complete no go; lions and leopards were known to prowl nearby, leaving theirtell-tale paw prints easily visible along the path.

But during the day, I encountered a much bigger danger during one trip to spend a Kwacha. I was just about to escape the horrible smell and head back up the path when a chorus of warnings came from the rest of the camp. As I peered cautiously over the thatch wall, wondering if they were teasing, a huge tusk rose very slowly to my eye level and a sinuous elephant trunk gripped a hardy tuft of grass at the base of the toilet wall and shook it out of the ground. I was close enough to see the elephant’s long, wiry eyelashes and the horny nails on his huge feet. Elephants don’t generally attack humans for sport, but this population were being poached in the wider park, and taking one by surprise by suddenly emerging out of the loo was a bad idea. I shrank back into a corner and held my breath while the rest of the camp mocked me mercilessly.

Things got only slightly better when I moved to Peru to work for the same organisation on a biodiversity survey. Running water was less of an issue; the Tambopata River ran right past our camp so bathing was at least a daily affair as long as you didn’t mind doing it directly in the river after a quick scan for caimans. Staying completely submerged was preferable as the sand flies tended to launch a full-on assault on bathers, leaving huge welts, which itched unbearably.

The toilet was another long drop known as the bog pit. Due to the less-than-clean river water, we often suffered from giardia, requiring long and repeated visits to the loo. This was particularly unfortunate, because the pit was full of mosquitoes, which would swarm up to feast on exposed buttocks. The longer you took, the more bites you accrued.

A slim coral snake once uncoiled itself from the thatch as I squatted, half fascinated, half afraid. It slithered upwards and vanished into the roof. I also learnt quickly to bang on the box first so that the bats would fly out before I sat down.

But the oddest Peruvian toilet visitor was the sloth. Sloths have algae growing in their fur, which provides camouflage, and since they move exceedingly slowly, they are difficult to spot during the day in the jungle. They do have a weakness for salts though. The not-quite-water-tight toilet box would leak its salt-laden contents onto the wooden boards and the sloths went wild for it. We would regularly find one after dark, slowly licking the boards with its strange claws twisted in ecstasy. A hysterical shriek from the loo one night alerted us to the fact that one sloth had lost its head completely in the quest for salt and actually climbed into the box itself. When an unfortunate volunteer sat down, it panicked and began trying to climb out in slow motion only to find the exit blocked by a bottom. She was traumatised for quite some time as was the sloth, who began an agonisingly slow getaway from the gaggle of humans that gathered to watch.

The only plus about such astonishingly basic bathroom conditions was that the most poky little shower cubicle and loo in a third-rate hotel suddenly held all the allure of a five-star spa experience.

The perfect bathroom can be more about location than fixtures and fittings that count. In Cuba, the government hotels were hardly known for their opulent luxury. The bathroom of the Las Terrazas Hotel was no exception, except that the back wall of the shower cubicle was made entirely of glass and overlooked the forest. It was like taking a shower in the branches of a tree.

Camping in Madagascar, the ‘shower’ was a thundering waterfall that hammered the aches out of my back at the same time as washing off the filth of a hiking expedition, an experience way better than the five-star Malagasy honeymoon hotel we later splashed out on, where the hot water ran out as I finished my shower, leaving my newly-wed husband with only icy needles instead of luxurious heated rivulets. This is unpleasant no matter how stylish the surroundings are.

Fortuitously, as my earning power has increased, the quality of my bathroom experience has risen too. Turkey was a particular high point. The Turks have taken quality bathing to an art form with the Turkish bath houses, and they haven’t stinted on private bathrooms either. Cappadocian hotels have some of the best.

Arriving late one night, we got a cut-price deal for a suite of outstanding quality. There was a study and an airy, luxurious bedroom, but the star of the suite was without a doubt the bathroom formed from a cave in the rock. The floor area was larger than my entire apartment in Malta. The walk-in shower had double ‘his and hers’ heads, the bath sat centre stage on clawed feet and a small closet held bathrobes with a pile that you just sank into. Everything was tiled in local stone, the fittings were in brushed steel and the lighting was recessed, subtle and relaxing.

All this luxury pales into insignificance compared to the bathroom of Jeweller Lam Sai-wing in Hong Kong. According to the Guinness Book of Records, his cost €2.8 million, which helps to put any plans for bathroom renovations that you might have into perspective. Sai-wing built it entirely of 24-carat gold and jewels. Even the loo brush and toilet bowl were solid gold (as the price of gold went through the roof, he melted down many of the fittings, although the toilet remains). To use it, you have to spend at least €105 in the jewellery shop. Perhaps that’s just as well because with gold bars inserted into the floor and a ceiling studded with rubies, emeralds and amber, this washroom is enough to give you performance anxiety.