Fresh poop-laundry in Cambodia

When you’re traveling full-time, you can’t do your own laundry. So, we often hand in our laundry to some locals in exchange for a bit of money

And at this point of our trip, we were staying in a hostel in Cambodia where they recommended us to go and give our laundry to the family living across the street. We gave the family $5 and they did all of our laundry – nice deal!

The next morning, Glenn went to pick it up. We were packing our backpacks because we were heading to a new destination in Cambodia. So, we had to catch the bus and were therefore in a bit of a hurry.

We started packing our “fresh” clothes when suddenly Glenn saw a big brown stain on his toiletry bag. He looked confused – What could this be?

I told him to smell it.

(All right, I know it’s really mean to tell someone to smell a brown stain, but it might as well have been mud?! There was only one way to find out…)

So Glenn smelled it. And then he gagged.

It was poop. Fresh sh*t. From a human.

We looked around to detect the poop source and saw that the plastic, which Glenn had gotten the laundry back in, had a big piece of poop on it. He had put the fresh pack of laundry on the bed – on top of his toiletry bag, which explains how the poop ended up there. So, somehow the family across the street had put our clean bag of laundry onto a poop.

We quickly learned that there were small poop stains on several pieces of Glenn’s clothes.

It was really disgusting… but somehow I couldn’t stop laughing when I learned that it was only on his stuff and not on mine (I know, I can be quite the mean fiance). Glenn on the other hand, he did not think it was funny at all – he was so pissed off!

We didn’t go back to the little family to complain because they were living in a small shed, and you could see that $5 meant a lot to their economy. Their small children were running around naked, so we assumed that it was their poop.