As someone who regularly drives between Savannah, Georgia, and Northern Vermont, I’ve become attuned to the places along the way where I can pull off the road, stretch my legs, and hit the head. Fancy rest areas have popped up along the interstates—when you first enter South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia—as well as along the New Jersey Turnpike, and even parts of Interstate 87 in upstate New York. But with a plan to drive nearly 4,000 kilometers in New Zealand, would I find public accommodations, or would we be seasoning the manuka honey?
While many people think of New Zealand as the land of the kiwi and the home of the Māori, after four weeks of exhaustive research I can also say that they host plentiful and clean toilets throughout the country. Especially on the South Island, wherever we went, we never seemed to be more than a half hour away from the next toilet. Perhaps the most remote toilet we encountered was at the Blue Pools Carpark along the Makarora River as we drove from Wanaka to Franz Joseph, just in time to deal with the morning coffee intake.
One of the big drivers for this surfeit of public facilities is an important one to New Zealand: tourism. Drawn by its welcoming people, awesome natural beauty, and a couple of movies, New Zealand is awash in foreign visitors. Large numbers of those visitors rent campervans to see the sights on their own time schedule, choosing to “freedom camp” instead of booking accommodations at hostels or hotels. But being self-contained isn’t without responsibility, and disposing of waste—blackwater—is a big issue. It’s been such a big issue as to prompt many communities—Queenstown is one—to prohibit freedom camping within their city limits. This in part was the result of campers distributing the freedom of their experience not only to camping, but to pooping, resulting in less-than-savory outcomes.
That led to regulations on freedom campers, including the chemical toilets used, as well as where they could legally dispose of their waste. Now, not only can campers dispose of their blackwater—which is actually blue, thanks to chemical conversion—in proper campgrounds, but there are hundreds of public disposal sites located around the country.
As for those of us who rented a Mazda Demeo—which has room for your ass and a gallon of gas, but no chemical toilet—we found that the proliferation of clean public toilets was emboldening: Another outstanding Long Black coffee? Don’t mind if I do! We were able to find toilets (most of them with astonishing views) in almost every stunning vista. And after the exhilarating drives, we needed them.
Not only could we find clean toilets, we could also find toilets with funky designs. This was true on the North Island, in the Bay of Islands region. There you will find
Kawakawa's Hundertwasser toilets, which are known as destination toilets: people go out of their way to hold their full bladders until they reach this artistic site. We didn’t make it there, but we were treated to some funky designs in Paihia.
If you think it’s silly to make a big deal out of an abundance of clean public toilets, take a moment to read a recent article in the New York Times by Lisa Goodridge, called “New Yorkers Deserve More Public Restrooms.” The artwork that accompanies the piece shows a dog merrily peeing on a tree while a human suffers, cross-legged. And if you’re one of these “If you want a toilet you should earn it” people, I hope your bladder never bursts, I hope you age without ever experiencing the misery of getting up in the night, I hope you don’t decide to dehydrate yourself to the point of kidney stones. I don’t know what the right mix of public toilets is in a place like New York, but I know that trying to pee in any major American city is more difficult than securing a business loan for a food truck—and I’m a white dude with money.
When you go to New Zealand and then you gotta go, you will experience this. Kiwis aren’t socialists, either, and there are plenty of them who will moan about those cool, free toilets. But they still have them, because it’s smart: it’s smart to make sure visitors have excellent services; it’s smart to care for the environment that gives us all we have; and it’s smart to make sure human beings have basic needs addressed.
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