Although this bathroom may strike you as primitive, it was very, very clean. The stalls are only about waist high, and door-less. With the combination of no roof, one gets the unmistakable feeling that anyone walking by outside can simply peek over the wall and take a glimpse of you doing your business. The way this works is to straddle the trench and squat. Simple and effective. I don't mind squatting anymore.
We stopped at this bathroom on our drive from Dali to Lijiong. It was at the top of a mountain, overlooking a very scenic spot. Perhaps you can tell from the pic that there were no English signs or pictures depicting which was the women's side and which was the men's. I'd learned the characters for both in my Chinese class, but well, they hadn't quite stuck in my mind like they should have. I was fairly certain which was which, but not certain enough to boldly walk into the one that I thought was women's. I just sort of wandered-drifted towards the one I suspected to be women's and looked back at the bathroom attendant, hoping she'd point me in the right directions. She did :)Speaking of the attendant, there was a lone woman sitting outside by the bathroom. We suspect her job was to make sure people didn't come and help themselves to the water intended for handwashing. This was a rural area, and somewhat arid. Water is a valuable commodity, and she's there to make sure people don't steal it. I wanted to take her picture, but I felt silly enough as she watched me photograph the bathroom.
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