25 Ways You Know You’ve Hit Hygiene Rock Bottom as a Traveller

We all let ourselves go a bit when we’re on the road. There’s no day job, and no real need to keep up those strict hygiene standards. You find yourself showering less, letting that five o’clock shadow grow out, and just generally don’t worry so much about what other people think. After all, you’re just out to chill and have a good time. Yet slowly but surely, all those little concessions build up, until eventually you wake up one day and realise you’ve hit rock bottom.

Here’s a few ways you can tell if you’ve truly stopped caring.

You know you’ve totally hit hygiene rock bottom when …

1. You wash your underwear one piece at a time, normally weeks apart.
2. You can’t tell if that smell is a dead animal, or your socks.
3. You really just can’t decide what’s more effort: finding a chemist, or just holding the diarrhoea in for a few more days. I mean, you’ve already come this far…
4. You discover that body odour actually plateaus after about two months.
5. You can’t decide whether to wash your hair, or just put on a hat.
6. You’ve discovered you’ll never need to wash your hands again if you just keep using your left hand for dirty things, right hand for clean things. Genius!
7. For years, you’ve quietly suspected your intestines have become a zoo for parasitic worms, but they haven’t done any harm so far, soooo…..
8. You just don’t touch the floor of your backpack any more. That’s no man’s land.
9. You can’t wear light colours because of the sweat, but you can’t wear anything too dark because of the dandruff. So, you pretty much just stick to a mix of grey, brown and olive.
10. The water you’re drinking looks clean, and that’s what matters, right?
11. You strongly suspect that mustard has been sitting in your beard for about a week.
12. You’ve given up trying to clean the mould off your drink bottle.
13. You know it’s time to wash your socks when they’re so hard and crusty they’re actually giving you blisters.
14. You realise you’re going to have to talk to people today … so it’s time to buy a toothbrush.
15. You don’t see anything wrong with weighing up which is cheaper: a haircut, or getting the machete sharpened.
16. You can’t understand why nobody else can read through the grime on your laptop screen.
17. You don’t know if it’s good vomit or bad vomit (hint: it’s always bad vomit, always).
18. You could go to a doctor, but you’ve only been sick for two weeks, so there’s still a chance you can just ride out whatever this is.
19. You forgot toilet paper, but luckily there’s a shower.
20. You spend months thinking your sight is getting worse. Then you discover you just need to clean your glasses. This seriously took me about two years to figure out.
21. You fall asleep with your half eaten dinner in your hands, then wake up the next morning and finish it for breakfast. Didn’t even have to get up.
22. You realise you forgot soap existed.
23. You have a festering wound. You momentarily consider pouring moonshine on it. It feels like it’s sterilised your guts, so why not?
24. You’re hungry, but luckily you find an old burrito in your backpack. You don’t know how it got there, how long it’s been there, or what that ominous looking filling was originally supposed to be. But whatever, it’s good enough.
25. You sleep with your feet hanging off the bed, simply so you won’t have to clean the black grime off them. Ever.