Can washing and drying really be the stuff of lasting travel memories?
Every day at just around noon, the little budget resort in Thailand's jungle-covered hills above Ko Samui's Lamai Beach fell silent in tropical torpor. An unforgiving, white-hot sun turned the corrugated iron rooftops of the resort's wooden huts into barbecue grills as guests fled to their porch hammocks to read or snooze off lunch. Everybody except me. The sizzle of midday is my cue to dig deep into the pocket of my suitcase to fetch the ten-foot length of shocking pink plastic twine that I picked up for about 25 cents at some street market in the Chinese countryside.
With practiced eye, I sized up my hut's balcony, carefully noting the position of the sun's rays, structural posts, and—most important—conveniently protruding nails. A couple of knots later, I was all set. I filled the sink and tore the top off a small cellophane packet of soap powder with Hindi lettering on the label.
The flowery smelling bubbles floating up from the bowl transported me back to another trip and another place—Rajasthan, where I'd traveled in 2006 (and where, for a couple of rupees, I'd bought some single-use packets of detergent from a roadside-stall vendor).
Ahhh. Every time I travel, there comes a moment when the stress of planning, of anticipation, logistics, timetables, and anxieties lifts, and I'm flooded with relief and a great sense of joy: Yes, I am really on the road.
For some reason, that warm, delicious Ahhh almost always happens when I am in the hot sun, wringing the last drips from some freshly washed T-shirt.
Laundry may well be one of the least romantic things—at least the laundry I do at home or send out to the cleaners—in my day-to-day life. But there's something about travel that turns the humdrum chore of keeping my clothes clean into an act of pure pleasure.
I remember, many years ago, being moved almost to tears after opening the tissue-wrapped package I'd sent off to housekeeping at a hotel in Mexico City. Inside was my favorite old summer dress. It had been one step from the Goodwill pile—the white had turned grayish and the skirt had the telltale mango-colored curry stains of a winter spent in Trinidad.
But when the dress came back, those curry spots were gone, the fabric had been restored to a blinding white, and a combination of starch plus some world-class hand ironing had delivered my dress back from the dead to its original condition. No, actually, it looked far more beautiful than when I'd laid eyes on it at the store.
I pressed the dress to my cheek; it smelled like sunshine and orange blossoms. I'd experienced much magic on this first trip to Mexico, but nothing quite as wonderful as the lesson taught me by the hotel laundry: that there were still places untouched by throwaway culture, places where the washing and pressing of clothing wasn't a mere chore but an art.
Since that first epiphany, I've made a point of having at least one encounter with laundry and laundering on every trip I take. Handing my dirty clothes to strangers, I seek clues and signs in the way they come back to me (in Bangkok, with little pieces of colored yarn attached to the seams, to distinguish my ratty cargo pants from the ratty cargo pants of every other backpacker on Khao San Road, I suppose). A button that disappears from my shirt at the hotel laundry in Shanghai appears, in a slightly mismatched reincarnation, years later, when my shirt pays a visit to a laundry in rural Japan.
Some friends of mine, recently back from a trip to India, experienced what must be the traveler's Laundry Holy Grail. A little while after surrendering a pile of dirty clothes to their guesthouse staff in Varanasi, they spotted their shorts and T-shirts spread out along the Ganges, being scrubbed and slapped by Varanasi's world-famous legion of dhobi wallahs, the local washerwomen and -men.
In Venice, I wandered away from the guidebook route and took many, many photos of old flowered tablecloths and embroidered pillowcases sagging from the windows of crumbling houses. The presence of hanging laundry, just about anywhere in the world, signals that you've left the manicured tourist zone and entered "real life." It gave me even more of a thrill to think that, dangling from a hanger outside the window of my tiny guesthouse, my socks had become part of the Venice laundryscape, too.
You know you're really traveling when you run out of underwear. I remember one bright morning, in Tonga, eating breakfast while watching my newly washed sarongs on the line flapping furiously in the breeze. I'd been away from home for weeks by then, and I didn't know when I'd return; my laundry was proof of how far I'd come, and how far I'd yet to go.
My fresh, clean clothes strained on their tether, as though aching to sail away on the warm South Pacific trade winds. And, I realized, so was I.