Travel Tales Collection, Toilet Stories, No. 8, March 2015, is part of Michael Brein's Collections travel tales series. It contains some of the best travel stories from Michael's huge collection of travel tales. These are stories that he has gathered in interviews with nearly 1,750 world travelers and adventurers during his four decades of travel, in which he visited more than 125 countries throughout the world.

Travel Tales Collections are groups of very interesting similar travel stories on a variety of very specific travel subjects, themes, or countries. Topics include close calls, great escapes, pickpocketing, scams, safety, and security in travel. Eventually, several hundred collections, on all sorts of specific travel subjects, themes, and countries, will be available.

In the previous issue, Travel Tales Collections, No. 7, Feb 2015, I included a selection of food and drink experiences that you can have in your travels. Therefore, it is only fitting, after covering food and drink travel stories, that we now turn our attention to what inevitably comes next: namely, the subject of toilets in travel. After all, toilet experiences are an unfortunate yet essential aspect of living that, like it or not, we all must come to terms with, whether on the home front or in strange exotic foreign lands.

The necessity of dealing with toilets, where to find them; what to do about them; and how to use them even, elicits from many travelers nothing less than abject terror. They are often beset with culture shock issues almost at every turn, especially in third-world countries.

Thus when nature calls, and you have barely a clue as to what to do about it or where to go...well, for many it is horribly anxiety-provoking, and for others nothing less than debilitating.