Backpacker Laundry: Doing Laundry on the Road

The daughters demonstrate that travel can be sweaty work

I am in a small, 4x4 foot, room.

An overhead fluorescent light flickers every now and then, emitting a harsh glare that would hurt my eyes even if it were constant. That the room constantly flicks from a murky, half-lit state to agonizingly bright is enough to make my head throb.

It is cold, and damp, and spare. And I am dressed only in my t-shirt and flip flops (not a great look).

You might guess I am in a torture chamber, or some kind of German micro rave.

But I am actually in the bathroom at Uncle Tan’s B&B. I am trying to do laundry in Borneo.

You see, I only brought two shirts to Borneo, and I have been sweating like it is an Olympic sport.

I need to clean a shirt. And there is no outside laundry to be had here.

So, I must do a backpacker's load of laundry. It is kind of like taking a shower, only with your clothes still on. So, I leave my t-shirt on (although I have turned it inside out), step into the harsh environment of our bathroom, and turn on the water.

Cold is the only available option.

So I stand there, shivering under the cold water in my t-shirt. I grab the bar of soap and start scrubbing. I just do what comes naturally. The parts of your body that need the most scrubbing when you take a shower correspond quite exactly with the parts of your shirt that need the most attention when doing shower-laundry.

Some will tell you that the best way to do on-the-fly laundry is to just wash your clothes in the sink. And this will work for light duty jobs. But this t-shirt is hammered. It is gross. It should be officially registered as a biological weapon. Letting it sit in a sink of soapy water, and agitating it a bit will simply not get the job done.

So I stand there in the shower, and my shivering adds vigor to my scrubbing motions.

Once my shirt is covered in a fine lather, I start the rinsing process. This will require significant amounts of time under the icy spray. But you gotta do what you gotta do.

So I do it. I let the cold water pound my chest and back. Shoulders. Armpits. Neck. I make sure I rinse all the soap out of the shirt.

Then the dry cycle: take off the shirt, wring as much water as you can out of it, hang it somewhere that it is unlikely to get rained on.

The next day the shirt is clean, dry, and smells great.

Another day, another obstacle overcome. Because travel.