Outdoor Bathing Beauties

There was a time around 3000BC when all bathrooms were outside and communal, and before anyone ever thought of a bathroom, everyone bathed outside in a creek or a river. There was also a time much more recently when toilets were still relegated to the bottom of the garden. Indeed indoor plumbing is one of those innovations which separated the civilised world from the unsewered world. Now though, particularly anywhere tropical the height of indulgence is the outdoor shower or bathroom, from luxurious versions in resorts to more modest private versions which may be as simple and unassuming as a hose clipped to a tree trunk. I have a beach shower in Vanuatu just a few metres from a little reef-enclosed lagoon pool on a white-sand beach which is just a flexible pipe with a shower head screwed to the trunk of a pandanus palm. This was once shaded by fronds but now, after a couple of slightly cyclonic ‘weather events’ all that’s left is a bare trunk with the shower rose at the top but it works a treat when you want to wash the sand and salt from your body after a dip.

I think my first encounter with a semi enclosed outdoorsy bathroom was probably about 25 years ago at Tamanu on the Beach in Vanuatu. In its original form this was an offthe-grid, sophisticated but ultimately simple iteration of a beachside getaway with a great restaurant and a couple of coral-walled bungalows which are still there but with a few more upmarket neighbours. I still enjoy staying in the originals and get all nostalgic about the bathrooms which remain freshly whitewashed and simple with luxurious linens and soothing bath products with green leaves peeping over the walls… and a sense of being somewhere which could not exist in a city.