Chinese Laundry

After our return to the ship, I run into a new problem. I’m out of clothes. Clean clothes. Aside from the lingerie and socks which can be easily laundered in the sink, I have no clean pants or shirts for the next day. Tomorrow we’ll be visiting the spectacular temples of Abu Simbel—a major highlight of the trip—and I cannot go to this marvellous site looking any less than my best. 

I have laundry soap and a clothesline in my luggage, but had planned on having two working legs and arms for laundry day. I could always resort to the laundry service aboard our ship but it would take too long to get the clothes back. 

So, laundry day it is. Undaunted, I get started. Stationed at the closet, I gather the clothes and toss them across the hallway into a pile on the floor outside the bathroom. That’s the easy part. Then, normally, I could have shoved the clothes along the floor with one of the crutches. Unfortunately, since the entrance to the bathroom includes a step up, this method won’t work. Standing by the pile, on one leg, leaning on the wall for support, I use the crutches like giant chopsticks, picking up clothes, swinging them through the doorway, over the step, and dropping them on the bathroom floor. 

With the clothes heaped in front of the bathtub, I fill the tub with water, add the detergent, then chopstick the clothes into the tub. At this point, laziness takes over. Instead of awkwardly kneeling on the floor and using my tired arms to agitate the clothes into cleanliness, I decide to use my state-of-the-art manual spinner-rotator. After ensuring that the tip is clean, I jab a crutch into the tub and proceed to spin, swish, stir, and rotate the clothes with it, much like a witch in front of her cauldron, cooking lizard soup.  

When the soup is ready and the clothes are clean, I drain the tub, refill it with water and restart the crutch for the rinse cycle. I drain the tub one more time, and secure the clothesline, with its cute little suction cups, to the walls across the length of the tub. I wring the water out of each piece of clothing and hang it on the clothesline. 

These are mighty strong suction cups; I’ve got two pairs of pants and three shirts on the line, and it’s holding up nicely. Satisfied with my accomplishment and knowing that I’ll have a clean and dry outfit in the morning, I retire for the night, snug as a bug in a rug in my large comfy bed.

The gun shots wake me up at 2:51 A.M.