I hate hand-washing our clothes. Like, passionately hate it. I think it’s partly due to the fact that we lived about a block from a Mr. Bubbles when we were in Taiwan. That meant all I had to do was load up all ten bags of laundry on the scooter, take it for a 30 second jaunt down the street, and then pick it up all folded and smelling like flowers a few hours later. The best part? Mr. Bubbles was really affordable. And it didn’t leave our clothes feeling like cardboard (like when washing our clothes at home). So yea, we loved Mr. Bubbles.
But then we cycled through Vietnam. And we only had two pairs of cycling shorts each. And they got really smelly, really quickly. Every night we would find ourselves in a grungy hotel, trying to clean and stop the sink so we could ‘wash’ our clothes for the next day. But let’s be honest: ‘washing’ for us really meant swirling the spandex around in the sink for a few moments until the water turned brown and the clothes smelled tolerable. This kind of worked, but it certainly wasn’t ideal.
After Vietnam we headed to Costa Rica and Panama. Of course, we would wait to even think about doing laundry until everything we owned was beyond dirty. And then we would be forced with the obnoxious task of trying to hand-wash our clothes in the bathtub and hang them all out to dry before we had to re-stuff them into our backpacks. But the alternative was to track down a Laundromat (seemingly impossible) or have the hotel do one small load for a hefty $25 fee. And they didn’t even fold it.