BINNEKRING BLOG

Kakpraat With Princess Caralot

Greetings one and all and welcome to the kakpraat corner! This is the place where we talk all things toilets and come together to try and make the thrones the best things around. I’ve been keeping an eye on the social medias lately and it’s so freaking fantastic to see so many of you engaging around something so central to the AfrikaBurn experience.

 

I’m here to talk you through some of the results of our 2018 experiment, share what we have learned and shed some light on what we have planned for next year.

But first things first. Let’s look at what y’all have had to say:

Michael Wilson of the fabulous Camp Metastofosis raised the issue of placement and suggested that we move the loo’s away from accommodation…

Michael, I hope you will be gratified to know that we are looking very closely at toilet placement for the 2019 event, and will be shaking things up a bit.

FACT: the toilets along 10ish Boulevard, at OCC and at 9ish and Blueprint
(the beautifully pimped loo’s thanks to the Ranger Love Crew) were hands down the most used toilets at the entire event. We were constantly maintaining them, moving new toilets into those areas as relief for the heavy use thereof, and ultimately had to close them down as they were filling up at such a rapid rate we couldn’t realistically keep up.

For our 2019 event, we’re looking at two things to address this:

1) Bulking up toilets in the areas where there is enough level ground to do so, and
2) We will be removing the toilets along 10ish boulevard. This does mean that people will need to walk a leeeeetle bit further to relieve themselves; but it will provide a welcome relief for all the camps along 10ish who were negatively affected by the presence of VERY full toilets directly in their front of house.

A couple of other people have also voiced concerns that there weren’t enough toilets…

Here’s the thing: there absolutely WERE enough toilets… but with us changing the Sound Zones around with the Great Switcheroo this year, we had no historic data around where the loos were needed, so we made a “best guess” scenario.

On the whole this worked, but as I say above there were some areas that were hit HARD and others that were completely underutilised (some of the expansion zone and the toilets at the end of deep 9.30). We did try mitigate this at the event by moving toilets around from low use to high use areas (you may have seen us rolling around in a forklift with a toilet on the tangs a couple of times) but now with a bit of experience under our belt we can more likely get it right first time in 2019.

That’s it for now – but stay tuned: I’ll be back soon with more kakpraat! (and hey, if you’d like to get in touch with me with suggestions about our toilets, hit me up! You can get me on [email protected])

psst: don’t forget that our new Thrones are totally open to being pimped, by you and your campmates – and if you’d like to see some inspiration, we highly recommend checking out the fabulous Pimp Your Loo group on Facebook.