FRANKIE DeGROOT | News | CONTACT
A critical part of the Aussie caravan park experience is about to get a whole lot more personal with the recent release of newly-developed toilet paper that is so thin it can’t even be seen with the naked eye. Lani Miller, owner of the optimistically-named Betoota Holiday Resort has spent the last 8 years travelling the globe with nothing but a drive to source the thinnest bog roll, and a micrometer.
“Yeah, it took ages to find the perfect formula”, explained Lani “for a while I thought I had found the best source, a tiny family business in Lithuania.”
“They were making paper out of the web of the rare Dolomedes Plantarius spider which was stretched out using a series of tractors until it was just a couple of microns thick.”
However, after a meeting at the CSIRO’s Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication, Lani realised she could access even thinner paper; so thin it was completely invisible.
“I was like ‘so I need really thin paper’ and they were like ‘how thin?’ and I was like ‘it’s for caravan park toilet paper’. At first they weren’t sure if they could do anything that thin but they assembled a team of boffins and after 18 months they showed me something that apparently was really thin paper, even though I couldn’t see it. I was so excited, I knew the campers would love it as soon as I didn’t lay my eyes upon it”.
But camping enthusiast Ben Harrice isn’t convinced about the new toilet rolls, which cost over $600 each but only need replacing once every 4 years.
“I dunno mate” said Ben, as he used the bathroom sink to wash his hands much more thoroughly than usual.
“I mean, you expect to have really thin toilet paper at a caravan park, but it creeps me out that you can’t see or even feel it. Like, I told the lady at the desk that there was no toilet paper left but she says it’s this new stuff that you can’t even see. I hope she’s right, I just can’t get my head around it at the moment. I mean, how can you tell when the toilet paper has run out? I think I prefer the old bum tickets, this new stuff is just a bit too… tactile for me”.
