The 11th of the 11th of the 12th… Belly Dancer was in a good mood. After an early morning meet up to rescue a stranded Bangkok hasher, he set off to lay the trail with Anything. In the evening at 11 seconds after 11 minutes after 9pm, he was particularly happy – Belly being a big fan of palindromic time:- 21:11:11 11/11/12
But back to the run – what would he have in store…? Yellow paper and red paper? More confusion – this time if we got to a white cross check, it wasn’t really a white cross check, it was actually a Wimp/Rambo split. Conventionally in Chiang Mai we mark with a clear W/R, and cross checks mean the correct trail is one of 3 options. No wonder we need to pay attention to the hare brief!
We set off up the hill and pretty soon came across strips of white paper. At a circle check Skiddy found trail way down the hill to the left, while Can’t Stop Cumming was way down the hill to the right. Good efforts from her to get back with the pack. At the bottom of the steep bank we climbed back up the other side, back to where we would have got to if we’d have just carried on up the perfectly pleasant trail. WTF? Scrambling over the bank of the mountain there was actually another trail here – white strips of paper??? Who else would be so stupid as to set a trail here? Ah yes… Belly Dancer did…
Back on the ridge it was HRA leading the way and we descended to another almost invisible circle check, hiding in plain site at the edge of a field. Home advantage – I’d been here many times, so ran off to the road and found the infamous cross check / wimp rambo split. I ran off to the right with Poo, shouting for Junglicious to join us on the Rambo trail. Confusion reigned but eventually almost all the hashers followed me – Skid Mark being the exception. He had to check left, and ended up doing the wimp trail on his own. As we ran along Poo was asking ‘Are you sure this is a good idea? Belly Dancer? Rambo trail?’
I burst ahead to get the choice at the next check and left Poo to do the dummy check. Hah – it was a long way to paper there, but eventually I was on, and now it was a rerun of Just Cumming’s run from a month back. Nice – I enjoyed it back then, and breezed through a few checks again today – until we hit the blasted tarmac. No more checks, just miles of grueling tarmac. Foot Loose from Bangkok picked me off, and I started going backwards.
Finally back at the A. Better than many of BD’s runs, but not his best ever!