One thing I will say, Seaman Soars always puts plenty of effort into setting a run, and today was no different. Nonetheless, he was given plenty of grief as the hashers arrived. The friendly welcome party of waving Thai soldiers didn’t quite make up for the lack of A bucket sign – plus of course Semen Soars should have stopped the rain! Fortunately the rain did stop and we were set off with the instruction that it was A->B.
And so we were off into familiar ground at the end of Huay Tung Thao lake. Pretty much everyone has run here, and pretty much everyone has scouted to find out where the army base is and where not to go. So when the first circle came up, nobody really wanted to check right, as surely that didn’t go anywhere we wouldn’t get shot at? But right it was, and the army base loomed. At this point the army escort at the start began to make more sense – and when the army patrol fishing on the reservoir simply waved and smiled, rather than shooting us, things were looking up. Fresh trails that I certainly haven’t hashed before.
And there were some great trails – so much that even Kwazi lifted his demeanor and enjoyed it. After the reservoir Chuck Wao inadvertently ‘short cutted’ by finding some trail a bit ahead and missing a few hundred metres of trail. HRA set off in pursuit and managed to follow along around 100m behind Chuck Wao – which meant that as Chuck Wao got every check right, HRA was in the right position to kick it out behind him, so as Mr. Poo, Sloppy Rod and I trundled along another 100m back, it turned into a straight run. (With it being an A->B run it was pretty much a straight line through the army camp).
The route gave us some interesting insight into the army training facilities, including a run through an assault course. HRA couldn’t resist the monkey bars! The trail was doing well until for some strange reason the hare sent us along nearly 2km of bitumen to a randomly chosen place for the songthaew to wait for us. We overruled the hare and took the songthaew back to save the stragglers from needing to suffer the bitumen. Afterall, due to the ‘national holiday’ and being an army camp, there was no beer waiting for us in the truck! Around 7-7.5km made it a good test, and a fun run in an area I don’t know if we will run again for a while.
The friendly army escort took us back to the cars, but didn’t stay for the circle. Colonel Cornhole somehow lost his keys – he left them with the hare, who left them with Ulrich, who managed to drop them somewhere along the way – fortunately Dyke Converter saved the day – and it was splashed repeatedly through the circle. My overall verdict is a good run, some good trails, it just could have done with some more checks!