Without a car it took some efforts to make it to the hash, racing a motorbike into to town after work to catch the songthaew. Almost my first experience on the sardine can songthaew – with Brownfinger and Pigshit hanging off the back, for the most part we were too busy focusing on breathing regularly for conversation. With a few inches view past Brownies ass, I was trying to figure out which way we were going, where we were going in fact. Impossible… I stumbled out of the back completely disoriented, next to an unfamiliar shelter.
With plenty of time, Piggy gave his hare brief – he was so organised he finished it well before we were supposed to be running, but what the hell, he set us off anyway. Around the corner on a trail, and finally I figured out where we were. Up a steep hill that my car has struggled on before, so no surprise I watched as Brownfinger stretched out ahead. I was feeling lazy, maybe I’d save something for the end?
We broke off to the right, and twisted and turned. Where the hell were we? We kept going left, but the trail was heading right? Why didn’t I recognise anything? Surely these weren’t virgin trails… We were in some farmers plantation climbing steeply up, and then running steeply down. The pack was kept together with some good checks that had us all over the place. He’d warned us about barbed wire – sure it was worse than the motorbike scene from The Great Escape – no way to jump over, just scramble through it – he’d marked it all? perhaps he’d missed a bit. Brownie squealed from up ahead. I was in a daze, braindead from end of semester?
We got to the latest single player barbed wire houdini effort. Single file led to a pile up. Brownie, Graven and Junglicious were clear free ahead while the rest of us scrambled through. When we got clear we turned left. From there on the trail was straightforward. Looking at the track I’m amazed we were only half way through!!! The front 3 were clean away and had no intention of kicking out checks (to be fair you could see the paper after a couple of steps)… I picked off a couple of runners and was running / walking along with Poo and Knockout. When we headed back towards the trail that we’d set out on I was horrified that we might end up going back over another frigging hill to get back. Fortunately the hare went out and corrected the trail and the first check was replaced with “On In”.
Piggy was dutifully punished for his misdeeds. By the time we got to the on on he was still achieving tasks like ‘standing’ and ‘swaying’. Nice job sir!