Bali Hash House Harriers 2

“I’m Not Lost, I Just Don’t Know Where I Am.”

I don’t know how my traitorous faculties conspired last week to so completely miss the split which was about the size of Luciano Pavarotti in his day, i.e. when he was alive, and spray painted in Arctic white on a green grassy flat area unobscured by ground scrub or bush (the sign, not the giant dead Three Tenor). If this sign had been alive it would have leapt at me and viciously bit me on the arse like a rabid dog it was so ridiculously noticeable when I did find it eventually. I must have been out to lunch, away with the pixies, dancing with wolves, not getting the memo, traveling with Frodo etc. etc. In fact I just stood there scratching my head (yes, head) after tracking it down saying over and over to myself “How the fuck did you miss that, self, you idiot?” As if I hadn’t wasted enough time already.

Down into a gulley through strewn garbage on either side of me on the periphery of the grassed area by a potholed asphalt road, I obediently followed the short paper. I’ve gotta say (sampah aside) this was the best part of the run. I had just backtracked through a scruffy looking section of kampong with black moss stained cement walls, hairless dogs barking maniacally at me and a four-year-old boy saying something about “jiggy jiggy” (how quaint) giggling enthusiastically while asking for money with an extended hand, and it was a relief to find said gulley opening up into rich green gold paddys bordered by palm lines and groves, the soothing sound of trickling water and a colorfully cloudy sunset on the horizon above large trees exploding with leaves in nuclear mushroom formations.

Yes Indeedy, this run had its moments and it wasn’t long before it was having another one, specifically the one on which I got hopelessly and bewilderingly not exactly lost but in pretty close proximity to extremely geographically befuddled, pretty hard to tell the difference at that point. Once again I found myself poised over some aerosoled hieroglyphics, scratching my (yes) head, but for a completely different reason. This time I was desperately attempting to decipher what the fuck they were trying to tell me. There was an arrow curving backward with “short, on in” (I think it was, by this time it had been trampled by two hundred odd Hash shoes and was hard to read) sprayed next to it, arrows pointing ahead with “L + S” adjacent them and the same thing behind the curving arrow, paper all over the shop as if it had been the scene of the announcement of the winner of “American Idol”. “Ah shit”, I thought, “I’ll just go with the L and S for now, after all, that’s how it normally goes”. Big mistake, I started to notice a certain familiarity to elements of the scenery that I was fairly sure I had seen on the way out. “But wait! Didn’t Labia mention that both long and short came back in the way they went out?” I reasoned with myself. “No stupid not yet, you’re on the mid-stages of the long and short going backwards, just go back to the weird arrows and figure it out if you want to do the short.” “No, I’m already running around in circles, arsehole, thanks to you”. I was really getting tired of the sound of me arguing with myself upstairs (or was it out loud) as I’m sure are you too, gentle reader. Suffice to say I made it out alive by a fairly circuitous route, returning a time or two to the scene of the spray painted crime and applying some rigorous forensic hashing techniques on all fours like a Las Vegas Crime Lab cast member without the flashlight and magnifying glass. At least I supplied a few laughs to the locals, a sweaty and angry looking buleh muttering to himself with the occasional loudly delivered address to The Saviour, peppered with certain obscenities.

Back at the Goa Gajah car park there were a few fellow travelers that had had similar experiences with the section that had bamboozled me beyond bamboo (the “second split”), but as I suspected and embarrassingly, nobody had missed the “main split”. Cane Rat had managed to injure a leg and displayed the bloodied evidence, at least I’d managed to stay upright. Thus far, that is, the circle hadn’t started yet then. It did, and rightly Hares Dick Doc and Bongo were praised for their good work. It was a bloody fine effort and it’s not their fault that I sometimes have the attention span of a sofa; that is when it’s not that of a gnat inhabiting the sofa.

An Australian gentleman with the spectacularly exotic name of “Bob” was christened “Suck it up Bob” for pulling off the amazing quinella of getting completely lost on his last Hash with us and paying a local motorcyclist the princely sum of one hundred Australian dollars for a ride back to his hotel. Talk about ruining the local ecology. Dancing Queen, taking his R.A. duties in an admirably more serious manner than he perhaps should, appeared this week resplendent in what was, I’m certain, a genuine ermine robe and a bejeweled crown of equally unquestionable provenance. He also wielded a majestic golden hook (more Little Bo Peep than Faerie Queen possibly, but what the hell, he was already dressed like one anyway) with which he persuaded circle members to take their places center stage. The fun and games continued with Jangle Balls, Dung Beatles tunes and a reading of some real courtroom exchanges e.g. “On how many dead people have you conducted post mortem investigations?” “All of them, the live ones put up too much of a fight.” Hardy har, hody ho, bowel movements were almost achieved and bladders wee hard pressed.

Wee wee Benton, a Scottish Hasher from days of well and truly yore put in an appearance this week after a short absence of 20 years or so and it was good to see him again, though he didn’t have a doctor’s note, or a doctor.

We all look forward to next week’s Bastille Day run by Allez Allez and my money’s on all the Frogs hopping it early because they just don’t drink beer (not that there’s anything wrong with that), which means more for us and another reason to go.

On on,
J.B