Bali Hash House Harriers 2

“Dead Set”

We took the scenic route to the Kuburan Cina last Saturday; in other words we drove right past a perfectly visible red printed sign at the turnoff, babbling and bullshitting, tackling topics as diverse as religion, politics, airport popularity and booger flicking, or something like that. The adults in the front seats changing the course of world events, sock purchasing and toenail clipping methods or something along those lines, and the teenager in the back consulting his phone on equally in-depth issues with comparable attention to detail. All of a sardine Petang was upon us, it is rarely a good thing, having Petang upon you. If they changed the name for example to Poontang it wouldn’t seem half so remote and distant - a lot more familiar and comforting. As it was, we were five k out of our way and dumbstruck as to what could possibly have caused our concentration to lapse to the point of missing the sign. We probably would have missed the 3rd World War.

Finally at the Kuburan Cina, which is a pretty elaborate and well-tended one as far as Kuburan Cinas go, I wandered around checking out the various tombs and gravesites. All the hallmarks you would expect to find were there: pagoda shaped tiled rooves, colourfully painted Chinese friezes of old blokes with long robes and beards, women with funny hats etc. standing around, and set off by ideograms aplenty. Some of the names on the graves were astonishingly exotic. The one we parked in front of was the resting place of one The Tiok Sun, which sounded to me vaguely like an Ernest Hemingway novel or short story title: “The Tiok Sun Also Rises”; let’s hope not, at least not in his present condition. What I did not expect to find were graves containing people with names such as Agung Raka or Ketut, but there was a well-populated gravesite smack in the middle of it all with such names buried along with souls of decidedly Middle Kingdom sounding ethnicity. There were at least six wildly varying names on this gravestone. “How the hell does that work?” I muttered to myself. “Well, I hope they’re all getting along down there”; yet another mystery of the East.

Labia mustered the troops and Hair (sorry, couldn’t resist it) Hare Serial Offender covered his dome with the day’s trail paper (perhaps he, considerately, didn’t wish to dazzle us with the sun’s harsh reflection) and proceeded anyway to “enlighten” (har) us about the impending run. It would be a six km short and a ten km long. I prudently chose the short, for something completely different, and we were off. We found ourselves in quite thick tropical scrub at the beginning of the run and there were some very enjoyably isolated and even canopy darkened areas which loaned a sense of movie or documentary-like adventure to the trail. It was almost as if you expected to run into either Harrison Ford and his leather jacket or Richard Attenborough and his safari suit. “Hi there Indie, Hello Dickie old bean!” I thought bubbled.

As it turned out, the Serial One acquitted himself extremely well on this run despite a certain propensity seemingly to not quite make up his mind whether to send us off through the padddys or send us back into the jungle or onto the asphalt or not. There were a couple of occasions on which paper just petered out to nothing and we picked it up elsewhere (quite elsewhere), with no hint whatsoever of a check or a back. At one point a certain Harriet who will under no circumcisions at all, ever, be named (Spank My Monkey) and there’s nothing you can say to make me reveal her identity, was moved to remark, “I should have brought my own bloody paper”. Never mind, this made for an exciting bit of unpredictability. It was all round a damn fine event and a well-chosen site from which, as far as I know, we haven’t run for two or more years. The short course was skenic and pictureskew and had just enough ups and downs to provide a bit of a challenge, a firmly-in-the-Goldilocks-Zone short in the best of possible ways, and S.M.M. agrees with me wholeheartedly, don’t worry. Apparently, the long was something more of a challenge if the degree of darkness in which many of the older hands returned was any indication, but as Sgt. Schulz in “Hogan’s Heroes” used to say “I know notheeeng” about this...

Circles and rumours of circles began to circulate. Would this week’s circle be as much of a disaster as the last one at Keliki? Some thought not as there was an actual piece of ground on which to hold the circle this time. Others were of the opinion that it hadn’t been so bad the week before anyway, the chaos of obtrusive traffic making it more interesting. It was a circular argument. We were on tenterhooks (I have no idea what a tenterhook is, but we were on them, I could feel one). I searched the crowd: Wooden Eye, Colonel Bloodnok, how bad could it be? Perhaps an eisteddfod was in the works, I could almost smell lanolin.

As it turned out it was a little of both as the Welsh got busy. Wooden Eye was in fine form and the Colonel gave us “Too Much Wanking Makes You Blind” plus the Wooden Eye Song: “Wooden Eye you’ve been at the sheep again” by way of introducing his fellow shepherd. I only wish I could remember what W.E. got up to but it’s just too hard when you are just about shitting your dungarees laughing to try and commit anything to an already Alzheimer’s-affected synaptic system in a stew of Bali Hai. There was a slightly somber note as we remembered the sadly passed Leeky Dick, another singing Taffy, and his bereaved Missus shed a tear, but mostly the hilarity continued unabated as I’m sure L.D. would have preferred it to. Jangle Balls told us how old he is and finally revealed the hidden meaning of “Turning Japanese” by the Vapours (wanking), the crowd was “relieved” to know.

Summary: great run, great circle. Only one question still remained to be posed: why were all these Chinese and Balinese orang buried here together? One highly plausible answer: they are dead.

On on
JB