Bali Hash House Harriers 2

“What Kind of Stool Am I?”

Many questions posed themselves in bikini bottoms only…sorry, I’ll start that sentence again. The mind tends to wander at this age. Many questions arose both on the way to the Hash last Saturday and also when we got to the run site. For example: I’ve been a semi-retired spoons player since I left high school and my government hasn’t given me a penny, why?. It’s outrageous, I’m a national treasure. Just kidding, the arisen questions were more like this: Why are we having a Hash from the Mambal swimming pool car park yet again? Is it, in fact, the Mambal swimming pool car park? There is another one closer to the swimming pool and it’s not full of weird old junk and stuff like the one we use. The “second car park” from where we hashed is a friggin’ huge area; how many Mambal swimmers can they be expecting with two car parks? My mate Damien just saw a UFO over Pettitingat, do you know what it is? Why hasn’t the Duke of Edinburgh been arrested? (some more very good questions).

What an eccentric old slice of “Baliana” car park 2 is. I decided to have a bit of a fossick among all the old junk. There’s all kinds of crap in there under the rusting roof adjacent the beer truck. An old motorbike with a Chinese brand name and a sidecar labouriosly added, a small truck cut in half near a hole full of water, a thriving coral reef (ok, not the latter) rusty tools and knives, and inexplicably, in a stack of moldy old local newspapers under some termite eaten bamboo lengths were a couple of decade-old editions of English speaking supermarket tabloids interspersed in the rotting pile. These had headlines like “He Saved Me From Rape, Then Died in a Tumble Dryer” and “Aliens Cured My Bad Leg” or something. How did this stuff get in there? I’ve never even seen a “News of the World’’ or a “Melbourne Truth” for sale here. The piece de resistance was a finely crafted “stool”, I think: a piece of round flattened metal attached with screws to a length of palm tree trunk at about “stool” height, if you know what I mean. It’s not that I don’t like the place, it’s interesting, it’s big, but I just don’t get it – what is it supposed to be?

Let’s consign these Mysteries of the East to their proper place i.e. the “you’ll-never-know” dept. and get on with the run. This one definitely had its moments, and here are some of them: the view of the river, stones, bamboo stands and gorge from the traffic bridge not long after the on out definitely makes the grade. The second bamboo bridge was a feat of engineering and aesthetics in itself not to mention the view which was also quite dramatic with a great scenic valley-scape and river rolling along at a lazy dry season clip, a mere promise of its unseen might. The imposing roadside structure that looked like a smallish bamboo cathedral was also eyebrow raising, especially after asking an attendant what it was and being told it was a “rumah bamboo” (well, thank you). I could have done with something more specific, but there was no point in the guy wasting his time with a sweaty, gasping, piss tank Hasher anyway in retrospect. I wasn’t about to order four of them for my hotel in Abu Dhabi, whatever they were.

By the time we were on the on-in we’d seen quite a variety of scenery and bamboo “erections” in both man-made and natural states, so to speak - there’s a shitload (communist measurement, like “kilo”) of it growing at impressive heights and sizes all along the wide waterway that makes up a substantial part of this run and it’s pleasant enough to behold. So, thanks to hares Dancing Muddy and Queen Man for an interesting and attractive course with not a lot of asphalt or garbage (those Hash banes), easy-to-follow paper and the absorbing curios of car park 2.

Speaking of absorbing curios, the circle was full of them: virgins, visitors, all-singing Grand Masters, all-Dancing Queens. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, it was like a Stealer’s Wheel song. Some poor unfortunate from the Hamersley Hash in Perth was comprehensively shriven/shriveled/shrived by the biumverate (So? there’s a “triumvirate”, there must be one – nya nya, nya nya nya, got my hands over my ears my ears) of Their Royal Anuses, Hash Master Labia and the G.M. Himself, for no apparent reason. And speaking of royalty and no apparent reasons, His Arse Holiness the Religious Advisor, De Queen, down downed half the Hash for not having on exactly the same hash tee shirt as he happened to be sporting, pretty thin grounds for a charge but all in a good cause (let me know if you think of it).

The following is a Jangle Balls song performed with Mudflaps as Harriet The Hasher. If it’s not actually there on your email for reasons of good taste on the Secretary and Hare Raiser’s behalf, there’s a good chance you’ll find it on the Bali Hash House Harrier’s TWO!! Website under Hash Trash.

Here is this week's song: "Harriet The hasher"

On on
J.B.