Bali Hash House Harriers 2

“Ole Man” (and) “River”

These are the two factors, culprits if you will, which after extensive investigation, Your Honors, we have found to be the underlying causes of last Saturday’s almost-debacle at the Australia Day run in Bonkasa. There were many other suspects, possibilities, macro-economic and micro-cosmic, geo-political hyphenated contributory blah blah blah, but as it turned out it wasn’t a terrorist or Putin-related event although we do have to thank the Russian President for looking exactly like Dobby the House Elf in Harry Potter.

Yes, scotch and soda darling, please. What? Oh, guilty parties, right. A source close to the Hares, in fact an actual Hare, you can’t get any closer than that, assures me that the setting of the run was completely under control up until the point at which the river ceased to cooperate. It rose several feet in the space of half an hour wiping out bamboo bridge crossings and rendering previously easy crossing points roiling and log spinning, surging and boulder rolling deadly. “Let me ask you a question” I interrogated him employing my most rapier sharp journalistic / logician mode. “If you are at a wedding and you hear ‘Here Comes The Bride’, is the first thing you think of “big, fat and wide”? No, that’s not what I asked him, I asked him a pointed “What happened then, then?”

The events he described sounded very much like scenes from “The Three Stooges Go to Mars” to me, but somehow out of all the confusion, frantic last minute alternative routes, substitute trails and thus some unforeseen cock-ups, the hares managed to give us a cohesive, wildly scenic and attractive, Boy’s-Own-Annual adventurous and mighty successful run. Everybody returned safely from this more-than- pleasing event except, that’s right, yours truly and three other unfortunates. Out of respect for their privacy, and for reasons of not wishing to cause them any (further) embarrassment these individuals of course will not be named: Horny Herring, Gudang and Balderdash. No, they will be named something else: Stan, Earl and Farquhar, for example and put in the BHHH2 (TWO!) witness relocation program.

Does anybody remember the title and first paragraph of this incisive report? I don’t. Oh yeah, that’s it, thanks, but there’s no need to be rude. My subject also informed me that an older local gent was spotted diligently gathering up paper very likely in the area in which it completely vanished for me and my erstwhile unlucky bastard pals. He also described exciting interludes in which he single handedly fought off nesting chickens with a stick that were attempting to get proprietorial with the Hash paper. Anything could have happened to contribute to our eventual state of abysmal and hopeless lostness, lostitude, lostity? I still think the old bloke collecting paper is the most likely suspect. Anyway, we were f….ng lost without a shred of paper to guide us.

Well, kind of, we knew in general where we were and provisionally how to get where we wanted to go. We spoke (at leeeeeength) to locals about the possible existence of a bridge or bridges to Bonkasa. But when we finally got to where we were directed, you couldn’t find a bridge with a Bridge Geiger Counter and we were confronted with a raging brown torrent, unfordable in anyone’s wildest imaginations.

We circumcised our watches, it would be dark in thirty minutes. There was no choice but to go to the local second-hand air conditioning / repair warung and toko potong rambut (barber shop) to find transport and a willing driver. What a stroke of genius! Why wouldn’t there be one just waiting on tenterhooks (whatever they are) for four harassed, sweaty bulehs to materialize looking for a ride to Pura Dalem Bonkasa? Miraculously, there was such a soul, an orang barang bekas plastik (plastic bottle collector and seller) from Jember in East Java, no less, with a handy black and battered Suzuki truck who had just had the finishing touches put to his haircut. All was not lost! I fished a soggy, mud stained hash map from my pants pocket.

We decided to forego negotiations for the ride and just get back to the run site ASAP. I would have gladly given the diminutive Javanese fellow the keys to my house and signed the lease document over to him, but I gave him Rp 50.000 back at the Bonkasa wantilan and he almost cried with gratitude.

The rest is history; with branches and leaves in my hair and a large python around my neck (kidding), I was interrogated in the circle by the overwhelmingly Swedish Religious advisor and along with my fellow Les Miserables, down downed for our foolish behavior. Actually, the circle turned out to be kind of fun what with Night Jar regaling us with a joke so foul and disgusting that cows and pigs in adjacent kampongs were keeling over stone dead, and large trees could be heard collapsing on the other side of the river.

We’ll never know how close it came to the first ever Hash cancellation in BHH2 history that fateful day, a little birdy may or may not have whispered to me, but I’ll tell you one thing: evil forces were at work. Forces that threatened not only Rivendell and Gondor but the Shire and all of Middle Earth. And I’ll tell you another thing: I think if Donald Trump wants to pay five million dollars to go to the International Space Station, let him go. Maybe he wants to rendezvous with the mother ship, besides I want to see what happens to his hair in zero gravity.

On on

JB