C.S.I. Sobongan

Before we get into last Saturday’s run at Sobongan, I’d like to report a conversation I overheard from two Perth – they could be from nowhere else – tourist girls yesterday on the Sanur Beach Walk (it features an accompanying handy dandy translation for those of you who speak English). “Orm not riddy ta gahu harm, Shez. Hair bairt choo? (I am not ready to go home, Sharon. How about you?) “Yair nahu, me do mite” (Yes, no, me neither friend / companion / close acquaintance.)

This just about sums up my thoughts, too, on the subject of returning to that fair city, which I must on Wednesday, alas do for a week or so. As heartbroken as some of you will be, I won’t be on the Hash next week, or perhaps the next and there will ergo be no Trash(es?), (blood curdling Hitchcockian screams in a motel shower). I thought I’d break it to you gently.
Have you seen the photo posts from the Sobongan run? Exotically colored barong statues outside ornate temples and elaborately carved Desa entrances, dramatically precipitous waterfalls amid gorgeous, verdant hilly surroundings, calming and bucolic paddy scenery; this was not the run that I found myself on – at all.

I saw none of these things as I’m sure many of those that I ran with intermittently didn’t either. Not that I didn’t enjoy what I saw and did, it was fine. As promised by Hare Kuchit there was plenty of canopied and cool jungle a tenuous, slippery climb down sheer rocky steps to a stony, bubbling stream – it was just a little, well, confusing, okay then, bewildering, alright, profoundly disturbing. This is not Kuchit or Pig Fukka’s fault.
There are now five Hashes on Bali leaving their respective paper on practically every trail we go to. As Grand Master Night Jar so succinctly put it to me after the run: “I suppose it’s all my fault”. Who could disagree?

A volunteer scapegoat standing right there in the car park in front of me. He started the bloody Hash in Bali after all, and escaped a down- down only because of my failing memory and a chaotic circle.

It all started with Kuchit’s severe warning at the outset of last week’s run that we “might” cross other paper as he flung a dab of his own paper groundwards to demonstrate it’s characteristics. “Small and white” he pointed to it. “Like you” cried a nearby smart arse (Kuchit is about as white as Michael Jackson the teenager, but about the same size admittedly).
I stooped down, picked up a handful and pocketed it on the way out of the site. Buggar me (no, don’t, I take that back) if I didn’t find myself squatting and frowning over a paper comparison like a member of the cast of any one of three TV shows with a theme song by The Who, not more than 15 minutes later.

We had indeed followed the wrong paper for at least ten minutes then took another ten to get back to the point at which we should have diverted from the asphalt into the bush following, of all people, Horny Herring and Gudang, who were right in the first place but gave up their quest in order to follow the “on on” call as we all did.
Another fifteen minutes found me alone in a farmer’s back yard again studying Christ knows who’s paper against mine. All I can say is that they were both white and more alike this time, but not quite the same. I repeated this performance running around in circles in the bush peering at variously colored paper and the position of the sun, for all the good it did me, until I came upon a group (a befuddlement? A baffle?) of Hashers careening around a corner coming from the opposite direction at the tee junction of a lonely country asphalt road which we followed, me right, they left, until we realized we were back were we had been twenty minutes earlier.

“Ahu nahu” as they say in Perth. That was enough. Mudflaps, I believe, identified an arrow pointing back to what we thought was the on-out so without hesitation we took it, catching a perhaps imagined faint whiff of beer as a reward for our prudent decision. Back down to the gurgling stream and before you could say

“Hands up, this is a cock-up” we were well on our way home. Let me emphasize again, this was not the Hares fault. From all photographic evidence it looks like they set a terrific run – somewhere. I only wish I had been there. At least we had a tumultuously lively ride back to Sanur in Dancing Queen’s Magic Bus listening to very loud 80’s, perhaps Scandiwegian, disco and drinking all manner of interesting local bottled dark and light beers and ales, that didn’t start with “Bin” and end with “tang”.

Not a microbe of formaldehyde detected by C.S.I. Sobongan.

See you in a cuppla woiks.

On on, J.B.