Graven teamed up with Brownie for the start of a GI Maejo epic… 12 months ago, Graven and I set a couple of runs on the same day, out at Maejo, so having spent time with Gravey out there, I was curious what he had in mind. 12 months ago, we set one run that turned out to be pretty good, and one that was pretty crap – turned out Gravey modelled this run on the crappier one!
With 10 minutes to run time, I was starting to worry – at the runsite with the boys, and finally Belly Dancer showed up… No sign of the hares or other hashers… Finally with minutes to spare, 3 songthaews showed up along with a bunch of cars… Times like this, hashcashing is a challenge! I managed to get things organised and ready for the hare brief. It wasn’t brief… While the hare brief is designed to reduce confusion when out on trail – this one didn’t…. If you want to do the whole trail, do it, but if you want to do a bit less, then follow the guy in the blue shirt, and if you want to do a lot less follow the other guy… When should we follow them? I happened to be following Brownie at one point, what did that mean? It was all so confusing!
Finally we were released and with a host of elite hashers, it was hard going to get to the first check. 50 ish hashers headed off into the jungle Familiar trail, we quickly got onto the trail up to the ridge line. A couple of decent checks took us away for a bit, but it was clear pretty early on where we were headed – particularly given the warnings in the harebrief. It was a run I’d done before in reverse. We got to a wimp rambo split, and after a brief sojourn on the rambo route, I cut across to where I knew the trail was headed. With the hares out in force trying to keep us going in the right direction, I joined up with Bart Plug and Cum A Lot, and finally we caught up with Gorf, who was alone and completely befuddled by a sneaky check.
The trail literally fell away off the side of a mountain – straight down off the side of the hill, with hashers hanging on to trees. Fortunately we made it down alive, to the side of the lake for a short OnIn back to the beer. With so many runners the Beer Monster had to do a quick beer run, but we managed to get through the circle. Fun, but tough! There must be a good run there, but I’m not sure we found it 12 months back, or this time!