Foxy teamed up with Robin Banks at Huay Tung Thao. It’s been a while since we’ve run here as a hash, but my recent explorations have told me that some old trails have become overgrown, and many of the good old trails are just unusable – when I saw the directions, I hoped the hares had scouted before they’d decided where to set! I wasn’t the only one struggling to find the A-site due to poor signage.
An early harebrief and we were set off before some of the pack had found the A. The A-site wasn’t new, but with changes in the mud tracks, we got to it a different way – it was the familiar trail cutting down to the bottom of the ugly waterfall. A big arrow pointing left, and a vocal co-hare insisting that we should turn left! It was clearly going to be right – first up, the hares had posted on facebook their scouting pics, secondly the trail to the left once upon a time was nice, but today runs out into overgrowth. The other option was the waterfall, which frankly is a bad, bad, bad idea. A V check took us towards the waterfall, with the co-hare guarding anyone from doing the obvious turn to the right. I guess I’ll play the game for now, and climbed up the side of the waterfall for a bit, before obviously going back down and along the trail at the bottom of the hill. The check had done nothing to keep the pack together, it had just scattered us.
We headed directly towards the aqueducts (I just spent some time to teach Terrorbyte and 8-Bit that the spelling of aqueduct is with an e not the sensible a as in aquaduct – we agree it is BS). After a W/R split, we made our way along the tiny canal, and when the trail when over the aqueducts, each time I dived underneath and managed to overtake a couple of hashers. But it was overgrown, and narrow, and my legs were weary. When the trail headed left back up the hill it was clear they were either going to double back to the wimp rambo split, or head further along the lake before coming back along the road. At 3k+ in I didn’t fancy either, so cut back down to the lake and trundled along the lake back to the W/R split. I got there and found how the hares had changed the trail, not long before the pack came down off the hill.
I jogged over the dam with Scooby Do and Brown Finger chasing me down behind. At the other end of the dam, a circle check, already kicked out, but not towards the village – this was going towards the main HTT entrance. I opted for the shorter route through the village, and bizarrely even though I made it clear I was short cutting, the pack followed me – to the point that the GM picked up the paper that was correctly laid out of the circle and relaying it in the wrong direction. I can only imagine the confusion behind, which surely contributed to Sticky Wicket arriving close to dark. Meanwhile I was leading a growing collection of FRBs on a shortcut through a MooBaan. The only problem was they wanted to go faster than me (they had just caught me up going over the dam!). They wanted to go faster, but they weren’t 100% sure which was the shortest way back, so had to keep stopping to wait for shortcutting instructions! When we finally got close enough there was a break for the finish, but Brownie stayed around to chat as we dragged our way in to the finish.