It was a small but festive crowd that gathered at
Wat Kaew Pitak for a holiday bit of excess. Wat Kaew Pitak is one of
the easier places to get to, I explained to my regular taxi driver
as I was being read the riot act for always getting lost on the way
to the run. Amazingly, we pull into the Wat parking lot at 5:05, but
as I alight from the LNG powered sleigh, not a creature was
stirring, not even a louse. Vehr iss efreepuddy?
Oh, there they are...fellow hashers... hiding
behind Malinee's catering truck. Are they drinking wine already?
Pretty soon, the place is lousy with hashers.
The steaming hares, Mike and Som, languidly set the tone for the
evening when they advised us to take our clothes off as the run
would take us swimming through the klongs and we would be finishing
in the nudist park. Oh, swell. Nothing like a good long streak to
make the drive worthwhile.
We set off in good spirits with the whole pack
walking up to Sugar Daddy's "parking lot". The parking lot turned
out to be a dangerous landfill, chock full of sharp, rusty hazards
just waiting to maim some unfortunate soul. Mike points, "Thataway",
and we tiptoe past a leaky discarded nuclear reactor. That tricky
dick hare had us all checking in every possible hotel room with
little success until the inevitable "On On" was called from the
absolute farthest possible point from where I was drinking on each
occasion. Isn't this like deja vu all over again? Anyway, the pack
complained for what seemed like an awfully long time. As darkness
fell, it was reduced to three million hearty souls that refused to
give up in spite of the huge distance between the chalk and the big
stone in Mecca. Eventually we found ourselves back in the gardens
with a choice of either swimming across a klong or getting back on
the out-trail. Fortunately right there on the path there was a guy
who was most certainly the long lost Thai cousin of the Bunker twins
from Delifrance. Narest is his name. He insisted there was a bridge
across the klong even though we were all looking past where he was
pointing and there was clearly no bridge. Suddenly, as if by a
miracle (it is the season of miracles, isn't it?) a dual-span
cantelivered suspension bridge appeared. We ultimately concluded
that this guy's real plan was to keep the tall young lady from San
Miguel Beer Co. in the woods. I think that had he imagined her later
wearing the prick-of-the-week, kicking his feet apart, breathing
throatily, "Spread 'em boy".
So we paid drove across the bridge, some of us
having a harder time of it than others (I was pulled over for my
17th drunk driving offense in the last 13 years), and happily ran
out the last several 50 kilometers back to the What. As we
approached, it was noted by more than one of us that the run had
that unmistakeable Nativity smell to it. Which, as all those of us
familiar with farming in Jerusalem will know, is a compliment of the
highest order. Well done Joseph and Mary.
