#1 Rehashed

The inaugural run of the Hangzhou Hash House Harriers was held on the 2nd of June 2007 from the Maya Bar, to whom the hash is grateful for hospitality and assistance. There were many photos taken on the day, so in order to collate a reasonable collection for publication on this website, please email your best shots to Pushup on chrisknud _at_ gmail _dot_ com.

So, our inaugural hash, how to immortalise this portentous occasion. Virgin grand masters, virgin hare, no hash cash to speak off and a last minute t-shirt delivery just to get us started. The lack of experience was everywhere to be seen and poor old push-up trying to keep us all afloat.

The hares, M the virgin and Pushup with his vast experience had allegedly set off to mark the trail but no one who had seen M leaving 1944 at 06:30 that morning was believing any of it. A phone call from the top of ‘some hill’ 20 minutes before zero hour didn’t bode well.

Yours truly stood up and mumbled something to the impatient pack and by 15:30 we were under way. 21 of us including a few brave hashmen from Nanjing and Shanghai who turned out to lend much needed support.

The trail set was, to this uneducated eye, quite well conceived. The vision of us all running across the busiest hillside in Hangzhou yelling “on, on!” to one another is a vision that myself, and I expect quite a few of Hangzhou’s tourists visitors from last Saturday will carry with us for sometime to come.

The hares had neglected to mention at the start line that we needed crampons and rope so the, er, ‘rock feature’ served in lieu of the re-groups rather well. Most people managed to fall off the side of it gracefully, as clearly at least one of hares hadn’t managed by the looks of the half a kilo of suspicious white powder down one side. Thankfully only one person lost his ring and only Hannah and LittleDrunkApple felt the need to slide down on their elbows.

Those of us running up last, *coughs* to ensure nobody was lost, managed to miss part of the trail out when a bunch of tired looking folks traipsed across our path on their way back up the hillside and we all managed to finish more or less together despite the absence of another rock-feature to re-group the pack.

Back at Maya the cooler of beer was going down rather worryingly quickly as the circle began. “Shags On” led the way with penalties for the hares, the trail wetter’s and other miscreants and before long everyone was in on the act. Jessica shall hence forth be known as SkidMarks and Andrew as BottomFeeder. LittleDrunkApple lived up to his name well enough for it to stick.

Shiggy, Caveman, Vomit and Pushup were stars looking after so many virgins. And “Shags On” deserves a special mention for his role as acting RA.

Yours truly made such a particularly shoddy estimation of the beer required (we restocked the cooler no less than four times) that a hash cash has hastily been appointed to look after anything that involves numbers.

All in all a very good day, at least once we were all finally fed.

On, on!

Photos to follow.