Mad Jogs
and Englishmen
Outside
April 1992, pp 42
By Randy Wayne White
ALTHOUGH IT DOESN'T
ENJOY much currency, a subject that deserves
discussion is a peculiar malady that sometimes
befalls even hard-core,
kick-butt-and-sleep-with-the-animals travelers, of
which this republic has its proud share. It is a
cerebral complaint, a kind of emotional virus that
infects people who, for reasons they once thought
perfectly rational, have committed themselves to
staying far too long in a region or country that the
travel books portrayed as far too attractive.
You may recognize some of the
symptoms. The traveler's gaze hardens, while his
posture degenerates. His hands, normally held at the
ready for an unexpected handshake, become fists. His
foreign vocabulary, once clumsy but at least varied,
shrinks to three phrases:
- “I don't want rice, I
want beer.”
- “Don't ever touch me
there again.”
- “That better not be
yak butter.”
The affliction has no name, but
it should. Maybe Travel Rot or the Dorothy Syndrome
(“there's no place like home”). Road
jaundice might be better, though, as it accurately
describes the yellowing of the spirit that the
afflicted traveler experiences. For reasons I don't
understand, Road Jaundice usually strikes late in the
first week of a trip or early in the third, and it's
a little like having a bad reaction to prescription
drugs and being homesick at the same time. To the
afflicted traveler, food that once seemed exotic
becomes a foul depot of mired flies and suspicious
meats. The native tongue, which once resembled a
warbling flute, becomes a defeating chorus of barking
frogs. It's ugly business, and in the old days a
traveler had no choice but to tough it out, to wait
for these doldrums to ebb.
Not anymore, though; not for me
anyway. I've stumbled onto a cure. Several years ago,
I was in Medan, Sumatra, which is about as bizarre a
place as the Western mind can imagine, what with its
lunatic motorized rickshaw traffic, wailing calls to
the mosque, and wok-fried dog fritters.
Spend a couple of weeks there,
and you'll understand why no town on earth would
consider choosing Medan as its sister city (except
maybe Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where opium smokers and
sexual deviants still have some say). I has been in
Sumatra a lot longer than I wanted, but not nearly as
long as I'd agreed to, so I was wandering the
streets, lost as usual, enduring a grumpy bout of
Road Jaundice when I sought refuge in the bar of the
Pardede Hotel. It eas there that I fell in with a
group of Australians who invited me to join them on a
ten-kilometer jog – what they called a hash run.
But if ran in this weird
country, I wanted to know, might not the police
assume we were fleeing some outrageous crime, and
open fire?
No worries, the Aussies
insisted; the running group – the Medan Hash
House Harriers, they called it – had a long and
interesting history on the island and was well known
in all quarters.
For reasons you'll soon
understand, I don't recall a lot of what went on my
first hash run. It was in a rural area southwest of
Medan; I remember that. The Australians were there,
of course, as were men and women from the
Netherlands, England, Scandinavia, several Asian
countries, and probably some other places, too –
about 30 people in all. We were standing around
talking, getting to know one another (it's a fine
thing to hear English spoken while you're in the
grips of Road Jaundice), when suddenly someone blew
on a horn and yelled “On! On!” and everyone
started running at once. Not down the road, mind you,
but cross-country. We ran up hills, through a
pasture, scattered a bunch of ducks in someone's
yard, then crashed our way through a pretty chunk of
jungle. Just when I'd decided I couldn't go much
further at such a pace, the front runners stopped and
began to hunt around in the grass. “Looking for
the scent,” I was told, which I later learned
meant they were looking for a trail of paper scraps
that a pair of runners – the Hares had laid ten
minutes earlier.
About the time I caught my
breath, someone yelled “On! On!” again, and
off we ran once more. And that's the way it went for
an hour or so. We ran through jungles, waded creeks,
loped down hills until the front runners lost the
trail. Then we all split up to search out the correct
path. It was like no run I'd ever done before;
certainly it was a lot more interesting, and not just
because of the unusual route. My fellow runners
seemed to talk in code. “Checking!” they
would yell. “On back!” “Slow the
bloody FRBs!” (front running bastards). And:
“No passing! You've won yourself a down-down
when we get back to the piss bucket.”
(Translation: Because you're being competitive, you
must chug a beverage when we get to the beer cooler.)
Not that only competitive
runners had to chug beverages at the conclusion of
this has run, no. The members formed a circle, sang
bawdy songs, the contrived outlandish reasons why
participants has to do down-downs, either beer or
soft drinks, the backwash remainder of which was
poured over the drinker's head.
It sounds silly – well,
hell, it was silly. But it was fun, I spent
my time in the circle. I spent plenty of time around
the piss bucket outside the circle, too. Like I said,
I don't clearly remember everything that happened at
my first hash run, but I do remember this: By the
time was event was finished, I'd made several new
friends, I'd learned a couple of memorable songs, I
had a nifty new T-shirt, and Sumatra didn't seem so
foreign after all. As for my symptoms of Road
Jaundice, they weren't temporarily forgotten, they
were completely gone.
IN SHORT, THE HASH HOSE
HARRIERS IS AN international organization
that attracts an interesting variety of expatriates
and wandering souls, all of whom believe that running
is a good thing – particularly when it's not
done on some prissy road – and that socializing
afterward is a great thing. Imagine a group of
sorority/fraternity travel warriors with a fetish for
bushwhacking and beer, and you'll get a pretty good
picture of what hashing is all about.
Not that you have to enjoy
alcohol to have fun with a hash run. Drinking isn't a
requisite, nor is it ever pressed. But if you enjoy a
tankard or two after a butt-busting cross-country
jog, you will not lack for companionship.
The best thing about hashing,
though, is that visitors are always welcome. It
doesn't matter who you are, where you're from,
whether you're male or female, young or old. As it
says in the organization's membership guidelines,
“No matter what colour, nationality, or
disability... [as long as it is] somebody who can
take a joke... who doesn't think he is better than
any other... who is not chauvinistic and can listen
to women... who is not a burn-the-bra type and can
listen to men... someone not a know-all arsehole...
and who is not too inhibited to scream On! On!
Virtually anywhere... and drink out of your new
running shoe.”
In other
words, hashers have standards, just not very high
ones.
What I didn't know when I
stumbled upon the Hash House Harriers is that the
organization is worldwide. It has more than 60,000
members affiliated with 1,191 clubs in 138 countries,
including just about every far-flung, godforsaken
spot on the planet. Stranded in Oman? There are three
Hash House Harrier clubs in the sultanate, and most
of them run once a week, year round. Missed your
connection in Mombasa? The hashers there meet every
Saturday and Monday. Suffer Road Jaundice in Tonga,
Tunisia, Turkey, Andorra, Argentina, Algeria, Libya,
Guyana, the Falklands, or Saipan, and the cure is
only a hash run away. There is an Antarctic clan of
hashers (though their runs are seasonal), and there
are still more chapters with headquarters aboard
oceangoing ships, such as the United Kingdom's HMS Edinburgh
and Australia's HMAS Stalwart.
I know a little bit of this
from my experience, but mostly I'm taking it from the
Harrier International World Hash Handbook, which
lists pertinent data for every chapter. I now
consider the handbook a mainstay piece of travel
equipage, and I pack it right along with other
necessities like clean socks and Lomotil pills. The
editor of the book is an Englishman named Tim
“Magic” Hughes (for reasons I still don't
understand all Harriers must have nicknames) and he
also edits Harrier International magazine, a
sporadically published periodical for hashing
enthusiasts. Highes, who is the organization's
historian and record keeper, does all of his work on
a voluntary, break-even basis using the offices of
his Bangkok advertising agency as a base for what
must be the largest, strangest, funniest running club
in the world.
Recently I was in Babgkok and
met with Hughes on the day after a hash run; he
discussed the history and aims of the Harriers with
the same tongue-in-cheek cheer that pervades the
club's jogs. “Running the hash got its start in
1938 in Kuala Lumpur,” he told me, “at a
colonial establishment known as the Selangor Club,
which had chambers behind it where the bachelors of
the day had their billet. The barrack served meals,
of course, and was know as the Hash House. One day
the members staged a run styled after the hare-and
hounds paper-chase game that was played in England,
and the run was a great success. Back at the Selangor
Club, after several rounds of rum drinks, the man who
founded the organization, A.S. Gispert, proposed the
name Hash House Harriers. It became very popular
among the expats.”
A second HHH chapter was
founded in Singapore in 1962, by an Englishman who
posted and advertisement inviting expatriates for a
run followed by “beer, sausages, and mash.”
Although hashing clubs became well known in British
colonial circles, it wasn't until the seventies that
they began to attract a growing number of world
travelers and international businesspeople who were
impressed by the organization's aims (promote
physical fitness among the members; get rid of
weekend hangovers) and charmed by some of its
prohibitions (no gaming or opium smoking at the
meets; no using society funds to pay the fines of
members who have been convicted in court). But
ultimately, all of them came for the same reason
people have been hashing all along: to run and
socialize.
According to Hughes, the first
world has run – called the InterHash
Unconvention – was held in Hong Kong in 1978 and
hosted by the Kowloon Hash House Harriers. Since
then, the weekend celebration has been held every two
years in places like Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and
Sydney, attracting thousands of members from around
the world. This year's InterHash will be held in July
in “InterHash Paradise” – Phuket,
Thailand – and, of course, nonmembers are
invited.
“Hashers run anywhere,
anytime, regardless of what is going on around
them,” Hughes told me. For instance, the Kuwait
Hash House Harriers had a good turnout for their run
on August 4, 1990 – which, if you remember, was
two days after the Iraqi invasion.
“That is one of the grand
traditions of the club,” Hughes continued,
“to keep right on running. It goes back to the
days of the founding club at Kuala Lumpur, where
members continued to hash right through the outbreak
of war in 1939. In some book, a British officer tells
how he had set his men in ambush position in the
jungle and was awaiting for the approaching enemy,
and damn if 15 chaps in vests and running shorts from
the local harriers club didn't come running
past.”
Members of the early club also
served bravely in that war. “A.S. Gispert, the
founder, was killed in 1942 while defending his post
on Bukit Timah,” said Hughes. “Gispert's
orders had been to detain the Japanese force as long
as possible.”
It is precisely this
mad-dogs-and-Englishmen attitude that makes running
with hashers so much fun. Why the ecentricities of
such a group should void one's impatience with the
oddities of a foreign land, I don't know. But it
does. And those of us who have suffered Road Jaundice
don't much care why. On! On!