Those of us who feared that Vaseline was going to go out on his own with a bag of paper and randomly wander around the hills behind Nam Noi in the hope of eventually ending up back where he started were proved wrong. He went out with Scud and randomly...
And actually there was nothing very random about the process. They had obviously and quite sensibly decided to follow an old run as the old shreddy we kept seeing bore witness.
But things have changed up there; some things have grown and some things have been knocked over. If the pictures (below) of Hatyai two weeks ago lead you to believe that's all that happened in the great storm of '10, think again. Trails which we've run for years are now strewn with fallen trees and sections of the hillside yesterday resembled a scene from The Great Chainsaw Massacre meets Big G Goes Mud Wrestling. The result was that this little 4.6k tour took an hour and 20 minutes to slog round with almost no opportunity to stretch our legs and prove what we are capable of until we actually hit the flat near the run site.
But we all got back; eventually. A chastened Off T having miraculously not got lost on Saturday took his new GPS with him and stuck closely to Moo Sahb just in case, and Gogo Pock alias Tuttee Fruity having escaped the clutches of Chao Kuay was assisted round by Sofar and Ouab-Im as far as the Wat before they escaped to the road and were assisted home by a passing Sawng Tao.
This month's storm is going to affect the way we do things for a while. Bits of 'our' countryside have been devastated and some of 'our' trails are going to be difficult to use for a while until either the debris is cleared or more likely until it gets eaten by the bugs. The moral is that until we work out what's changed, unrecced runs are unwise if not positively dangerous ... but then some of us worked that out a long time ago!
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